Since June we are Preparing our own Gardening Projects:

We have been examining the reactions of our own kiez communities in Lichtenberg and Wilmersdorf. Trying to understand how people react to guerilla type gardening projects and in the end how they materialize in our Kiez (neighborhood).

Jule will be hijacking one of those “macgyver” garden beds. It seems like someone (sadly not so much visible in the pictures) has put some painted pavement stones around the tree squares. First Picture was taken on the 2nd of June.The second Picture was taken on 7th of July.

I took pictures of the already existing plants there and ran them through google lense. The outcome was:

There is a lot of red clover,which provides enough nutrition for bees and some seedlings of celandine poppy. So since there are 2 of those “Do it yourself garden beds”, I decided to plant some flowers on one garden bed (which is not in the pics right now) that attract butterflies and since the other one (in this picture) already has some flowers that attract bees,some additional greens.

Since the Weather was rather unpredictable I decided to pre grow them on the balcony. Left side was taken on the 5th of June, the right side was taken on 8th of June. In addition to the “wild flower” mix, I’ve decided to pre grow sun flowers.

As you can see, all of them got very sunburned despite watering everyday and tried to keep them away from too much sunlight. The 4th batch by now sadly is dead.

Since I’ve had some additional soil I decided to bring some “almost dead” potatoes (yes sorry i forgot i had them) back to life, just to have something to show as progress.

In the sense of our original plan to observe the reaction from the neighborhood i have nothing to show off yet, but on my scout missions for the “perfect space” i’ve noticed,that in this neighborhood people do seem to care about ways to create beauty (sometimes in unusual ways) in front of their homes, within a dense housing situation:

I will let you know what will be the reactions (or if there are any) when I finally get to set the green little oxygene factories out into their natural habitat.

Georg has been building a small raised bed by his own front door with help of a friend from my old home town of Leipzig.

Day one of building a own raised bed from a Europalette was kinda hard as we only had simple tools to work with.

We were detaching the Pallet parts and afterwards reattaching the parts back together. It took far longer than expected.

Already on the first day we garnered attention from my house community. Getting books and wooden material to work with.

Day Two of building an own raised bed we continued to work towards finishing our Project.

Also on day two the Project’s sight caused attention by walkers and bystanders asking questions about what we were doing.

All were positive or at least neutral about my project idea. day one and day two were on 04. and 07. of June

Day three was about finishing the Project.
It was strongly delayed due to Corona and other Illnesses caused by a Festival.

I was in need of additional wood, so I bought it at a local Bauhaus store together with the earth (120l of earth + 3 Parts of Wood each 1m long) for abou 21€.

After finishing the raised bed it was great to see the first reactions of community members and dwellers of my street in the Kiez (more in the Presentation on Wednesday) With the new raised bed what was intended was not only to make the street more beautiful but also to protect the trees with their huge roots from cars parking on their roots. How this will end up is still to be questioned.

In the raised bed there is now a variety of plants with some additions to the three plants planted in the beginning. The first three plants were two Tomatoes and one Lavendel. Additions were not only made by me but also by people I don’t know. Which is great to see that the garden is also used by others.