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Grow Food Together: Community Gardens, Co-op Games and Big Ideas
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items Part 2 of Grow Food Like Art. The first list put a garden in your home. This one is about growing and playing with other people: starting a community plot, learning from neighbors, and a co-op game where players work together on climate. My vision fo...benable.com/Dinky_Tehc/grow-food-like-art-indoor-gardens-games-books
Sections
2
Start a garden together
Play it and think bigger
Start a garden together
Books and handbooks for turning a patch of ground into a shared garden - finding land, organizing neighbors, and keeping it going season after season.
I put this first on purpose: it comes from the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, people who actually run community gardens. In 132 pages it covers finding land, working with local partners and keeping a garden alive for years - the handbook I'd wan...
Community Gardening: A PHS Handbook
The grid method is why this book is on my list: it turns a shared plot into squares anyone can claim, plant and learn. When not everyone in the group is experienced, that simplicity is the whole point.
Square Foot Gardening
A 112-page novel about strangers who turn a vacant city lot into a garden, one person at a time. I keep it here because it tells the story this whole list believes in - a garden is how a neighborhood starts acting like one. Short enough to hand to an...
Seedfolks
LaManda Joy founded Chicago's Peterson Garden Project, and her handbook walks the real path from finding a site to keeping volunteers coming back. I chose it as the organizer's companion: less about plants, more about people.
Start a Community Food Garden: The Essential Handbook
Subtitled 'Your community gardening handbook' and backed by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, this is the friendliest first-steps book on my list. It's the one I'd hand a neighbor who says yes before knowing anything about gardening.
Let's Plant & Grow Together
The classic intro to permaculture: design the garden like an ecosystem and a shared plot mostly takes care of itself between work days. I included it for every group that can't meet every week - which is every real group.
Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture
A calendar instead of a course: what to do each week of the season, so everyone sharing the plot always knows the next job. I love how it turns group coordination into just checking the week.
The Week-by-Week Vegetable Gardener's Handbook
The standard seed-saving reference: save and share seed, and the garden replants itself. To me this is where a community garden becomes independent, and where a small neighborhood seed library can begin.
Seed to Seed
My own design: the word GROW illustrated as a community garden, with neighbors planting, watering and harvesting across the letters, printed on demand on a soft Bella+Canvas shirt in Soft Cream. I made it so the idea behind this list is something you...
GROW Community Garden Tee
Play it and think bigger
Games and big-idea books about how living things work together - to play and read with the same people you'd garden with.
A fully cooperative board game about stopping climate change: everyone at the table wins or loses together by cutting emissions and building resilience. It's the game form of this list - the big problem, tackled side by side. 1 to 4 players, ages 10 ...
Daybreak (2nd edition)
Climate solutions laid out one by one, ranked and readable, with food, farming and land use right in the middle. I keep it next to the garden books because it's where big ideas become a plan.
Drawdown, edited by Paul Hawken
You build an ecosystem of plants, habitats and weather on your own tableau. It isn't cooperative, but it earns its spot by turning the living world itself into the game, and it's beautiful on the table.
Earth
The deep cooperative pick: every player is a spirit of the island, combining powers to protect the land together. Heavier than Daybreak and one of the most loved co-op games ever made - my choice for game nights that want the big version of working t...
Spirit Island
The follow-up to Drawdown: from naming the solutions to putting them into practice, with food and land at the center. I added it for everyone who finishes Drawdown and asks 'okay, now what.'
Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation
A forester's account of how trees share food and warn each other through the network under the forest floor. It's the original story of plants working as a community - the quiet science behind the whole list.
The Hidden Life of Trees
A botanist weaves science with indigenous wisdom: what plants give us, and what we owe back. I chose it as the mindset book of the list - the reason a community keeps a garden going for years.
Braiding Sweetgrass
The hit bird game: grow a habitat across forest, grassland and wetland. Calm, beautiful and famously easy to teach, which makes it my pick for bringing brand-new players to the table.
Wingspan