Community Garden

'Community Garden' mungkin satu perkara baru bagi rakyat Malaysia. Namun di Amerika, United Kingdom dan Australia ia merupakan satu aktiviti masyarakat yang sedang giat berkembang.

'A community garden is a single piece of land gardened collectively by a group of people.'

Gambar-gambar berikut adalah aktiviti Community Garden yang ada diluar negara beserta dengan sedikit penerangan tentang tujuan dan definisinya.

PURPOSE

Community gardens provide fresh produce and plants as well as satisfying labor, neighborhood improvement, sense of community and connection to the environment.They are publicly functioning in terms of ownership, access, and management,as well as typically owned in trust by local governments or not for profit associations.

A city’s community gardens can be as diverse as its gardeners. Some grow only flowers, others are nurtured communally and their bounty shared, some have individual plots for personal use, while others have raised beds for disabled gardeners.

Community gardens may help alleviate one effect of climate change, which is expected to cause a global decline in agricultural output, making fresh produce increasingly unaffordable. Community gardens encourage an urban community's food security, allowing citizens to grow their own food or for others to donate what they have grown. Advocates say locally grown food decreases a community's reliance on fossil fuels for transport of food from large agricultural areas and reduces a society's overall use of fossil fuels to drive in agricultural machinery.

Community gardens improve users’ health through increased fresh vegetable consumption and providing a venue for exercise. The gardens also combat two forms of alienation that plague modern urban life, by bringing urban gardeners closer in touch with the source of their food, and by breaking down isolation by creating a social community. Community gardens provide other social benefits, such as the sharing of food production knowledge with the wider community and safer living spaces. Active communities experience less crime andvandalism.

DEFINITION

Unlike public parks, whether community gardens are open to the general public is dependent upon the lease agreements with the management body of the park and the community garden membership. Open or closed gate policies vary from garden to garden. There is no 'off the shelf model' of a community garden, however; they provide a green space in urban areas, along with opportunities for social gatherings, beautification, education and recreation. However, in a key difference, community gardens are managed and maintained with the active participation of the gardeners themselves, rather than tended only by a professional staff. A second difference is food production: Unlike parks, where plantings are ornamental (or more recently ecological), community gardens often encourage food production by providing gardeners a place to grow vegetables and other crops. To facilitate this, a community garden may be divided into individual plots or tended in a communal fashion, depending on the size and quality of a garden and the members involved.