Biogarten

in eschewing all attempts to apologize for or explain my long absence from blogging, i'll start right into my current duesseldorf excitement:

i've finally started volunteering at the 'Biogarten' (organic garden) in the big city park near my house.

it's a beautiful, peaceful sanctuary set up as a practical grounds on which to run gardening courses for the 'volkshochschule' - the folks' high school, or college. so they offer courses on medicinal herbs and drying herbs and composting and all kinds of stuff. plus they take on volunteers who want to learn how to grow stuff by doing, get stuck in up to the elbows in dirt and physical labour, be a part of the community and share in the fruits of our communal labour.

above you can see some of the gorgeous 'fruits' i brought home last week!!

i've been loving it. the first saturday i helped them build up this massive compost configuration of branches, dirt and green stuff, which is strategially layered to collapse in on itself and rot evenly. they use that to feed the rest of the garden, and grow squash over the heaps still in process. yesterday i helped create a 'death zone' free of plants (klaus, my coworker's term for it: he compared it to the no-go zone between east and west germany before the wall fell) in order to maintain friendly relations with the small gardens society next door, which kept complaining of uninvited ivy and acorns and random other plants invading their pristine, golf-course-esque lawns and beds. hee hee! we had fun thrashing through the bush, though. he's a 70 year old retired pharmacist who loves gardens and seems to know quite a lot about the medicinal herbs.

after our 10-1 session of work, we all congregate around the big outdoor table and drink coffee and some treats someone has brought: fresh baked seed bread with butter and jams made from garden berries, or yesterday 2 different kinds of plum cake with garden plums and whipping cream. mmmm, mm. here is a close up of some great sunflower seed bread - you can't beat german bread - baked by hildegard.



i get to practice my german quite a bit and am getting to know the other folks. they seem like a really sprightly bunch of characters, full of humour, and quite relaxed. ie, i get to call them all, even the 'old farts' ;-), 'du' instead of the formal german 'Sie'. and THEN after the end of the Kaffee und Kuchen session, we all get to try some of the stuff that has been grown right there and picked that day. can you feel my excitement?! so far i have had the pleasure of: zucchini green and yellow, yellow beans, potoatos, mangold (chard?), chives, cucumber, apples. they produce all kinds of things in this garden: they also have bright red, fuzzy amaranth plants which i have never seen before, a fig tree, a peach tree, 2 types of plums (one is really small, yellow, called mirabellle or something), an asian apple/pear, raspberries, etc.

here's a weblink with a few other photos and an article on a plant exchange for those of you who want to practice your german! i'll endeavour to get some of my own photos up here soon.


http://www.wdr.de/tv/service/heim/inhalt/20030711/b_2.phtml