Matching gardeners and neighbors with space to share

March 27, 2015 12:08 PM

Matching gardeners and neighbors with space to share
We built a way for gardeners without gardens to find neighbors with space to share. It's done well in the Boston area – BoingBoing wrote it up last year. Looking for feedback on how to expand to be a national project. We've started promoting it, but as it's a marketplace, it faces all the challenges of marketplaces – you need two interested parties to arrive around the same time. We don't make any money on it. We're building it for love of gardens everywhere. :)

Role: Programmer

posted by Galen (3 comments total)

What offline and online communities were most productive in terms of getting sign ups in the Boston area? Do you know if these differed between prospective gardeners and space owners? Were most of these communities local in nature and, if so, how unique were they to the Boston area?
posted by waninggibbon at 9:24 PM on March 27, 2015

I would focus on incremental cities before thinking nationwide. Try to get popular garden stores (Home Depot, lowes, etc) interested. I'm sure that they would be interested in contributing resources for a meetup of local gardners in their stores
posted by The Ted at 11:36 AM on March 30, 2015

I think focusing on incremental cities and then going international could work well. I know LocalWiki did it that way. And when they came out of beta they had a ton of dots on their map.

It's a hard balance to strike.

I think Portland, Oregon would be a good candidate. Tons of people into gardening around here. Seed libraries, yard shares already happening, etc.
posted by aniola at 9:09 AM on March 31, 2015 [1 favorite]