To volunteer at our Hackney market gardens, email us to join the waiting list. Our grower Sophie will be in touch when a slot is available. We are currently unable to offer volunteering at our Dagenham Farm as we don't have enough staff and resources to do it. You might want to check out Capital Growth's list of London gardens that usually welcome volunteers, including some weekend sessions.
If you are interested in organic growing and want to make a difference, come and join our regular volunteer work team. Volunteers are essential in helping us to grow food in the heart of the city.
Anyone who is interested in gardening and growing can volunteer - no previous experience is necessary! It's a great way of improving your growing skills and meeting other local people while making a real contribution to Growing Communities' aim of setting up practical, long-lasting alternatives to the current food system.
Email us to join the waiting list and Sophie will be in touch. Please tell us if you have any health problems or allergies and if there is anything in particular you would like to learn from your volunteering experience. We can then tailor work tasks to suit you. We will also ask you to fill in a short form, so we can contact you about any changes to garden opening times. Note that we have lunch about 1pm and that Tuesday afternoons are quite busy with all the harvesting going on, so not the best time to start volunteering.
Our sites are open for volunteering from February till November on Mondays and Tuesdays, but are sometimes closed over holiday periods. Check here before coming to the sites during school holidays or on bank holidays.
Provisional opening times, summer 2024:
Mondays 10am till 4pm at Springfield Park
Tuesdays 10am till 4pm at Clissold Park
Our other sites are not currently open for volunteering.
We are not able to offer weekend volunteering as our grower works part time.
Every year we offer free six-month traineeships to enable keen future growers to experience the entire growing cycle from soil to seed to harvest to compost to soil again, via watering, weeding, worms and much more. We usually advertise the roles in late January; check our jobs page then.
