New Year and Greenhouse dreams

Happy New Year everyone! 

Sorry it's been a bit quiet on the old blogging front but it's most certainly not because nothing's been happening.

On the 12th of January team Adopt A Box sent off an funding application to build a greenhouse down at Institut For (X) at Godsbanen. This greenhouse would give us the necessary space to expand our production of plants as we propagated all the plants at home last year and well, as none of us has moved into a new house with lots more windowsills, we need some more growing space.

The greenhouse was designed by Vitalij and Vilius and is inspired by the Tetris form - the idea being that we can transport individual modules if we want to hold a workshop or get invited somewhere with the plants. We have applied for funding from the Danish fund Byggeriets Ildsjæle - http://byggerietsildsjaele.dk/. We'll hopefully hear from them at the beginning of March, just in time for the sowing season! Here's a little picture of what the greenhouse would look like:

In other news, we have moved Adopt A Box HQ from the Front Runners on Mejlgade to Institut For (X) down by the old freight yard. There is more space to get our fingers dirty down there and we have got a bit of growing space in D House. As everything is pretty freezing outside, there is not much greenery in there at the moment aside from the many many garlics we planted in October and the salad planted at the same time that has not grown in any visible way over the last 3 months.

We have around 100 sprouting garlic cloves of 4 different varieties. They come from a family farm on Sjælland - http://www.hvidløg-vin.dk/

We're having our first meeting after the New Year this afternoon, feel free to join and just ring 27430039 for more details/directions! We're going to have to decide where we want to focus our efforts this year. Whilst we only advertised in the Latin Quarter last year, it might be fun to include other neighbourhoods, maintaining the idea that many boxes in one area will somehow protect each other by making it clear that it's a project and not just a random potato box.

We're also going to have to choose which plants we want to grow, bearing in mind that we can be a little more adventurous this year. We've already got lots of seeds ready to experiment with including Callaloo (a brightly coloured Caribbean spinach) and Cucamelon (a funny mix of cucumber and melon).

I hope there will be some more growth to show off soon! But for now, we can collectively dream about balmier times! See you later, or at some point in the future hopefully.

A delicious and oh-so local feast

Just over two weeks ago we held the grand finale of the Adopt-A-Box project.

We harvested all the goodies that have been grown on the pavements of Mejlgade and Graven in the centre of Aarhus and were surprised at just how much there was above and beneath the soil!

The vegetable that we are (probably) most proud of is a single green pepper, grown by Sander Jensen of SmallGiant Communications. This hardy little fellow made it through rain and shine and has survived 2 months on one of Aarhus' busiest streets - Mejlgade. Behold its glory!

 
All the potato boxes, even the ones that had their leaves ripped off during the summer, had a decent crop. The potatoes were pretty small but perfectly formed and not suffering from any diseases or fungus. We used two different kinds which meant that we both had some bright red and some regular new potatoes.

Beside the potatoes, we had a pretty spectacular crop of Swiss Chard, which has by far been the most visible and the easiest vegetable we have grown - and so rewarding! I have noticed that Swiss Chard is often used in plant boxes and in community gardens and I can only presume that it is because of its size and stunning appearance.

It's not a vegetable that you often find in the supermarket which means that it takes a bit of imagination to decide how to cook it. We used some of the less exposed Swiss Chard (less potential for wee wee) for a salad and thoroughly rinsed and fried up the rest and made it into a pie. The pie, with Swiss Chard, goats cheese and pine nuts tasted absolutely incredible! A bit like a mixture between beetroot and kale.

 

We didn't have much luck with the carrots, which was half expected. They were very difficult to propagate despite the ingenious use of toilet rolls and they were also very difficult to transfer meaning that many of the fragile roots were disturbed in the process of planting them out. We did however manage to get a few beautiful cherubim-like ones which we scrubbed clean and sliced into the flower and leaf salad.

Most of the salad heads were wilted by the time of the harvest. Salad requires frequent, large amounts of watering which has been difficult to provide over the summer, especially seeing as a lot of the box parents went on holiday, next year maybe spinach will be a better alternative. We decided not to eat the few surviving salad heads - we judged it to a bit too risky in terms of drunken encounters...

