Using plots of disused land, FareShare Kitchen Gardens grow vegetables to add nutrition and taste to our meals.
You can help us grow healthy food for people in need by supporting our kitchen garden program with a general donation.
FareShare Kitchen Gardens welcome donations of materials and services. If you have a garden donation, please contact us.
Our kitchen gardens are tended by an enthusiastic community of hard-working volunteers. It's tough but rewarding physical work which includes weeding, propagation, planting, harvesting and composting.
In order to cook nutritious meals at scale, FareShare needs a constant supply of quality ingredients. Sourcing enough fresh vegetables in Melbourne to meet the growing demand for cooked meals from food relief charities is one of our biggest challenges.
FareShare’s kitchen gardens tackle this problem head on by growing our own vegetables on three sites in and around Melbourne to supplement rescued produce. We aim to grow at least one third of the vegetables we need for our Abbotsford kitchen with our garden manager working closely with our chefs to optimise the flow of healthy ingredients.
The vast bulk of FareShare’s vegetables are grown on the Baguley family farm in Clarinda with the generous support of experienced horticulturalist Les Baguley. FareShare has also created vibrant community assets on pieces of disused land at Moorabbin Airport and Victoria Park. Watch how we started on Gardening Australia and see our trial sweet potato planting on Landline.
The kitchen gardens program is one of FareShare’s sustainability initiatives. Read more about our emphasis on sustainability here.
In order to cook nutritious meals at scale, FareShare needs a constant supply of quality ingredients. Sourcing enough fresh vegetables in Melbourne to meet the growing demand for cooked meals from food relief charities is one of our biggest challenges.
FareShare’s kitchen gardens tackle this problem head on by growing our own vegetables on three sites in and around Melbourne to supplement rescued produce. We aim to grow at least one third of the vegetables we need for our Abbotsford kitchen with our garden manager working closely with our chefs to optimise the flow of healthy ingredients.
The vast bulk of FareShare’s vegetables are grown on the Baguley family farm in Clayton South with the generous support of experienced horticulturalist Les Baguley. FareShare has also created vibrant community assets on pieces of disused land at Moorabbin Airport and Victoria Park. Watch how we started on Gardening Australia and see our trial sweet potato planting on Landline.
The kitchen gardens program is one of FareShare’s sustainability initiatives. Read more about our emphasis on sustainability here.
Commercial flower, herb and vegetable grower Les Baguley has provided FareShare with the opportunity to grow vegetables at scale on his prime farm land in Melbourne’s outer fringe.
His family farm in Clarinda enables FareShare to grow a wide range of vegetables with a focus of generating yield. In 2022, more than 100 tonnes of vegetables were harvested at the farm – our biggest crop to date. The top crops were cauliflower, carrot, capsicum and zucchini.
Volunteer shifts operate on Mondays – Thursday with a Saturday shift on the first three Saturdays each month. Garden shifts require a good level of physical fitness. There are immediate volunteering opportunities on the Baguley farm for weekdays.
FareShare has created a large kitchen garden in the heart of Melbourne on VicTrack land close to our Abbotsford kitchen.
With initial support from RACV and Gandel Philanthropy, FareShare has transformed a former dumping ground between Victoria Park railway station and Victoria Park oval, into a productive urban vegetable patch.
The kitchen garden now grows a range of vegetables on 70 beds tended by volunteers.
Due to its proximity to the FareShare kitchen, this garden is particularly valuable for growing crops with a short shelf life such as herbs and leafy greens. In 2022, crops included silverbeet, bok choy, spring onion, kale, basil and parsley.
Volunteer shifts operate on Mondays and Wednesdays, with corporate volunteering on Fridays. There is currently a long waiting list for new regular volunteers.
A disused plot of land on one of Australia’s busiest airports has been donated by Moorabbin Airport Corporation and the Goodman Foundation to grow vegetables.
The kitchen garden, located next to the Australian National Aviation Museum, comprises scores of raised beds which grow a range of vegetables including zucchini, celery, spring onion, eggplant and broccoli together with herbs.
Volunteer shifts operate on Tuesdays only.
FareShare Melbourne: cooking more meals, Meals for the Mob continues, Dingley farm gathers pace Cooking more meals for people who need them most Our Abbotsford chefs and volunteers are well and truly back into the swing of things in our revamped kitchen… July was an incredible month, with 110,345 meals
On any given day, the staff and volunteers at the Abbotsford garden get asked about the history of the site, what it’s currently being used for, and how it came to be a kitchen garden that grows vegetables to help people doing it tough. And while our staff and volunteers
Back in 1999 Les Baguley was working a 100-hour week for Australia’s biggest flower growers in Melbourne’s Southeast. Born into a business started by his parents, horticultural legends Frank and Isabel, Les could scarcely have imagined how his life would change when aged just 47 he suffered a catastrophic stroke.
Marnie Dixon decided to volunteer with FareShare because she witnessed first hand the benefits of our meals to struggling women and their families. The garden volunteer worked for more than 21 years as an outreach community nurse and midwife supporting homeless women and families in inner-city Melbourne. As a first
In 2022, we worked with the City of Yarra to install four sculptural panels in our Abbotsford kitchen garden. These panels tell the story of the site and our kitchen gardens. The Australian Environmental Film Association was there to wonderfully document them. Watch the 3 minute video here:
Our kitchen garden champion Les Baguley has been featured in The Age!
Read all about how a life-changing experience changed his perspective, how his collaboration with FareShare began, how he has helped us grow almost 100,000kg of vegetables this year alone, and how his vegetables are so crucial for our free, nutritious meals and the people who need them.
Our work to convert disused land into edible gardens has attracted a lot of attention.
Gardening Australia’s Jane Edmanson reported from our Abbotsford garden in our first growing season. Find out what she made of the experience which included an inspection of vegetable preparation in our kitchen.
The first harvest of Melbourne’s largest planting of sweet potato took place in our kitchen gardens in 2017.
The cultivation of a global staple, rarely seen in Melbourne gardens, is part of an innovative partnership between FareShare and the Burnley Campus of the University of Melbourne.
The low GI, versatile and easy-to- prepare sweet potato is a welcome ingredient for FareShare’s nutritious meals. It also enables FareShare to better support migrant groups and develop more culturally-appropriate recipes. The sweet potatoes are being used in a variety of FareShare dishes including curries and soups.
In a country as big as Australia, it’s hard to understand why you would squash a farm between a rail line and an inner-city parking lot.
But, that’s just what has happened alongside Victoria Park train station in central Melbourne, and for good reason.
Nothing more than a dumping ground for old mattresses and broken bottles 12 months ago, the land is now a 3000 square metre garden supplying vegetables to Abbotsford’s Fareshare kitchen, where one million meals a year are cooked for charities.
