„What would I do, if the earth was in my hands?“ A little piece of soil “is in my hands”, a garden of 1500 square meters. Hundreds of various plants are growing there, mainly shrubs, berry bushes and herbs, and you can find two ponds. We grow vegetables in one part of our garden. The crop is often so large that we can share a lot of it with our neighbours or the local school-kitchen. The garden is very naturally grown, which means many plants choose their place on their own and we do not clear away every “weed” so that there are some very wild areas too. That way the garden provides a precious natural habitat for a variety of animals (birds, insects, aquatic animals, hedgehogs, …), extra nesting aids are provided too. In 2018 our garden was winner of our village-contest “species-rich gardens 2018”.
My favourite flowers are the “Winterlinge”, Eranthis hyemalis, which are the first bloomers already in January. When we sold my mothers house I dug out thousands of them and moved them to my place. As soon as the sun comes out neighbour Frank’s bees come over and the whole garden is humming.
There are glass rose balls all over the garden. For the foto shooting I took all of them from their rods, gave them an extra cleaning and arranged them together with Ronnie’s globe.
A striped snail (Cepaea) is hiking around the world:
During the summer we keep collecting seeds from all plants. This year we collected a lot of poppy seeds (Papaver rhoeas) and Akelei seeds (Aquilegia) in various colours. We give them away to neighbours and friends, but also spread them on the waysides (“guerrilla gardening”) to make our neighbourhood more colourful to give a nice surprise to everyone passing by and to provide new food for birds and insects.