We had a great meeting yesterday morning with Brisbane City Council’s Community Gardens Officer Jeanette Baker. Inspiring. Jeanette has a heap of wisdom about community gardens gained through her role working with so many across Brisbane. Jeanette drove up from Beenleigh so we are very grateful to her. She is a very keen home gardener with a huge vege garden of her own coming from Rabaul where being self-sufficient in food was the norm.
She said the site we were looking at in Upper Kedron was one of the best she had seen recently and she’ll go and follow it up inside the Council to find out whether there are plans around it etc.
The garden would not be fenced – community gardens are just that – open to the community. She would not expect theft or vandalism to be a problem. In fact in areas where there had been a vandalism problem a community garden caused the problem to fade right down.
The garden would be a raised beds garden so we’d be looking for funding support to get the surrounds and soil. Also talked about a shed.
It is important to have an area which gets 8 hours a day sunlight in summer and 6 hours a day sunlight in winter.
There is a water connection there which would need a bit of work. Jeanette said she’d look into that too.
Another site we were keen on had a number of issues that were likely to make it unsuitable. It is probably a designated wildlife corridor and there have been extensive native tree plantings which are young now but in a few years would shade the area a lot.