GreenThumb Site Visits: NYC Community Garden Inspections

GreenThumb provides programming and material support to over 550 community gardens in New York City. NYC Parks GreenThumb staff conduct annual site visits to observe and record quantitative and qualitative information on garden operations, maintenance, and physical features. This data is used to inform maintenance needs, plan support, and ensure compliance with license agreements and regulations.

Use Cases

• Assessing urban agricultural infrastructure using columns like Greenhouse, Aquaponics, and CompostSystem.
• Evaluating community garden amenities and safety features using columns like HydrantOnGardenSide, TotalFenceLength, and ParksSign.
• Analyzing food production and biodiversity in gardens using columns like Food, FruitTrees, NonFoodPlants, and Chickens.
• Measuring environmental sustainability features using columns like RainGallons, SolarPanels, and Pond.
• Tracking garden programming and communal use using columns like CSApickup, OpenLawnOrCommunalArea, and Murals.

Strengths

• Covers a specific, large-scale program supporting over 550 community gardens.
• Contains detailed, structured observations from annual site visits by NYC Parks staff.
• Columns suggest a wide range of recorded features, from infrastructure to programming.

Limitations

• Key metadata like row count, license, and author are missing or listed as 'unknown' across all sources.
• The 'last updated' date is listed as a future date (2026-05-18), which is a conflict and suggests potential data entry error.
• The datagov platform entry lacks column information, indicating incomplete metadata aggregation.

Provenance

Source

NYC Parks GreenThumb program.

Collection Method

Annual site visits by NYC Parks GreenThumb staff to observe and record information.

Freshness

Last updated dates conflict; one source lists 2026-05-18 (a future date), another lists 2026-03-22.

Geography

New York City, specifically community gardens under NYC Parks jurisdiction.