A partnership of various Old Town organisations, bringing together garden spaces and keen volunteers.
Aims:
To improve local residents’ access to gardens
To grow and use fruit, herbs and vegetables for the community
To create lasting relationships and share skills.
Description
Nearly all Old Town residents live in flats with no access to a garden. EOTDT’s Community Growing Collective aims to partner up keen gardeners with greenspaces that need tending. The project has four main aims:
To get more Old Town residents playing an active role in gardening in their community.
To grow fruit, vegetables and herbs for the community to use
Skill sharing, civil empowerment, and creating long lasting relationships.
To improve Old Town greenspaces for public accessibility and enjoyment.
Through previous funding, we have set up partnerships with the West Port Garden and Scottish Veterans’ Residencies. We have had a launch event to inform local organisations of the project, and recruited 20 volunteers so far. We require further funding to purchase gardening resources and equipment, to hire a freelance growing coordinator, and for staff time to organise and evaluate the project.
Volunteers will work on gardens in weekly slots, planting, tidying, weeding, and doing any maintenance work to improve the spaces. Any food grown will then be used in The Crannie’s free community pantry, and in their weekly cooking group and subsequent community lunch. A focus will be placed on skill sharing and community empowerment, with the Growing Coordinator helping to teach about growing veg in Scotland. Additional focus will be on building community relationships, allowing the participants to enjoy spending time in the gardens and working together.
We hope the funding can support the Community Growing Collective becoming a mainstay of our weekly programme, while allowing the local spaces to flourish. The Veterans’ Residencies garden is used by 80 veterans, and West Port Garden is a very central publicly accessible space. We hope that when it has been transformed, it will be an enjoyable place for local residents and passers-by to experience.
The project aims to be as sustainable as possible, contributing positively to the climate via several avenues: empowering locals to grow their own food, lessening the need for imported supermarket goods, and creating enjoyable accessible greenspaces in the Old Town.
Location: The majority of Old Town residents live in flats without gardens, and access to garden spaces is limited. The project aims to partner organisations' garden spaces with keen Old Town residents, making greenspaces more publicly accessible, and enabling people to grow vegetables. As of May 2025, we have partnered with the West Port Garden (off Grassmarket), and Scottish Veterans Residencies at Whitefoord House. The Crannie Community Hub will act as a central hub, with harvested produce being used in their free pantry and community lunch, so that Old Town residents can enjoy the benefits of locally grown food. We hope to partner with more organisations in the Old Town in future, so that there is a strong network of publicly tended gardens within the area!
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