Community Garden Workshop

by David Schoo
Supervisor: Dr. Gesa Lüdecke

Community Gardens are spaces where groups of people grow fresh and healthy vegetables the most local and seasonal way. Even if the harvest of a community garden may not be enough to cover all the vegetable needs of its members around the year, they have a high benefit regarding social, educational, and environmental aspects. Community gardens can become a meeting point for a neighbourhood, where workshops can take place and people come together to exchange knowledge. These gardens are a welcoming place to relax and escape from the hustle and bustle of the city, and moreover, contribute to greener and more sustainable cities. Therefore community gardens as a topic for my final project caught my attention, and I decided to organize a two-day workshop for students from the RCC. The aim was to experience gardening in a practical way that goes beyond the theoretical discourse. Being outside, touching the soil and the plants, observing nature, all this helps to understand theoretical concepts like nutrient cycles or biodiversity and interaction between species. This understanding is the base for gardening in an ecological, sustainable way, which I wanted to get across to participants in this workshop.

We visited three community gardens in Munich, the community garden of the "Ökolgisches Bildungszentrum München" (ÖBZ) in Englschalking, "o'pflanzt is!" in the Olympic Park and my own community garden in Karlsfeld, to have an insight into different types of community gardens. We learned about the history and concept of those gardens and had the possibility to practice gardening and to build a herb spiral and an insect hotel. While working in groups, the participants talked about their experience and interesting conversations opened new perspectives so that everyone was profiting from the different backgrounds of the other participants of the workshop.

Ökologisches Bildungszentrum München (ÖBZ)

The ÖBZ was founded in 2001 as a cooperation between the Münchner Umwelt-Zentrum e.V. and the Münchner Volkshochschule as a center for environmental education. Together with different environmental groups as partners, it forms a network, with the aim to spread ecological ideas. The main topics are ecology and sustainability, environmental politics and the future of society, health and nutrition, nature and art, and the experience of nature in the city.

I had chosen the ÖBZ as the first place to visit in order to get an overview of the topic of community gardens in Munich. Different types of gardens are located on the 6.5 hectares of the ÖBZ such as an experimental garden, a meadow orchard, and a thematic garden about renewable raw materials which shows alternative plants for energetic use but also fibre and dye plants. Furthermore, there are social projects, like a women’s garden and a garden for refugees, which encourage intercultural exchange and integration. All gardens are cultivated by groups of volunteer working gardeners. The movie "Eine andere Welt ist pflanzbar" gives a good insight into the different kinds of gardens of the ÖBZ, their philosophy, and the people behind them.

Frauke Feuss, landscape architect and environmental pedagogue, gave us a short presentation about the ÖBZ and showed us around the different gardens. We had the opportunity to talk to some of the gardeners who were harvesting cherries and had an interesting conversation about the use of renewable raw materials and the resulting land-use competition with food production. In one of the gardens, where many flowers were planted for bees, we could see an insect hotel, which was an inspiring example for the one we were planning to build the next day on our own.

O'pflanzt is!

The community garden "o'pflanzt is!" was founded in 2011 at a 3,300 square meter piece of land next to the Olympic Park. Within a few years, it had become one of the most famous community gardens in Germany. Various workshops were offered and more than a thousand visitors were coming every year.

The gardeners of "o'pflanzt is!" welcomed us very heartily. They had planned to build a herb spiral with us. It was hard physical work to move all the stones and the material, but together as a team, we nearly completed the herb spiral within one afternoon. It was interesting to see how the members of the garden organize themselves and make decisions as a group. Volker, one of the gardeners, was showing us around the garden and we were planting vegetables and took care of the tomatoes. In the evening we were invited to stay for a barbecue and could try delicious self-grown cucumbers and zucchinis. We had time to exchange our thoughts about the situation of urban gardening in Munich and the concept of solidary agriculture, because Patrick Beggan, a gardener of "o'pflanzt is!," is also one of the founders of the project Auergarden in the north of Freising.

Own Community Garden Project

On Sunday the 14 July, we met in my own community garden in Karlsfeld. At first, we were having a walk through the garden while I was explaining what kinds of vegetables are cultivated and how. I talked about the development of the garden over the last years. Three of my gardener colleagues participated in the workshop and supported me, sharing their knowledge of garden practices with the students of the RCC.

Before we started to weed the garden, we were discussing the role of wild herbs, which most people see as problematic weeds that steal nutrients from vegetable plants. But they also have an important benefit for the ecosystem, by providing food and living spaces for insects and soil critters, by loosening the soil with their roots, and by providing shade. Moreover, many wild herbs are edible and most of them have even more vitamins and nutrients than cultured vegetables. Thanks to a course about wild herbs I took this year, I could show the participants which herbs are edible and while weeding we collected the ingredients for a wild herb salad, made out of Chenopodium album, Daucus carota, Plantago major, Plantago lanceolata, Galium mollugo, and Rumex acetosa.

After weeding (only in the direct surroundings of the vegetable plants), we planted different kinds of cabbage and fertilized with composted horse manure, an organic fertilizer that stimulates the activity of soil microorganisms. Finally, we covered the soil with cut grass to protect it from rain erosion and from the sun so that it conserves moisture. All these activities follow the thought of closing the nutrient circle by using renewable local resources, a principle that is applied in biodynamic agriculture and permaculture.

We ate the wild herb salad for lunch, the majority found the salad delicious, even though for some people the taste was unfamiliar and too bitter. After lunch, we started to build insect hotels.

Inspired by the "Volksbegehren Artenvielfalt," the idea was to actively support biodiversity by creating habitats for wild bees and insects. I explained what to look for when building them and how to avoid construction mistakes, like unclean holes, which can hurt the wings of the insects and the use of inadequate materials. One of the participants is working as a carpenter and could pass on his knowledge of working with wood to the other students. Together, we built three insect hotels; one was set up in Karlsfeld, one in my own garden in Moosach, and one at the Massmann student residence.

Organizing the workshop was challenging, especially finding a date that worked for everyone. The bad weather on the first day of the workshop was a reason why many students cancelled the workshop so we had to find another date for the "o'pflanzt is!" visit. Altogether the workload was quite big, so it would have been easier to organize the workshop together with another RCC student, also to profit from input from another discipline.

Some activities needed more time than I expected, like the construction of the insect hotels, so there was not enough time to do all the things I would have liked to do. Nevertheless, I considered the workshop to be an enriching experience, and all participants were very motivated and had fun working together.

For me, it was good practice in organization and coordination. I was able to establish valuable contacts with other community gardens in Munich. And I hope that I could encourage other people to become active in some way, collecting wild herbs, supporting insects, or participating in some of the community gardens in Munich, which you can find on the map of the website "urbane Gärten München."