Hadiqaa – Education City Micro-Farm community garden (Doha, Qatar)
Doha, Qatar · Operator: Hadiqaa (Vicky Damalou, Sara Khorasani)
Overview
A community garden run at the Micro-Farm inside Education City, Doha, where residents can register for a bed and grow their own food. The name Hadiqaa (حديقة) is Arabic for "garden". To make growing possible in a Gulf climate that nears 50°C in summer, it runs a year-round programme of workshops on soil, sowing, composting and winter vegetables, treating growing skills themselves as a shared asset.
Citizen participation
Residents who register take a bed and grow seasonal vegetables, herbs and flowers. Individuals, families and corporate groups garden side by side, sharing watering and upkeep along with knowledge and plants. People without a bed can join as volunteers supporting garden operations, and there is a designated "leader" role for those who take charge of managing a garden. Day-to-day coordination runs through a WhatsApp group.
Operating model
Hadiqaa began in 2017 as a small gardening community on Facebook, sharing how to grow food in a desert climate, and grew from there into running actual gardens. It now operates as an organisation registered in both Australia and Qatar, funded through membership access to garden beds and paid workshops (QR 150–300 per session). It also sets up the same kind of garden for companies as a CSR and team-building offer.
Impact
Gulf states import most of their food and have little tradition of household food growing. The significance here lies in providing both a place for residents to grow and a structured course of workshops through which to learn how. The same garden model has been replicated at a school and a shopping centre, so it works less as a single garden than as a mechanism for adding gardens across the city.
Crops
- vegetables
- herbs
- flowers
- microgreens
Scale
Community garden beds plus a covered teaching space at the Education City Micro-Farm, Doha; exact area not published
Sources（3）
This entry is compiled from the public sources, official sites and research below.
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