Share Your Spare Garden | PlotNua Discoveries

Why This Discovery?

The demand is real, and it is close by.

Council allotment waiting lists in Ireland run from one to ten years. In Dublin, more than a million people share fewer than four hundred council plots across four local authorities, and several waiting lists have simply stopped taking names.

Meanwhile a great deal of good, sheltered, south-facing ground sits behind ordinary houses, cut every fortnight and walked across on the way to the bins.

What It Actually Is

A corner of the garden, not the garden.

Someone living nearby grows vegetables on a part of your garden that you agree. You keep the rest, you keep the use of it, and you keep the key to the side gate.

You pick the ground. A strip along one boundary, the far corner, the patch behind the shed. It is a decision, not a negotiation.
You keep walking through it. The garden does not divide.
It ends when you decide it ends. A season, a year, or for as long as it suits you both.
Nobody has to be paid. Money is one option among several.

How involved you want to be

Barely at all. The grower comes at agreed times, does their own work, and you carry on as you were.
Or properly. Plenty of homeowners end up in the beds themselves.

You decide which, and the answer is allowed to change.

The Arrangement

Six things to settle, and you decide all six.

Which part, and how big

Mark it out before anyone starts. A bed or two is a real growing space; most people overestimate how much ground a household needs.

What may be grown

Vegetables and herbs are the usual answer. Say early if you would rather not have a polytunnel or anything permanent.

When they come, and how they get in

Set hours and a route. Side access matters more than anything else here; if the only way in is through the kitchen, choose a different corner.

How long, and how it ends

A growing season is the natural unit. Agree the notice either of you gives, and what happens to plants still in the ground.

Water, and small costs

An outside tap or a water butt matters more than it sounds. Agree who provides compost and timber.

Produce, and payment if any

A share of the harvest is commonest. Some hosts take a seasonal payment, some take help with the rest of the garden, some take neither. Any money you receive is income and is taxable in the normal way.

Before You Agree

Two things worth understanding first.

Keep your access, and you keep your garden. Irish law distinguishes a lease from a licence by exclusive possession. A lease gives the other party the right to exclude you; a licence is permission to use ground you still share, and shared possession means no tenancy arises. Courts look at how an arrangement works rather than what it is called, so the protection is not a form of words — it is continuing to use your own garden.

Tell your insurer. Liability to visitors is standard on an Irish household policy, but Allianz states plainly that visitors to your home for business purposes are not covered on a standard home policy. Someone growing food in your garden, particularly if money changes hands, is not an ordinary social visit. One phone call settles it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions.

How would I find somebody?

Community gardens, local growing groups and council waiting lists are where people already are. Homegrown.ie, an Irish listings pilot launched in 2026, matches hosts with growers directly — it is new, and had recorded no completed match at the time of writing.

Do we need something in writing?

Not legally, but write it down anyway. The six things you agreed, on one page, signed by both. It costs nothing, prevents most disagreements, and puts on record that this is permission to use ground rather than a letting.

Will it damage the garden?

Raised beds sit on top of the ground and can be lifted. Ask for beds rather than dug ground if you want the lawn back, and agree who restores the area.

Does anyone need permission for this?

Growing vegetables in a garden is not development, so no planning question arises. Anything built — a shed, a polytunnel — is treated the same as if you had put it there yourself.

What Everyone Gets

Three people are better off.

The grower gets ground now, rather than in eight years, and within walking distance instead of across the city.
You get a garden that is looked after, more interesting to stand in, and producing something. Most hosts report the vegetables as the smaller half of it.
The road gets a bit more food and a few more conversations. Ground that produces nothing is the only thing anybody loses.

Nothing about this has to continue past one season. But the beds are built by then, the grower knows the ground, and next spring is a much shorter conversation.

Looking Ahead

Where this is going.

Everything above can be arranged today between two people who have found each other. Finding each other is the hard part, and that is where PlotNua is going. None of it exists yet.

Knowing who is nearby. A homeowner has no way of knowing that somebody four streets away has waited six years for a plot. That person has no way of knowing about the lawn.
Starting with your Eircode. Future versions could show you growers looking for space near you, community gardens and food initiatives already running in your area, and the gardening experience sitting on your own road.

This is part of the same long-term idea as our other Discoveries: connecting what a property already has with the people nearby who could use it.