School and Community Gardens
Our founder, Jenna Deane, spent over a decade as a school garden educator and trainer, and so providing excellent support for school and community gardens has been an important goal for GGC since its inception.
If you are involved with a school or community garden, here are some tips to help you make the most of GeoGardenClub.
Create a "special" email account for GGC
One easy but important initial step when using GeoGardenClub for a school or community garden is to create an email account specifically for use with GGC (as opposed to your personal email). Register this "special" email with GeoGardenClub. (You can do this even if you already have registered an account with GGC using your personal email.)
A "special" GGC account simplifies long term management, because school and community garden management often involves a succession of educators and administrators. Using a "special email" for GGC makes the transition from one manager to another much easier. Also, multiple managers can login using the same "special" GGC account.
If you follow our recommendation to use a "special" email to register with GGC, then that is the email that will be subscribed to the GGC mailing list. Unless you enable forwarding, you might not see our newsletters.
To fix this, you might consider joining the GGC mailing list with your personal email so you can stay informed about updates and new features. You can register here.
We try to keep the volume of GGC emails low, and the quality high. We understand that your inbox might already be overflowing.
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 (parents, students, etc).
To set up your free subscriptions, the garden administrator should send email to info@geogardenclub.com providing the location and contact information for the garden program.
Next, send a list of email accounts for the people who are currently involved with the garden. Make sure to indicate which email account(s) will own the garden(s) as noted above. You can send us more emails at any time, and update the list yearly if necessary to reflect who has joined and who has left the garden program.
Our free subscriptions works this way: everyone who signs up with GeoGardenClub gets the first three months free. After that, we will send discount codes to the emails associated with the school or community garden to provide additional months of free use. We will continue to send new discount codes annually to the people active in the school or community 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.
Often the administrator of a school or community garden also maintains their own personal home garden. If this sounds like you, please note that your free subscription covers all of your GGC accounts. This means that you could potentially create one GGC account using the "special" email for your school and community garden, and a second GGC account using your personal email that is used to manage your own home garden.
Programs that span multiple chapters
Sometimes a garden program might involve multiple gardens that are located in more than one GeoGardenClub chapters. The setup and management of such programs is a little more complicated, because GeoGardenClub currently requires each account to be associated with a single Chapter. There are a couple of ways you can proceed if you're in this situation:
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Create a new "special" email address for each garden. This will be used by the administrator of that garden (and inherited by future administrators). This account "owns" the garden, and is able to add other members of the chapter (i.e. parents, students, etc) as "editors".
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Create a new "special" email address for each chapter. This is used to create (and thus "own") all of the gardens associated with the program in that chapter. This approach involves less email addresses, but gives more power to anyone with the credentials for the master email address.
Now, a question you might have is: "If I have an account in one Chapter, how do I see garden data from one of my program's gardens in another chapter?" The answer is, Lurk Mode! Using Lurk Mode, you can "visit" any other Chapter and look at any of the Gardens. You can't actually edit garden data from outside your chapter, but you can still see the data (and if you need to make changes, then you can always logout and log back in to an account associated with the other chapter.)
Note that (1) and (2) are not mutually exclusive: you can mix and match techniques or combine both to best suit your circumstances.
If all of this seems bewildering and complicated, just drop us an email at info@geogardenclub.com and we'll be glad to work with you to figure out the best option.
Community garden organization
There are two potential ways to set up a community garden in GeoGardenClub, which we call "Single Garden, Many Beds" or "Many Gardens, Single Bed".
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Single Garden, Many Beds. In this approach, the administrator of the community garden creates a single Garden to represent the entire community garden, then creates a Bed for each "plot", and adds gardeners as "Editors" to this single Garden so that they can manage their own Beds.
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Many Gardens, Single Bed. An alternative is to have each gardener create their own Garden using GeoGardenClub (typically with only a single or very few 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 the 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 multiple Gardens within the community garden.
Develop and share curriculum
We believe there are many exciting possibilities to use GeoGardenClub to help students and community members learn about gardening, food production, and its relationship to science and other areas.
We invite you to work with us to develop and share curriculum for school and community garden programs. As these materials are developed, we will provide a way to host and share them more widely.