living vegan in the city, on the balcony

Living vegan

Project Idea & Imagination

What is the effect that the group would like to trigger with your action?

We want that the people start thinking about their nutrition and their health. Also we want to show them that everybody can live environmentally aware, when they buy their food local or even plant it by themselves.

What are the instruments with which the intended effect is to be achieved?

We want to make a self experiment, where we eat local and vegan for 3 weeks, so we can talk about our own experiences. Also we want to show people how they can plant their own vegetables and fruits and in which season they can plant which plants.

How should the effect be achieved?

With a survey about food habits of people and with an interview with a person who already eats local and plants their vegetables in her own garden by their own.

Who is the target audience?

Everyone that lives in a flat, has a balcony or enough space in their flat for a pot.

Research

Where can you plant your vegetables?

The best way to plant your vegetables, if you don’t have a garden, is to grow it in a pot on your balcony. There are some great solutions if you don’t have that much space on your balcony. You can buy railing pots, which you can easily hang on your railing. There your plants always have fresh air and are in the sun. There are also some growing-tables especially created to grow your vegetables on an if you want to grow your plants in winter you can buy a little greenhouse. In a greenhouse your plants will safely survive winter without getting cold. (pictures below)

urban gardening
places where to plant your vegetables
High bed for planting vegetables
A large table to plant your salad, so no snails eat it

You can also grow your plants indoors in a pot if you have enough space in your flat. For example you can grow some herbs in small pods in your kitchen or in a herb pot. A herb pot is great for indoor farming because it’s an easy handling. It generates artificial sunlight and you just have to plug in the connector for the electricity, fill up the water tank an throw in the capsules filled with seeds so they can grow. (picture 2 below)

 

Which vegetables and herbs can you plant in which season?

Even tough you can grow many vegetables with the options mentioned above, there are also vegetables and fruits that don’t grow in Switzerland because of the climate. Another reason could be that you have to less space for some plants. (For example a pumpkin)

Seasoncalender - Which vegetables should I plant when?
Which vegetables should I plant when?

A list of all the local, economical stores and restaurants:

Restaurants to eat local & vegan:

Stores to buy local food:

Experience on site

Because we don’t have a lot of experience in this subject and how we would have to plant the vegetables and fruits we made an interview with Carmen’s aunt, Angela. She plants her own vegetables and some fruits on her balcony.

Carmen: “Which vegetables do you plant every year?”
Angela: “Normally I plant different herbs, carrots, onions, pumpkins, different salads, potatoes, leeks and radishes”
Carmen: “How many different vegetables do you plant?”
Angela: “about 12 different vegetables and a lot of herbs like chives, parsley, Basil and many more.
Carmen: “Which vegetable does grow the fastest?”
Angela: “It’s definitely the salad. It only takes about nine weeks until you can harvest it.”
Carmen: “Can you also grow fruits on your balcony?”
Angela: “Yes, of course. you can plant different varieties of berries. If you have a enough space you can also grow a plum or apple tree in a pot.
Carmen: “Whats the easiest fruit or vegetable to plant?”
Angela: “I really think that growing a plum tree is very easy to plant if you have enough space.”
Carmen: “What is important that a plant grows?”
Angela: “You have to look that you water your whole garden enough, so the plants and the soil around it don’t dry out. Of course the plants also need a lot of sunshine and the clima has to be right. It is logical that you can’t plant a pineapple or mango in Switzerland because the climate is not the right one but you can’t influence that.”
Carmen: “How much effort do you have to put in?”
Angela: “In summer you have to water your garden everyday and you have to do some garden work at least once a week.”
Carmen: “Do you taste any differences between self planted or buyed food?”
Angela: “Definitely. the taste of the self-planted food is much more taste intensive than the food you buy in the store.”

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Our own experience

To know what living vegan is like, Jennifer decided to live vegan for three weeks and see what the difficulties are. Carmen guided Jennifer through this three weeks because she already lives vegan for a year.

At the beginning it was hard to get used to the new way of eating. During the three weeks it wasn’t even that hard to not eat meat but it was very hard to not drink milk or consume other products of animals.

I would recommend trying to live vegan to everyone because I thinks it’s a very exciting experience.

Survey

For our project we created a survey with different questions about other peoples eating habits. In total 35 people participated in our survey. We were very surprised that so many people look after the environment and eat ecological.

Below you can see the survey results:

 

Diagramm 1
Diagram 1
Diagramm 2
Diagram 2
Diagramm 3
Diagram 3
Diagramm 4
Diagram 4
Diagramm 5
Diagram 5

Reflection

If we are completely honest we had a lot of ups and downs during our project ‘living vegan in the city’.

First, we had trouble finding a project we liked and that had something to do with the subject “city climate & city trees”. Ms Suter has told us to lay our focus on urban gardening but unfortunately an other team already had this subject, so we had to find a way around the others. When we finally had our subject “living vegan in the city” combined with urban gardening we were very happy.

We had a lot of fun creating the survey and analyzing it. Also the interview with Carmen’s aunt was very informative and exciting.
In the end I think Carmen and I were successful because we learned new things about urban gardening and we had fun working at the project.

Jennifer & Carmen

 

Picture sources

  1. Urban gardening (diybook.ch)
  2. raised bed (landi.ch)
  3. season calender (Pinterest.ch)

☷ See the project teams here »
☵ Some words about the contributions »

3 thoughts on “Living vegan

  1. Heyy you two

    I find your topic very interesting and your post is very well structured and well written. The survey and interview were very interesting and informative. I also find the list of restaurants and shopping options very exciting. I will certainly try out a few of these. 🙂
    It would be interesting to know how popular it is in other countries and whether you have as many options there as in Switzerland?

    But really well done and great job!

  2. Dear Jennifer and Carmen
    Your project sounds very interesting! You get a lot of information on the subject of vegan living and on the basis of the interview and the survey you get many opinions.
    Thank you for the great work 🙂
    Kind regards
    Karishma

  3. Hii!
    I think your post was very informative and exciting to read.

    I really liked that Jennifer tried living vegan for 3 weeks because I think it was a big challenge for her.
    The interview was very informative as well.

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