Last blog post, we had all these questions about what a Herb Farm should be and what people wanted and what it could do. We weren’t even sure if these were good questions.
Today, we realized that these are, in fact, excellent questions, but we aren’t the ones who should be answering them. Instead, our stakeholders and participants should be the ones who get to decide what their herb gardens should look like. Revolutionary, I know.
So we’re shifting gears a little bit. We are not, as we previously planned, studying food security via shifts in food consumption. We are also not, as stated in the last post, studying social capital generation and community health. Instead, we’re just going to look at the people using the herb gardens and ask: “Well, what were you expecting?”
This little herb garden isn’t a proper urban farm or community garden. Very few people (if anyone) tend the garden and I doubt a lot of people are going to share gossip about last night’s episode of Game of Thrones over some shared weeding.
But our stakeholders see something in this garden. We’ve spoken to people with rather different views of what the garden was planted for and what it will do. We haven’t spoken to anybody in the community about it yet, but we figure they’ll have some interesting opinions as well. Heck, we had some pretty interesting assumptions about the garden when we started this study.
Our TA, Lucy Rodina, recommended that we pursue a perception study. Instead of measuring benefits or impacts or behavioural shifts, we simply want to see what people think the Herb Farm is for.
Each community has its own unique needs and wants; a community has a context. Establishing a garden for the community and saying ‘Hey! Free herbs!’ is great, of course, but the healthiest gardens occur when an organization and a community come together in partnership to decide how a garden should work.
Maybe this community is perfectly happy with free herbs right outside their door. Maybe they’d like to work in the raised beds and grow some of their own herbs.
There is a suitable level of engagement for this garden. It probably lies somewhere in between what Gordon Neighbourhood House wants and what the community wants. Our job now is to figure out what everybody wants and presumably give it to them.
This could be a cool little miniature community garden that cranks out produce year round to feed the residents of 1078 Burnaby Street. Or it could be a social-capital generating hub for community members to gather and learn about food. It could be a node in a region-wide network of community herb farms that supply fresh herbs and promote home cooking. It could be all of these things.
To us, the most important part is that this garden is and will be whatever the community needs it to be.