Neighborhood Gardening Guilds

Reclaiming our Roots (ROR): Growing our Food, Growing our Future, a burgeoning program of APPLE, serves as an umbrella for APPLE’s food security projects that are just taking root. One such project is the Every Neighborhood Garden Initiative which envisions a community that grows a significant portion of its own food by establishing abundant neighborhood food gardens which are socially organized through collaborative Neighborhood Gardening Guilds.

What is a Neighborhood Gardening Guild?

In permaculture, plant guilds are one of the most essential strategies for building sustainable food landscapes. A plant guild is a collection of mutually beneficial plants that work together to help one another, and therefore the whole plant community, thrive. Likewise, individuals nested within a neighborhood within a broader community, who work together to grow and share their own food, constitute a neighborhood gardening guild.

APPLE believe this is the kind of neighborhood-scale collaboration and structure it will take to re-localize our food economy.

The Local Energy Solutions Task Force found in 2009-2010 that with existing zoning and available arable land, only about 10% of western Nevada County’s food production could be served through local commercial farming. These findings, combined with a growing socially-conscious food movement encouraged APPLE to seek solutions to solve for what we view as local food security vulnerabilities that can be addressed by organizing and training community members to grow their own food and to knit community in the process.

APPLE conducted a community-wide gardening survey in order to gauge local interest in residential food production and neighbor to neighbor collaboration. The results from this Spring 2010 survey were astoundingly favorable. The more than one hundred respondents clearly indicated their interest in growing their own food, improving their gardening skills through training and workshops, and in collaborating with neighbors to grow food, compost and to share resources.

While the APPLE Center provides the community with gardening resources, education and information on an ongoing basis, we have identified that the development of a toolkit is an essential next step toward the attainment of this goal.

The Neighborhood Gardening Guild Toolkit would provide local residents with a stepwise guide on how to develop a Neighborhood Gardening Guild. The toolkit would include comprehensive resources for planning, enhancing and sustaining neighborhood-scale food gardening projects.

We are currently seeking funding for the creation of the Neighborhood Gardening Guild Toolkit.