Wintergartenlabor Meetups

I would like to share one of the first activity I've done during my EVS in Trial&Error e. V. It was great experience and helped me to get to know Berlin's gardening, to create a network and first of all to meet great people.

As a beginner culture practitioner and urban gardener gaining experience in projects with local community, Berlin was an obvious place to hold my volunteering. After long research finally I found Kulturlabor Trial&Error that is hosting volunteers for the project "Green practices in urban communities." Great catch! I thought I will come and straight away I will make my hands dirty and get to know with local community. It happened that I started my volunteer work at the end of September – during a slow out from the horticultural season, where evenings are not so long and warm and people prefer to spend time in cafés or at home. However, in October there was still quite lot of work to do in our community garden. In fact the energy to work slowly fall into winter sleep.

Of course, in addition to the typical gardening activities in my organization, there were a plenty of other things to do - recycling workshops in kindergarten and refugee shelter, office work, helping in ongoing activities, fundraising etc. Nevertheless, I felt that I live in this wonderful city - center of grassroots urban and gardening movements and I can't fulfill myself and I'm missing something important. As they say “If Mohammad will not go to the mountain, the mountain must come to Mohammad. So, together with Ewen – a soul mate, gardening enthusiast and the volunteer, and Ruta – our mentor, we decided to set up Wintergartenlabor - Garden Activist Meetings in Kulturlabor Trial & Error. The main idea behind this was to organize open meetings and presentations with people from different community gardens in Berlin and discuss about garden movement in the city, participation, permaculture and gentrification.

Couple of questions kept urging the minds – how to continue our community garden? How to engage the neighbourhood? Are we gentrifying the area? Are we growing a community to deal with it is the best possible way? What to grow next season and how? And the most urgent topic was how to get to know with other Berlin activists and gardeners during the winter.

In December we developed the idea, program and ways of promotion. We made small campaign with flayers, posters and blog posts. „We invites you to get together in the dark winter evenings for Wintergartenlabor to share and learn more – about each other, about plants, gardening in Richardkiez, urban gardening opportunities and challenges!” In January was kick off meeting Wintergartenlabor #1 with Gudrun Walesh about community gardens in Germany. Gudrun is quite well known person in the field of green spaces for participation since 1999. For us, beginner activists it was an important meeting and honor to host Gudrun on first Wintergartenlabor. On the next Wintergartenlabor meetings we were hosting among others: Himmelbeet and Prachttomate community gardens, journalist and garden activists Elisabeth Meyer-Renschhausen, Claudia form Spreeacker Garden. Beside meetings and presentations we organized a compost workshops and seed exchanges. Wintergartenlabor became a place for discussions, presentations from other experienced urban gardeners and making plans for the new gardening season in Richardkiez.

What we achieved through this meet ups? We invited people to join the Wintergartenlabor to learn from each other, neighbours and other urban gardeners, researchers and activists. The first 2 months we focused on ideas, concepts and social aspects of gardening. Then spring came and we got our hands dirty again and we had much more experience with planting, composting, building and other handy skills. I also showed myself that it isn't worth to wait for the new season. It is worth taking matters into your own hands. Beside this I can tell that now I feel I'm a part of Berlin gardening movement.