Urban Gardening is the horticulture in cities, which is mostly small-scale. Typical examples in the city are courtyard and roof gardens. Urban Gardening has always existed, but the importance of this horticultural use of urban areas is growing. It’s about sustainability, about the vegetables on your doorstep, also about cost reduction and last but not least about the important ecological aspects.

Survey

We have made an online-survey on KoBoToolbox among friends with eleven participants.

Have you ever heard of urban gardening?

80 percent of the respondents already knew what urban gardening is.

Many of them think it’s good for the environment, it gives the city a connection to nature. However, of those surveyed, only two-thirds have their own garden.

If you practice urban gardening, how much time do you spend at it?

Unfortunately, most of them do not practise urban gardening.

In the future, urban gardening could become even more popular, some of the respondents answered. Besides, plants clean the air.

Interview

For our project we made an interview with Georg Eberle, a local man from Zurich who is member of the urban gardening community “Land in Sicht”.

Where do you practice urban gardening?

I practice urban gardening not at home but near by. The land is about one hectare. The land is leased by the city and our community rents it. We are a community garden and everyone does everything. So when you go on vacation the beds are taken care of. We plant different type of vegetables such as tomatos and potatoes. From the things we grow we use a part for our own consumption, but we also sell a part of it on a local market. From the profits we buy tools seeds and soil.

How could people be motivated to take up urban gardening?

If you have your own balcony, you could plant vegetables in pots. Try growing them, like tomatoes or cucumbers. After a while, you also have to make sure that the plants get enough sun and a little fertiliser.

How do you think urban gardening will be realised in Switzerland?

The goal is to work without machines as much as possible. Unused areas for cultivation could be roofs. Working in a team would be an advantage, you can take turns in the work.

What are people’s motives for running a garden?

An important reason could be a healthy diet. Besides that, a small garden is also a habitat for insects. Suddenly you are in the middle of the subject of “nature” and start to deal with it. You harvest your own vegetables.

Do you believe in a future trend movement?

A trend movement could well emerge in the future. The protection of the environment is already an important issue today. Allotment gardens are already very popular today.

Location: Click here (Google Maps)
360° view (Street View)

Conclusion

If we compare our knowledge since the beginning, we can already see an improvement. However, our thoughts on the definition of urban gardening were pretty much the same as they actually are. We also realised what role urban gardening plays in cities. Moreover, it’s not only good for nature and the climate, also for the people who practise it, because small communities often practise urban gardening as a hobby or as a break from the stress of everyday life in the big cities. The best thing in our project was definitely the Interview with Georg Eberle, it was very interesting to ask him our questions and to compare our opinions. We found it difficult to find good questions for the interview, but in the end we found some.

Simon & Luca

Sources

Urban gardening community (Landahoy.ch)
Plant research (Pflanzenforschung.de)
Urban gardening (Wikipedia.de)

Pictures:

Header Image (Unsplash.com)
Image – Plant in a Hand (Pexels.com)

 

Other posts on dontwastmy.energy

Green Roofs – Licely green instead of dull gravel
Cool city-climate
Organic waste
Living vegan
Urban gardening
Neophytes – harmless or a hazard?

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