Growing Community Gardens

Denver Urban Gardens’ Best Practices Handbook for Creating and Sustaining Community Gardens
The intention of the Denver Urban Gardens’ Best Practices Handbook is to provide a tangible road map, with technical assistance directions, to guide you toward your goal of a sustainable community garden. To that end, Growing Community Gardens is a compilation that shares the practices and core beliefs of our organization’s experience over 25 years. During that time, we have worked with countless partners and communities with the primary goal of building and strengthening community.

In 2006, Denver Urban Gardens received funding from LiveWell Colorado to pilot programs and projects that promoted healthy eating and active  living through community gardens and supporting programs in three Denver neighborhoods. Over a period of seven years, we learned a great deal about what works best for our gardens and the communities we serve. The Handbook is a result of our work as a LiveWell Colorado community and as a leader in building and sustaining community gardens.

To make the Handbook even more helpful, we include some of our most useful documents as appendices; these are meant to be templates, easily adaptable for organizations and communities with different needs. We hope these resources will help communities lay a solid foundation from which to begin planning a thriving and sustainable community garden network.

Thanks to a grant from LiveWell Colorado, Growing Community Gardens is available free online. Hard copies of Growing Community Gardens are no longer available, as we are currently working on an updated second edition, which will be available for purchase as soon as they are complete.

Click here to open Growing Community Gardens: Denver Urban Gardens’ Best Practices Handbook for Creating and Sustaining Community Gardens.