Community gardens are collaborative projects for local people to work together on a shared open space to grow healthy and affordable vegetables, fruit, herbs and flowers.

Often community gardens provide opportunities for recreational gardening and food production in underutilized spaces, and transform the land into beautiful, social and eco-friendly community spaces.

Benefitting the volunteers who work on them as much as the people they feed, community gardens grow a lot more than just food. They cultivate communities through the environmental, physical and mental health benefits they bring too.

There is evidence from other community gardens (including the POWER project in Jerusalem) to show that they can help to mitigate problems that plague urban areas.

• Increasing the availability of nutritious, low cost food

• strengthening community ties

• improving air and soil quality and water infiltration

• improving the ecology of the area

• reducing food miles required to transport nutritious food

• reducing neighbourhood waste through composting

• improving dietary habits and health and fitness

• creating a stronger and more sustainable local community

The Planting Up website has a map of existing MK community gardens that you can access and get involved with.

Visit PlantingUp.co.uk/mk-map to find out more about each location. You’ll see that there is a wide variety of community gardens doing different things – from offering horticulture training opportunities and welcoming refugees to focusing on orchard fruits and taking a permaculture “food forest” approach.

Get in touch - Help us map, make and motivate community gardens in MK.

Use the comments area at the bottom of the page to get involved.

We intend to help community gardens prosper, starting by helping them capture and store their water efficiently.

New challenges will be created here on the POWER water community platform as we develop individual community garden projects for you to contribute to.

UPCOMING EVENTS

We have two events taking place on Thursday 19 September 2019 at the Trinity Centre in Fishermead that are focused on getting the conversation started with Milton Keynes residents and organisations.

The first meeting (from 4.30pm - 6pm) will be aimed at MK facilitators to explore how we can create more beneficial "green spaces" across Milton Keynes by working together.

The second meeting (from 6.30pm - 7.30pm) is for Fishermead residents to discuss the potential for us creating of an Incredible Edible community garden right next door.

Everyone is welcome to attend these meetings. Please share your ideas for them in the comments area below and register on EventBrite to let us know you're coming.