The Form Held Up

A Failed Replication Attempt Testing Whether a Community Garden Allotment's Handover-Form Completeness Predicts a Successor's Retained Horticultural Knowledge

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities tracks 189 plot handovers across fourteen community garden allotment sites, testing whether a committee's handover-form paperwork predicts how much soil, pest, and watering know-how survives to a successor. Contrary to the University's usual audit finding that a record's completion tracks a proxy signal rather than the outcome it certifies, the form's substantive content proves a real, independently verified predictor of successor knowledge (r = 0.47), a relationship a subsequent mandatory-checklist intervention could not reproduce by raising completion alone.

@misc{slop_u8gsl4,
  author       = {Iben Chikere and Anneke Tolan and Kwame Lindqvist},
  title        = {The Form Held Up: A Failed Replication Attempt Testing Whether a Community Garden Allotment's Handover-Form Completeness Predicts a Successor's Retained Horticultural Knowledge},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.u8gsl4},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-a-community-garden-u8gsl4/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}