The above map depicts Feedback Farms on Bergen Street, Brooklyn, in July 2013.

Link to sign up to use the Garden Tracking Toolkit: http://barn.farmingconcrete.org

Project Background

Five Borough Farm: Why Measuring Matters from Design Trust for Public Space on Vimeo.

The Five Borough Farm toolkit is a set of field research tools and methods for gardeners themselves to track progress towards their own goals, i.e., food production, compost production, landfill diversion, healthy eating experiences for participants, project completion, task management, etc. These tools are open source and available for all to use for free. Five Borough Farm (5BF) was originally created by the Design Trust for Public Space. Farming Concrete are partners on the project and are building the companion software for logging data, http://barn.farmingconcrete.org/, and for publicly viewing data in aggregate, http://mill.farmingconcrete.org/. The project website can be viewed here: http://www.fiveboroughfarm.org/

This project was piloted in 2013 with 25 gardeners who first participated in an open space technology workshop. After the workshop, the ideas were synthesized by Phil Silva and Liz Barry, and materials were distributed to participating gardeners during summer 2013. Based on a season's worth of field testing, a second iteration was completed, simplifying the language and adding additional protocols.

Here's a table of contents of the protocols to date:

Here's what the landing page of Barn looks like:

NB The name Five Borough Farm is because this project began in New York City, which has five counties known as boroughs.