Starting a group
Would you be interested in starting a group in your area? You don’t need to have any gardening experience, all you need is to be good at organising and encouraging people. If you can gather a group of people together, we’ll provide the help and resources to get you growing for your first season.
A Grow Zones team in Cambridge
Overview of the process
A Grow Zones season takes a little organising – we provide simple resources to help you do that, all you need to do is guide your team through the process. An average size team could be 15–20 people with 8-12 different gardens, but Grow Zones works with bigger and smaller size teams. The participants will have different skills, experience and garden sizes and different availability over the season. Each garden also needs some degree of planning and designing before the team arrive. To help you organise this we will provide you with the Grow Zones Kit which simplifies the process into just two steps, helping you organise and ensuring that the participants don’t get overloaded.
Step 1 The Grow Zones Introduction Meeting
At this first meeting you will introduce the project to anyone interested in joining a season team. With the help of resources provided in the kit you, as a team, will explore the idea of growing your own food and how Grow Zones works. Each household that wants to participate will take away a garden survey and booklet that will help them think about what they would like to do in their garden. The meeting is also an opportunity for people to ask questions and get to know one another better. It is worth considering how you are going to attract people to this meeting through different marketing means as well as by asking others to help spread the word. Just putting up a poster and hoping for the best doesn’t work very well. More ideas will be available in the kit. You can tell us about you intro meeting here.
Step 2 The Season Planning Meeting
A couple of weeks later, a representative from each household will gather together with you to plan the season – they should have their completed garden surveys. During the Season Planning Meeting the participants availability and requirements are collated and a series of visits begins to take shape. By the end of this meeting everyone should know where they are going and when – and when people are coming to their garden. Facilitating this meeting well keeps the planning really simple.
Shortly after the Season Planning Meeting the season itself starts. On some days there may be garden visits happening at two sites simultaneously. Ideally, all participants, including yourself will only be making about four visits even if there are more than four gardens in the group. During the season, if the planning meeting has gone well, you shouldn’t have too much to do but you may want to feed late joining participants into upcoming visits or rearrange visits and let people know if a visit gets cancelled for any reason.
What skills will you need?
Organisational skills To be a Grow Zones facilitator all you really need is to be good at organising and encouraging people – at times that may mean being a strict time keeper and keeping people focussed on the necessary process steps during the two meetings. You will need to be prepared for those meetings so that you’re ready to answer questions about the process. If you yourself have questions at any time, we are available to help. The booklets in the kit are designed to prepare you in advance.
Horticultural skills It obviously helps if you have some familiarity with fruit and vegetable growing basics, but don’t worry if you don’t. Grow Zones is definitely a place for people to learn and gain experience. It isn’t your responsibility to provide all the answers. You could facilitate a season as a complete novice as long as you can appreciate the next skill.
Facilitating learning The last facilitation skill may be the most important one: to encourage people to learn for themselves. Instead of there being a ‘teacher’ providing all the answers Grow Zones encourages the participants into what’s called reflective practice – this is where they take responsibility for learning themselves by approaching their gardening as an experiment or even as a game. If a participant has a question, that’s fantastic; an opportunity to learn rather than an admission of ignorance. For example, if someone doesn’t know how to grow carrots, then the Grow Zones team can help them find out – perhaps someone in the group knows, or someone else has a book they can share, or someone may find out via the internet or a TV programme. If after a couple of Grow Zones seasons a participant becomes responsible for their own learning then that is the best fruit of all.