West Pymble Community Garden
If you’ve been reading about the wonderful world of Community Gardens and thought “Wouldn’t it be great to have a Community Garden nearby where I can be involved?” Well, now you can, if you’re in the Kuringgai area.
There is a fledgling community garden located at the rear of the local shopping centre in West Pymble. It lies on Ku-ring-gai council land, is council supported and is a great opportunity for locals in the area to be a part of their ‘own’ community garden. If you live in a suburb nearby we would love you to join up and become involved.
In 2011 the Kuringgai council was approached by the TV program Better Homes and Gardens to identify and provide a site to use for a TV segment on building a community garden. The garden was subsequently designed, built, and filmed by the TV crew, and then handed over to the ‘community’.
A few West Pymble locals have since then been active in small upgrades and ongoing maintenance, but mostly it has remained fairly low-key.
Recently the Garden has been fortunate to have received substantial support from Council who have built a first-class shed, complete with water and power, plus supplied a new water tap to a convenient location in the current garden. In addition to this, the Garden was awarded a grant of $1000 from the environment levy. This has been allocated by the members to be used on a drip irrigation system, which has already been purchased and is undergoing installation.
While this community garden has not been established using Permaculture design or principles, it is a great opportunity for interested and active locals to become involved and begin to apply these, and also to be a part of its expansion and transformation.
It should also be noted that this is a very informal place. There are no membership fees, and there is no committee. At the moment we have a coordinator and an infrastructure team and our main communication is through a monthly newsletter.
We currently meet every Saturday morning at 10am, and on Tuesdays there is a Kids Gardening group at 330pm during term times. The garden location is Philip Lane, West Pymble.