When I started yours2share, I didn’t realise that I was starting a social enterprise, I just wanted to help people share stuff. As the number of private syndicates that were helped by yours2share increased, I also became aware that if as the number of partners in a private syndicates increases substantially, it becomes a co-operative.

Over time yours2share has created a well established forum for people sharing property, boats and aircraft. It also enables people to share land, gardens and allotments, for food and vegetables as well as animals such as hens, goats, horses, and bees. We’ve also helped people to share cars as informal car clubs: buying a car between three and six people in a street or village. The principles of sharing, the issues that must be agreed to make a sharing arrangment work are basically the same, whether you are sharing a £1 million yacht or a vegetable plot at the end of the garden.

The last year I moved to a small town in south Norfolk, a rural corner of East Anglia and I’ve become immersed in a rural lifestyle and economy. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been using the social networks much more, particularly Twitter, and all of the strands of yours2share and my lives, seem to have come together in the guise of the Plunkett Foundation and various projects in which it is involved.

The Plunkett Foundation promotes and supports co-operatives and social enterprises in rural communities worldwide. One of the Plunkett Foundation’s projects is the lottery funded MakeLocalFoodWork, where it works with a range of other major partners including Co-operativesUK, the trade association for all types of co-operative enterprise throughout the UK, and the Soil Association which works to improve the public’s understanding of the impact of different methods of food production on health and the environment.

The MakeLocalFoodWork project is a collection of projects all designed to ‘reconnect people and land through local food increasing access to fresh, healthy, local food with clear, traceable origins’.

If you want to know more about supporting rural communities, do visit the Plunkett Foundation’s website, and if food issues interest you, have a look at the MakeLocalFoodWork website.

If you just want somewhere to “grow your own” or would like someone to help you to make use of your garden, here are yours2share’s landshare listings and landshare guidance.

yours2share gets mentions and links from many and varied forum posts, but I had to have a look at this forum when I saw the link on the stats pages: PigeonWatch.  The forum entry is actually about sharing allotments, but I was intrigued to find this forum devoted to pigeon shooting.   With nearly a million posts this is a thriving forum.

As the post indicates, yours2share has lots of ads for land sharing (garden sharing or allotment sharing) as well as guidance.

I’ve just commented on an article in last week’s Economist, my favourite newspaper.  I don’t remember ever reading about allotments in it before, so this probably reflects the substantial change in the middle classes that make up their readership over the last year or so.  Tending your allotment is no longer the preserve of slightly batty hippies or retirees.

Anyhow here’s the article: allotments, take this job and shovel it and here is the listing of yours2share’s current garden shares.

It’s good to see examples of garden sharing or landsharing in action and Totnes in Devon has been encouraging this for a year or more and has 21 garden shares currently in place.  There is lots of useful information for anyone considering setting up a landshare, either as a landowner or as a gardener.  yours2share enables people across the UK and indeed anywhere in the world, to find local partners to share gardens, allotments and land for growing fruit and vegetables, keeping bees, goats, sheep, pigs, horses or any other livestock, or share land for any purpose.  Here is the current list of garden sharing opportunities.

Garden sharing or landsharing in Totnes

If you are thinking about allowing someone who will grow vegetables in your garden, here are ten top tips to ensure a successful sharing arrangement.

• Make sure there is a water source, if there isn’t one, you will need to provide one.
• Work out where the composter will be located and what is to be done with non-compostable rubbish.
• Ensure there is reasonable access to the vegetable plot.  Can a car be parked nearby?  If there is more than one access route, can they all be used?
• Decide the times of the day and days of the week when the gardener can have access
• Agree exactly who other than the gardener is allowed on the vegetable plot.
• Establish how long the arrangement lasts.  Don’t go over a year, but the gardener will need the whole season.  364 days may be the answer.
• Agree the rent or amount of fruit and vegetables in kind.
• Determine any favourite fruit and vegetable that must be grown.
• Can the gardener have a bonfire?  Or hold a BBQ and invite some friends around?
• Finally, and most importantly of all, write down whatever you both agree and both sign it.

These points, and a few more, are covered in more detail in the landshare guidance.  For me point 8 is particularly pertinent and easily forgotten.  If I was a landowner, I’d want to make sure I was going to get rhubarb, raspberries and sweet peas at some point in the year!

Here is the current listing of people who want to landshare.

yours2share has a new category: landshare. This category is for people who want to share land for vegetable plots, gardens, horses and livestock. You may have land that you are willing to allow other people to use; or want a piece of land that you can use to grow vegetables or use for livestock. There is detailed guidance and we will be working with Net Lawman to create new template contracts for this.

This has been a potential category for a year or so, but a recent conversation with someone I met at a trade show, prompted me to get on and set it up.

I was with my partner at an exhibition for working for charities and got talking to a man who worked for a charity that enables elderly people to go on holiday.  I have been wondering whether owners of second homes and boats would consider sharing or donating use of their house or boat to charities who operate holidays for disadvantaged people.  So I explained what yours2share does.

As so often happens, the man gave me a great example of sharing.  His daughter had bought a terraced house with a garden at the front and back.  After a few months, she realised that keeping them in order was much more work than she had bargained for, and she was not interested in gardening.  To make matters worse, her neighbours were proud gardeners and had beautifully manicured front gardens: her scruffy patch was letting them down.  She asked her father what she should do as she couldn’t afford to pay for a gardener.

He suggested that she ask her neighbours if they would be willing to help her.  She spoke to them and found that several were delighted to help if they could use her back garden as a vegetable patch.  She was pleased to allow them to do this and now gets some fresh fruit and vegetables during the summer.

Everyone is happy.  A little communication and a willingness to share goes an awfully long way.