Scottish Government has funded greenspace scotland to bring together community groups who are working on food growing and local food projects to create a vision of ‘our ideal food growing community’. The project will develop a visualisation tool and support materials to help communities to visualise, plan and create their own ‘ideal’ food growing community.

The project is based on work published last year which highlighted that more and more people in Scotland want to grow their own fruit and veg but land availability is a major constraint. It will capture the ideas and knowledge of community growing groups and organisations to develop a visual map of a typical Scottish town. This will illustrate the range of different community growing models (e.g. allotments, community gardens, community orchards, edible landscapes) and match them to the different places where community growing could happen (e.g. school grounds, backgreens, work places, temporary spaces, even road side planters) with support information for each of the growing models.

We see this being used by communities to spark ideas, identify which types of growing they want to take forward, and to begin to map their own community growing vision and plans. We have already started engaging with growing groups and communities, and the next stage will involve gaining input and expertise from community growing organisations and professionals. More