The Pilgrims learned it, Now NPR and Community Gardens will too.

[anarchir]

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/03/20/148999066/at-the-community-garden-its-community-thats-the-hard-part

You may think that the great historic debate between communism and private property is over.

Well, it's not. Not at your local community garden.

Take, for example, the experience of Campos Community Garden in Manhattan's East Village.

Eight years ago, the garden was decrepit and abandoned. Beverly McClain walked by it all the time, on the way to her daughter's school. And one day, she and a motley group of fellow gardeners decided to revive it.

"It was neighborhood people; it was parents from the school; people from the project across the street who had seen it be a hellhole for way too long," she says.

After they carted in lots of fresh, clean soil, they decided that they were not going to stake out little individual garden plots. They'd work on the whole thing together.

"I liked that people could just show up and join the garden, as opposed to being on a wait list," says McClain.

But there were debates about this over the years. McClain wanted to keep it a community enterprise — as Karl Marx once put it, "From each, according to his ability, to each, according to his need." But others thought there were too many days when it seemed that because everybody owned the garden, nobody really did. And there were days when it seemed that too many people assumed that somebody else would do the work.
 

"It's just really hard when you've got a whole lot of stuff going on and only one or two people have shown up [at the garden], and they're expected to take care of everything," says McClain. "In August, when it's really hot out, it's just kind of hard."

So last year, the Campos Community Garden laid out some boundaries of personal responsibility: Individual plots where people get to plant and pick their very own vegetables. McClain says she has to admit that it's helped.

Of course, if you're an economist like Russell Roberts at George Mason University, you can say that this was completely predictable.

"Collective farming does not have a great historical record," Roberts points out. "Collective farming is probably the main reason why the Soviet Union had about 70 years of bad harvests."

And even if you just talk to veteran community gardeners, many of them will warn you away from communal arrangements.

TL/DR: Community garden tries going communal, fails, goes into private plots instead, win!