Community Gardens Winners

Garden Joans web

OGSA called for applications in January for $3000 grants for up to three Community Gardens. The succesful gardens are the Mt Gambier Old Gaol Community Garden, Joan's Patch and the Trott Park Community Garden.

Twenty seven applications were received and were reviewed according to several considerations—How needy the organisation was for funding, how well planned their project was, how community based and how likely to advantage the community, the practicality of the project and the chance of successfully seeing it through to completion. In this last regard, we considered whether they had already proved their success with an established garden, or could show evidence that they had resources to continue and complete a new project. We also considered whether the project would be likely to foster a love of gardens and gardening and whether the average visitor to gardens in OGSA would think this has been a good use of their money.

Garden Gambier web

1.The Old Mount Gambier Gaol Community Garden is a not for profit organisation. Members of the community participate in growing fruit and vegetables on the land adjacent the Old Gaol site in the centre of town. The garden consists of 46 plots and has 29 active plot holders with many many of these being recent migrants to the area. Other facilities include a pergola, pizza oven, BBQ and rainwater tank as well as all tools and hoses available to members. The Garden sought funding to construct permanent bird covering for their orchard.

 

Garden Joans2 web

2. Joan’s Patch in Hawthorndene was established as a Community Garden in July 2013. Garden members are proud of the fact that much of the infrastructure has been donated or has been built and maintained by members. They hold events to involve the community such as Open Days and have held workshops on a number of topics including plant propagation, seed collecting, worm farming, insect hotels, permaculture and mosaicing. They have sought funding to establish a drip line irrigation system to individual raised garden beds with individual isolation valves attached. It will also extend the existing fruit tree irrigation system.

 

 

Garden Trott web

3. The Trott Park Community Garden was established in 2014 and slowly built the garden to become a community of enthusiastic gardeners who grow a wide range of produce, share gardening ideas and educate those who are new to gardening. There are 20 raised plots; 3 are for communal use while the other 17 are leased to members. They have an open orchard of 20 fruit trees which is accessible to the public. There is also a publicly accessible dry herb garden and flower garden. Members freely swap and share their produce every Saturday morning. Excess produce is regularly placed on the ‘free-swap’ cart located at the adjacent Trott Park Neighbourhood Centre so that other members of the local community can share in the output from the garden. In 2018 the City of Marion Council approved an extension to the garden enabling them to build an extra 8 plots. The OGSA grant will help in meeting the cost of the expansion project.

Please visit this website on a regular basis as the OGSA Committee may release further funding for Community Gardens.

 

 

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