I am a fan of community gardens!! Community gardens are a library of information about how different people, and even ethnicities have found ways to do a variety of different gardening activities and grow food that work for them.
Community gardens provide permaculturists a way of interacting with the environment in a healthy beneficial way even if they only rent a small apartment.
The smartest thing you can possibly do in first getting a plot at a community garden is going to any work days with a plan to work at improving your community as a whole -not _your_ plot- and also talking to other gardeners about how they garden. If you’re an introvert with difficulties in initiating conversation the only thing you have to do with a gardener is simply walk over and say; how did you grow that? It’s not hard :-)
I like raised beds. If you are interested in raised beds, I would suggest putting wire mesh down on the ground in just the footprint of the bed. I don’t like burying sheets of wire mesh in the ground! It’s impossible to get out. If you lay the wire down on top of the ground and then put some stuff over it like described below, if you move the box you can just pick the wire up and move it too.
Place your raised bed frame on top of the wire mesh. That saves you wire mesh material as you are not putting the mesh down in your paths, only where you are planting. Use mesh of a size less than 1 inch. Young gophers, mice, and voles can use the gopher tunnels and then get through 1in mesh. Make sure your wood frame sits on the wire so that things can’t get through around the inside edge. I also like raised beds that are high enough that I don’t have to crawl around on my hands and knees too much but in my opinion it must sit on the ground and not have legs. If it’s too high up in the air it’s just going to have the water sucked out of it by the breeze and sunlight.
Then put old clothes (that are too beat up or stained for Goodwill), cardboard, old mail, house plant trimmings, anything organic. Several inches of his material will also act as a sponge to help keep your water in your raised bed. In 2 years it will pack down and decompose to half an inch or less.
Now put your planting material in. Some people buy a lot of bags of material from Home Depot, but try to make sure that it’s organic. If you buy bags of material try to also take dirt that’s in your area to about 10% of the volume of your box and mix it in. Some of you will think that it is crazy to do this because of weed seeds but the soil will contain bacteria and fungus native and endemic to the micro climate zone and will be a benefit to your garden box. And it’s really easy to pull out a few weeds that have come up from seeds and you don’t have to do it year after year.
I particularly advocate raised beds of this type in areas with gophers as I am against killing them. http://www.puravidaaquatic.com/wordpress/?s=Gopher I much prefer the red-tailed Hawks and the owls and the coyotes and the weasels. Even herons and roadrunners will catch gophers. I like the biodiversity. If you can’t outsmart an animal whose brain is the size of your thumb and you have to kill everything that’s in your way you may have a small problem.
So that’s my two cents for now on community gardening with raised beds.
Oh and one other thing you might look at this information as well
https://extension.uga.edu/publications/detail.html?number=C1027-3&title=Raised%20Beds%20vs.%20In-Ground%20Gardens
The best to you all