Thanks for visiting. This is the home of CoGrowing, or Co-operative Growing. The idea is simple: groups of people get together to share the growing of vegetables and fruit. Each person in the group focuses on one or two kinds, to remove the complexity of individual veg growing, and the group gets together periodically to share their home grown food.

Why? Because despite all the help on the internet, despite books and videos and podcasts and everything else, growing lots of different types of vegetables is not easy. Each veg type has its own cycles, its own needs, its own vulnerabilities. Keeping track of all those needs and succesfully producing edible vegetables is just not simple. It requires consistent time and effort.

Cogrowing aims to simplify all that. In a typical group, instead of one person trying to grow 6 types of vegetable, a group of six people would each take on a single type. One might do potatoes, while one does salad leaves, and another does beans and peas, etc. Because each person has one type to focus on, they can soon learn what they need to do, and what might go wrong. That simplicity and focus means a greater chance of success. But because the group is sharing what they grow, each person still gets a variety of vegetables to eat.

And theres other benefits: the creation of a group and the sharing that goes on is itself a fun, sociable, communal act. Theres greater strength in the diversity of a group: should one persons crop fail, they have the rest of the group to fall back on. Each group member could swap from one vegetable to another as a year passes – and then they can share what they learnt about the previous years veg growing to the person taking over.

The focus here is on growing veg and fruit, but the group could have slightly broader concerns: one person could just focus on creating compost for example, and another person might have hens that allow them to share eggs as part of the group.

Ultimately the aim is to make home veg growing and eating possible and accessible to more people. Lots of people often give up simple because its too hard to keep track of lots of kinds of veggies throughout the year. With CoGrowing a new group member can be welcomed, and they can be given the very simple task of sowing some salad seeds, and keeping an eye on them. And as part of the group they get access to all the produce the group provides.