Before

Gather the people before you touch the soil. Gardens fail when someone builds the beds first and hopes a community shows up. Call a meeting and invite anyone likely to care: neighbors, renters, the school down the street, the garden club, the folks who always stop to look at your tomatoes. Decide together what kind of garden it will be and who it's for.

You can start by organizing a planning gathering in Plurality. Print your poster, share the social card, and invite folks directly. The magic starts after that.

Find the land: a vacant lot, a church yard, or a corner of a park all work. Vegetables need at least six hours of sun a day, water within reach, and a soil test for pollutants. Find out who owns it and ask to borrow it for at least two or three years. You don't need to own land to start a garden. Joy built twelve of them on other people's property.

Use the Needs tab to request tools, seeds, lumber, and wheelbarrows. Use the Volunteer tab to assign tasks to do in the garden. A community garden is all about folks showing up for each other.

During

Assign plots, leave pathways between them, set aside space for compost and a tool shed. Plant flowers along the edges for the neighbors who walk by but never come in. They're the garden's goodwill ambassadors.

Let the gardeners write the rules. Folks follow rules they had a hand in making. Put them in writing: dues, watering schedules, weeding, who harvests what. Then keep them light. Joy's advice is to make the garden your happy place: “Have enough rules for people to be safe and for the garden to thrive, but let the community form and create the world they want in the garden space.”

Give the kids their own bed. Children don't care about the size of the harvest, they care about digging, and a kid with a plot brings two adults with them.

Pair the veterans with the beginners. In Chicago, 90 percent of wartime Victory Gardeners had never gardened, and half of Joy's first crop of gardeners hadn't either. “I've never grown anything” is not a problem. Say that in the invite.

Try capturing all the milestones as Moments. The first sprouts, the first beds, the first de-weeding session. They’ll be memories that you’ll cherish.

After

Share the harvest loudly. Cook a meal in the garden from what you grew, give the surplus to neighbors or the food pantry, and take photos of the ugliest and most glorious vegetables for Moments. Celebrations are what pull new members in for next season.

The most important step: set up a Plurality Group for the community garden. You’ll be able to set and collect member dues, organize gatherings, and keep track of the calendar of activities.

And raise the next leaders. Ask a first-year gardener to run a work day or teach a skill they just learned. Joy's proudest result isn't the food. It's that her 2010 beginners now lead gardens of their own. When the founder can skip a Saturday and nothing falls apart, it stopped being your garden and became the neighborhood's.