School and Community Gardens
One of our founders has over a decade of experience with planning and managing school gardens, and so providing support for school and community gardens has been an underlying design goal since the start of GeoGardenClub.
Here are some tips for using GeoGardenClub to support school and community gardens:
Create an email account to "own" the garden
One easy but important initial step when using GeoGardenClub for a school or community garden is to create an email account specifically for the garden, then use that account to register with GeoGardenClub.
This simplifies long term management of the garden, because school and community gardens often involve a succession of educators, parents, and administrators. If the garden is owned by a specific person's email, then if that person leaves the garden, then the garden ownership must be migrated to a new person's account.
By creating an email specifically for the garden, when garden managers change, you can just provide them with the credentials to this account, and they can take over easily.
Get your free subscriptions
GeoGardenClub offers free subscriptions to everyone involved with a school or community garden: not just the garden educators or administrators, but any other people actively involved with the garden.
To set up your free subscriptions, the school garden educator or community garden administrator should send email to info@geogardenclub.com providing the location and contact information for the garden program. At that time, they can also provide an initial list of email accounts for the people who are currently involved with the garden. At a minimum, this list should include the email account that owns the garden as noted above.
Free subscriptions are provided in the following way: everyone who signs up with GeoGardenClub gets the first six months free. After that, we will send discount codes to the emails currently associated with the garden to provide an additional year of free use. We will send new codes annually for the emails of people currently active in the garden.
GeoGardenClub enables the "Family Plan" feature in both App and Play Stores. This means that all members of a family can install the app on their own device using the same free subscription.
In addition, you are not limited to using GeoGardenClub for only your school or community garden. For example, if you have a home garden, don't hesitate to use your free subscription to manage it as well!
(School Gardens) Develop and share curriculum
We believe there are many exciting possibilities to use GeoGardenClub to help students learn about gardens, science, history, language, and other school curriculum.
We invite you to work with us to develop and share curriculum for school garden programs. As these materials are developed, we will provide a way to host and share them among all the school gardens using GeoGardenClub.
(Community Gardens) One garden, many beds
There are two potential ways to set up a community garden in GeoGardenClub:
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The administrator of the community garden creates a single Garden, then creates one (or more) Beds for each "plot", and adds gardeners as "Editors" so that they can manage their own Beds.
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Each gardener in the community garden defines their own Garden with one (or more) Beds.
In GeoGardenClub, we recommend the first approach. The advantage of this approach is that it provides a single, unified view of the entire community garden, and makes it easy for each member to see what else is being grown in the garden. It strengthens the "community" aspect of the Garden. It does have some disadvantages: (1) any gardener can edit any bed, and (2) the Task List will show tasks for the entire Garden, making it a bit more difficult for individual Gardeners to use it for their own Beds. (We intend to introduce features to address this problem in then future.)
The second approach has complementary pros and cons: while individual Gardeners have control over their own Beds, the single unified view of the entire community garden is lost. We believe the loss of the unified view is significant and outweighs the advantages of "private" gardens within the community garden.