Joy, LaManda. Start a Community Food Garden: The Essential Handbook.

Master gardener and Peterson Garden Project executive director Joy (coauthor, Fearless Food Gardening in Chicagoland) provides a step-by-step how-to on creating a community garden from nothing but a vision. Using worksheets to form a mission statement and detailed meeting agendas, with advice on managing volunteers and creating partnerships, and tips on gardener education and seed planting, Joy offers experienced guidance and best practices for the ongoing process of community gardening. The final section of the book contains several pages of useful resources to aid the community in furthering its goals. Aimed at those who are completely unfamiliar with this type of work, the text still has plenty of suggestions for those with a little more experience. Joy has laid out the content so that it is easy for readers to skip to relevant sections. While the author stresses frequently that community gardening is full of challenging tasks and not without group conflict, the author is upbeat and encouraging about overcoming obstacles. Sometimes this comes across as being simplistic and overly optimistic.