 

 
With kind donations from Karlbak, OliNico, Skt. Oluf, RisRas, Jeremys Brød, New Age Shop, Arkitektforbundet, Svineriet and SmallGiant Communications we put together a harvest feast and bid the residents of the Latin Quarter welcome to send Adopt-A-Box 2012 off with a bang.

We would like to say a great big thanks to everyone that gave a hand during the harvesting and the feast preparations - we could not have done it without your help! Also a really big thanks to everyone that has been involved during the 3 months that the boxes were on the street. We have learned a lot of things from this year's project and are bursting with ideas for next year! 'Like' our Facebook page to keep up to date with what's happening with Adopt-A-Box!

Harvest tapas!

On this spectacularly rainy day it seems inappropriate to dream of a sun-drenched summer evening with white wine, jazz music and good food but that's exactly what I am going to do.

On Friday the 24th of August we will bring the Adopt-A-Box project to an end. The boxes will have been on the streets for just over 3 months and most of the vegetables will have reached a decent size, decent enough to eat at least!

Himmelhaven and Adopt-A-Box would like you invite YOU to enjoy harvest tapas with us at Mejlgade 37 at 15.00 on the 24th of August. Just bring yourself - we'll provide the food! But we can't guarantee that you'll get full.. Everyone is welcome, whether you've been involved in the project, one of the adoptive parents, live on Mejlgade or simply have seen the boxes and liked them.

Harvesting the vegetables has been the ultimate goal of the project from its conception. We aimed to experiment with the idea of growing edible plants in the city centre and so they need to be eaten to conclude the project - being decorative has been a wonderful bonus!

We hope to see a lot of you there to send Adopt-A-Box off with a bang! Just a few more weeks that the boxes have to survive...

Summer is finally upon us! - week 8

The boxes have now been on the street for 8 whole weeks! How time has flown by.

The box that disappeared for a good four weeks and then returned! Thankyou very much to the person responsible!!

A few of the boxes have been replaced and some of the boxes have received the odd touch-up after encounters with overenthusiastic/clumsy drunks but most of them are thriving and have become really colourful! We never expected the nasturtiums to be grow quite so big!

It has also been very interesting to see how all of the different plants are getting along. The carrots were harder than expected to propagate - root vegetables are not particularly fond of being moved once they have started to sprout. Some of them have been growing quite well but suffer from having been planted very closely because we dared not separate the intertangled roots. If nothing else we'll have a lot of small tender carrots at the end of August, mini-veg were supposed to IN!

You can see the carrots in the middle of the picture - the fluffy looking leaves in between the bright orange nasturtiums.

The potatoes have been thriving pretty much everywhere (unless you count the unfortunate tale of Jeremy's box which was completely emptied, this can hardly be caused by the potatoes themselves though!) Potatoes do most of their growing after they have flowered so they can last for quite some time under the ground, which hopefully means that we will have some great big spuds for the harvest dinner! OliNico's potato foliage was ripped up a couple of days ago but lo and behold there were lots of tiny potatoes under the soil! Very rewarding to see that the last 8 weeks have not been in vain.

The marigolds and cornflowers have also been doing very well - we can thus conclude that urban horticulture is a fairly simple phenomenon and that the real challenge lies in urban agriculture. Finding vegetables and fruits that are appropriate for growing in the urban landscape demands taking the space and the public into consideration. In this regard, the winning vegetable most certainly has to be swiss chard. We received some seeds called "Bright Lights" which produce bright magenta stalks which are both wonderfully decorative, large and tasty!

 

 Whilst it would be wonderful to grow sweetcorn along the pavement, they are far too inviting to cut down due to their height. Likewise things that are visibly edible wouldn't last long at all - strawberries and tomatoes for example. Although if the aim wasn't a communal feast but merely creating edible street art, that wouldn't be a problem at all! Adopt-A-Box is going to be back next year and we have a fairly clean canvas with regards to what we are going to do so stay tuned if you would like to be part of it, or drop us an email!

 Here's a few pictures to wrap up - they explain how the project is going far better than words!