Since we started our garden share scheme in Brighton & Hove (which is called Grow Your Neighbour's Own) a number of people from around the country have contacted me to ask for advice on how we got going... so I thought I'd start a thread here to which people can reply with other questions and answers which can be shared with everyone...
The details of how we set up our garden share scheme here in Brighton are pretty much laid out on this page on the Transition Town Totnes website:
http://totnes.transitionnetwork.org/gardenshare/startupscheme
This page sets out almost exactly what we did, mainly because I had a long conversation with Lou in Totnes before we did ours... I think she wrote the page afterwards so that she wouldn't have to keep repeating herself...! We also use Google Maps to keep track of where all the garden owners and gardeners live (just for our own use, the map is not publicly viewable).
There's only a couple more things to add to her page, namely that we found that setting up a website where people can email in their details proved very effective (see our website here: http://grow.transitionbrightonandhove.org.uk)... but the website on its own is not enough, because the most important thing is matching up people with the same expectations from the scheme. There will be all levels of gardening experience amongst the gardeners, from beginner to experienced, and this needs matching with what the owners are expecting, as well as matching by location, times when access is available, how much time gardeners have available, etc.
As to legal/security issues: we meet all of the gardeners personally and check a personal reference for all of them. We don't ask for CRB checks, but if a garden owner requests this, many of the gardeners already have a CRB check, so we just match them with a gardener who has. We've also taken out Public Liability Insurance for the gardeners in case of an accident/damage in an owner's garden (we've got a small grant). But generally we want to just pair people up and let them get on with it – we provide them with a list of guideline questions to discuss before they agree to the pairing...
There are other practicalities to think about if you are in a city like we are in Brighton and Hove: namely that the gardeners will generally be living in flats near the centre of town, and the garden owners on the outskirts... so you have to find out if some gardeners are willing to cycle/get the bus to get to gardens (we've tried to avoid people using cars, but we might change this sometime soon so that we can match more people up), and promote this by saying they get the pick of the gardens if they do...
I have a number of the documents that we use (and there are others on the Totnes garden share at the link above): an info sheet about the scheme, the guidelines I mentioned above, the certificate we ask the pairings to sign once they've agreed to be matched together, and an example of the garden owner details sheet that we show potential gardeners when they are picking a scheme; as well as the procedures we follow when visiting garden owners or gardeners. If anyone would like copies of these please email me at grow_info*at*transitionbrightonandhove.org.uk
Please add any other questions and ideas about garden share schemes on this post so that everyone can see them
regards
Chris