Tallinn University garden

Overview

Tallinn University garden is a project based community garden at the university, where participants mostly from the university but not limited to the university come together to collaborate and contribute to gardening aspects such as growing of food and flowers (Holland, 2004). The garden's aim is to provide opportunities to the community to engage in healthy recreational activities, community building, attain a sustainable environment and a beautiful green space. 

This project bring students at the university, and  different countries to share innovative ideas and try tries to build a better and sustainable community garden. These are achieved with the aid of a couple of organized meetings among the participants. We believe in collaboration as a means to build to build strong relationships based on trust, with those who share our vision of a sustainable environment, and innovation and continuous improvement as way in achieving our goals as we are dedicated to achieve positive changes to improve efficiency and quality (Krasny and Tidball, 2009).

Impacts of the garden 

Community garden has various impacts on our daily lives; ranging from health (social, mental and physical health), environmental (connection with nature, sensitive to food waste) and economy (Voicu and Been, 2008).

–       In terms of economic impact of community garden, its reduces the cost of purchasing food items for those who directly involved in gardening; increases the consumption of organic local produce while reducing the exposure to food with chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and also serve as means for some earnings.

–   Exposure to green space reduces stress and increases a sense of wellness and belonging to the community.

–    Community garden serves as a medium for education and innovation by bringing people together from different backgrounds (age, sex, race, cultural and social class) to learn and innovate ideas for the betterment of the community.

–      Through physical activities, community gardens improve people's physical and social health, it adds beauty to the community and heightens people's awareness and appreciation for nature.

–      Community garden encourages and promotes relationships in the community by bringing people together, sharing ideas and creating positive relationships and serves as a medium to acquire knowledge.

–      Community garden enhance the sense of community belonging and also serve as means to protect the environment.

How to engage people in a Community garden project

Getting people involved and engaged in a community garden is a good way to develop a community garden is good to achieve it goals and create more awareness on it sustainability and related issues. Here are some of the suitable ways to engage people in a community garden project.

• Organizing social events in a community that will enable the people to come together and share perhaps food or drinks, this might serves as an opportunity for people to discuss the ideas.
• Embracing social aspects of a community gardening may be another good way to get people involved in community gardening as it enable the people to come together and do something they love especially admirers of nature and green life (Saldivar-Tanaka and Krasny, 2004)
• Hosting summer camps that may include opportunities for students and people to learn gardening tips such as transplant seedlings, harvesting garden produce, hunt for undesirable insects. This might make most of the people gardening with relative ease.
• Printing of T-shirts with garden related questions on them; these may serve as sense of belonging to garden members and may attract others to participate in the garden projects. For example T-shirts printed with plants and questions as, 'which of these plants attract bees'' may serves as message to lovers of nature.

 REFERENCES

Holland, L. (2004). Diversity and connections in community gardens: a contribution to local sustainability. Local environment, 9(3), 285-305. 

Krasny, M. E., & Tidball, K. G. (2009). Community gardens as contexts for science, stewardship, and civic action learning. Cities and the Environment (CATE), 2(1), 8.

Voicu, I., & Been, V. (2008). The effect of community gardens on neighboring property values. Real Estate Economics, 36(2), 241-283.

Saldivar-Tanaka, L., & Krasny, M. E. (2004). Culturing community development, neighborhood open space, and civic agriculture: The case of Latino community gardens in New York City. Agriculture and human values, 21(4), 399-412.