GOODMAN COMMUNITY FARM

2014 - present

The Goodman Community Farm (GCF) is a demonstrative urban permaculture food garden and commons. It is a community effort. Here, we experiment, teach, learn, create closed-loop food systems, regenerate soil, and cultivate biodiversity, food, collaborations and a community. We show you how we practice permaculture so you can create a positive eco-footprint and culture within your own context and community.

Using permaculture design principles, we are transforming a dormant and unused urban space into a thriving edible garden. Here, soil is restored, diversity cultivated and ecosystems created. The Goodman Community Farm community composts, mulches and returns organic matter to the ground to strengthen the soil food web. Volunteers grow herbs, vegetables, edible flowers, fruits, and a community. The Goodman Community farm continues to evolve as a demonstration of urban permaculture in a tropical city like Singapore.

If you’d like to make growing food and working with nature part of your identity as an urbanite, get in touch and get involved as a volunteer. We also run workshops on-site from time to time. Read more about the Goodman Community Farm below and get involved.

How it came to be…

In the early days of Cultivate Central, Nova would run creative gardening workshops for children. Her workshops encompassed learning about composting worms, growing food in small spaces, upcycling and more. Luanne Poh, the founder of The Artground, observed the positive reaction and engagement received during these workshops. This gave Luanne and her team a vision of integrating an edible garden as well as our out-of-the-box, hands-on, messy, soil and nature-based gardening workshops when they launched The Artground in 2017. We designed and maintained a garden space and continue to run one-of-a-kind nature and art workshops for preschool and primary school students at The Artground. This collaboration has over the years given thousands of children insights into how nature informs art and vice versa.

In 2019, the folks at the Goodman Art Centre where The Artground is located, realised that the community garden on site had become dull, dormant and void of life. We were called upon to redesign and recreate the community garden using permaculture principles while engaging the community of artists at Goodman Art Centre. Our first challenge was to transform the dry, compacted, anaerobic and rubble filled urban soil. Our second challenge was ensuring that this urban food space created opportunities for public engagement. We crafted a design, built and launched a garden with The Goodman Art Centre. This is now a space where permaculture, the arts, educators, food growers and biodiversity come together within a compact urban setting.

Yield and elements

The once dormant community garden is now alive and abundant. With support from the folks at the Goodman Art Centre, help from enthusiastic volunteers and creative input from the resident artists at Goodman, the space has become a productive space.

It demonstrates how urban permaculture can turn small unused spaces into food commons filled with biodiversity and a community with an eco-positive footprint. In the first half of 2022, we grew and harvested over 50 types of edible flowers and vegetables. With volunteers we will shape and apply regenerative gardening, closed-loop food systems and permaculture principles that will help increase the yield in the space.

We see yield as more than just the amount of food and herbs cultivated. At the Goodman Community Garden, we educate the community, adults and children alike, about the importance of growing our own food, restoring our soils, and maintaining biodiversity through hands-on workshops and activities. We’ve also run dozens of collaborative workshops onsite. Read here for more information on workshops.

Small but big in biodiversity

One of the things we are extremely proud of is how much diversity we’ve managed to cultivate in this urban space. The selection of native and regional plants not only showcases plant diversity, but also cultural diversity in Singapore and the region, allowing us to share recipes, stories and restore medicinal knowledge and application of these plants. Small “marginal” and niche spaces and ecosystems such as ponds, swales, leaf litter mounds, and bug hotels, were deliberately included. This has allowed for a flourishing bug biodiversity. Our moderately manicured space encourages wildlife that feed into the garden web of life and help us manage pest issues too. This has allowed for lessons and observations about local bug biodiversity and appreciation for the city in nature vision.

We are constantly creating new elements at the Goodman Community Farm. Here are some elements already on-site:

• Herb spiral
• Leaf litter collection
• Composting station
• Mural walls
• Garden raised ponds
• Banana circle and swales
• Perennial food patches
• Fruiting tree guilds
• Workshop spaces
• Bug hotel
• Urban agro-ecological beds
• Keyhole mulch beds
• Vermicomposting
• Food Bank Patch
  

Do you have a dormant space you’d like to transform into an abundant and productive food space? Or do you have a community you’d like to build a Permaculture Garden for?

Tell us more about your space and objectives by clicking on the button below.

Goodman Community Farm in numbers

Location	Next to Block B, Goodman Art Centre, 90 Goodman Road, Singapore.
Size of area planted	about 14,800 sqft
Soil condition:	Clay, dense, urban rubble filled.
Number of plant species	Over 50
Composting systems onsite	3
Average weight of waste collected a month for composting	About 100kg
Total community garden farmers engaged and taught	25
Total engagement and education ( students and adults )	over 1000 workshop participants.
Programmes that we run in the space	Friend or Foe Worms Love Coffee Learning Journeys Permaculture Design workshops Grow, cook and make workshops Soil and Society

Phase 1 site plan (2021)