Grangegorman Community Garden - Living Lab experimentation
The Grangegorman Community Garden is now at the halfway mark of the year-long pilot. The pathway to achieving our goal is bumpy, but it is exciting to see shared-value opportunities and potential new directions emerge.
Experimentation
Three Grangegorman Community Garden Committee meetings have taken place during the second phase of our Living Lab, with an understanding of roles, shared purpose, and a calendar of activities agreed.
Achievements of our collaboration so far include:
- Garden plots divided among the growers,
- Funding secured and budget allocated to finance garden resources,
- Crops planted by students with gardening support by volunteers,
- Seven educational workshops delivered by partner experts and enablers to support the projects mission,
- Started to tell the story of our garden through the garden webpage and other online platforms,
- Soil testing carried out as action research by academics and students from the School of Chemistry,
- Soil enrichment by TU Dublin students enabled by Student Volunteering.
Living Labs are experimental by nature. The initiation and operation of Living Labs are rarely without challenges and when you enter a space for exploration, you can encounter the unexpected. As the 2023/2024 academic term ends, gardening activity is paused while we await soil analysis for the garden. With this urban site we have encountered the potential for lead and other soil contaminants to be present - a growing issue for people who wish to garden on sites such as ours.
As we consider what a sustainable governance model for our community garden looks like, we are working to keep our stakeholders engaged so we can overcome the gardening challenges we face. We anticipate a shift in our objectives and priorities potential scenarios emerging of how to deal with making the soil safe for growing.
To that end, we have adapted our growing plan during this period to deliver educational activities on site and to mobilise an expanding network of stakeholders and garden users as we respond to the challenges of urban gardening and food production and of the complexities of gardening collaboration so that we can achieve our goal together.