Production Landscapes: ‘Grow your own’
Workshop flow notes
Focus: The focus of our workshop is to investigate creative methodology for strengthening our relationship with what we eat, and how we grow food in the city? What we grow? The seminar and workshop will be in three parts; intro, workshop and conclusions.
Develop relationship with what we eat, what how we grow, and how we live
PART 1- introduction
- Part A. Team intro:
Introduction to facilitators (Anna-Maria,Johan,Lina), and students organizing the workshop.(Ameli, Elfrida) Introduce the flow of the workshop and aim of workshop
- Part B. Short Presentations
3 presentations from each (Anna-Maria,Johan,Lina), roughly 10 minutes each as an introduction to the concepts. Our Topics: Anna-Maria – Food and the city Introduction to resilient cities. Illustrated through foodprints and norra djugarden. Introduction to toolkit designed in last year and use of it for planning discussions Lina - Introduction about permaculture principles and different systems. Examples from FoAM workshops, projects from the past. Foraging. Typologies etc. * Johan – Different methods for growing indoor outdoor plants. Considerations for creative design solutions. Ie; show different examples (ie loop? Vertical garden in kitchens)*
alnarp_presentation_110612.pdf
PART 2-workshop
Break up into 3 groups(approx.10pl per group)
Creative methodologies for relationship between Food, Plants & Environment (eat-grow-live): 3 Sections outline FOOD (plate) - Eat as FOOD/ personal, local, seasonal, cultural PLANTS (plant) - Growth as Plants/ indoor, outdoor, seasonal, local ENVIRONMENT(place) - Living as Environment/ home, indoor, outdoor
Through hands-on suggestions and creative alternatives, we can begin to see what is our inherent relationship to the way food arrives on our plates daily in the city. Making the concept accessible, desirable, fun, educative, and worthwhile to plant where one lives. And, begin to understand the discourse around what are the main challenges presently and in the future on how we feed our cities.
- Part A. FOOD – Plate: Set the perspective from the Personal place - individual
How can we develop a relationship with what YOU eat.
- choose your dish, which include from 3-4 vegetables, 2-3 spices. (choose it before the workshop) (think about local edible plants, try to choose as much local vegetables as you can)
- write all vegetables on walls / choose repetitive and majority
- every group chooses from the list max10 plants, which are compatible with plant guilds and companion planting.
- Part B. PLANTS – Plant: Collecting, deciding, mapping
To develop a food mandala inspired by Nordic biotopes and seasons. A mapping of the seasons in order to communicate to a wider urban audience what one can grow when. The term ‘Food Mandala’ was first used by a Japanese Farmer called Fukuoka in his book ‘One straw Revolution’.
TASK (mandala mapping) * everyone will write down the names of plants on the paper as a mind map. 10min * Make a plant list, in Latin, Swedish and English – companion planting * (we will select about 5 to 7 different plants and we will looks at plant guild structure to match the seven level combinations, to get as close as possible) * look at plant origins (20min) – parallel to all phases / look where they come from
1. compatible with each other? 2. native/local? Seasonal?
* (we should encourage each group to share the tasks, in order to get as much information about plants as you can) This part includes research (internet and books), analysis, (approx. 1h) Students receive an ‘empty ruler’ system to fill in with their guiding frameworks (they create their own toolkit)
a. vegetable / herb – local b. companion plant c. seven level combination
media: visual representation – draw, paint
QUESTIONS; Some questions along the way to ponder; (‘food for thought’) - What are you eating and growing habits? - What are your enjoyments and/or traditions, (cultural, social, habitual,) Look at what do you like to eat? What do you eat? What do you want to change about your habits? - Nutrients; kilojoules (something about energy and making that correlation) - List the different ingredients behind this dish - Think intuitively where they come from, (seasonally, geographically, etc) * Plant input in to local ecosystems? * Growth methods and needs? * The light travel during the day time and how it effects the light inside the place you want to build structure? * Think about roots of the plants and how much space does it need in order to grow? * Would the selected plants somehow reflects the permaculture methods? * Is it possible to adjust it to, lets say, edible plant guild? * Would that make sense and why? Outdoor to indoor * How could we do it, by using following methods: 1)Vertical gardening. 2)Hydroponic or and aroponik system. 3)Potplanting.
Growing typologies- making a plant guild, understanding the types like permaculture, companion growing, forest gardening, agro-forestry etc? (explain principles) Is there difference between plant guild and companion planting? Explain the differences And how it relates to different growing methods? Permaculture, organic etc Different ways of selecting plant combinations:
Permaculture guilds are groups of organisms - plants, animals, fungi, bacteria etc. - which work particularly well together. These can be those observed in nature such as the White Oak guild which centers on the White Oak tree and includes 10 other plants. Native communities can be adapted by substitution of plants more suitable for human use. The Three Sisters of maize, squash and beans is a well known guild. The British National Vegetation Classification provides a comprehensive list of plant communities in the UK. Guilds can be thought of as an extension of companion planting.
Companion planting is the planting of different crops in proximity (in gardening and agriculture), on the theory that they assist each other in nutrient uptake, pest control, pollination, and other factors necessary to increasing crop productivity.Companion planting is used by farmers and gardeners in both industrialized and developing countries for many reasons. Many of the modern principles of companion planting were present many centuries ago in cottage gardens in England and Home gardens in Asia. For farmers using an integrated pest management system, increased yield and/or reduction of pesticides is the goal[citation needed].For gardeners, the combinations of plants also make for a more varied, attractive vegetable garden, as well as allowing more productive use of space. Companion planting is considered to be a form of polyculture.(Polyculture is agriculture using multiple crops in the same space, in imitation of the diversity of natural ecosystems, and avoiding large stands of single crops, or monoculture. It includes crop rotation, multi-cropping, intercropping, companion planting, beneficial weeds, and alley cropping.)
Forest gardening (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_gardening) is a food production and land management system based on woodland ecosystems, but substituting trees (such as fruit or nut trees), bushes, shrubs, herbs and vegetables which have yields directly useful to humans. Making use of companion planting, these can be intermixed to grow on multiple levels in the same area, as do the plants in a forest.
Part C. ENVIRONMENT – Place: Construction; building their gardens - group Design the place where you will plant them Framework – indoor, Nordic (local + seasonal), DIY Plant choice: How the choice for the plants relates to your house environment and the structure of plant growing systems?
TASK * Make a map or sketch (make a collage) of the combinations of different plants (plant mandala), how would it look aesthetics inside your living place
PART 3- conclusion Coming together at end of day to discuss workshops and conclusions
- Part A. Presentation by students
- summary from the different groups and their ideas
- Part B. Open Dialogue / open questions
- dialogue and feedback from the students experience - what were the main challenges? - What did we learn?
- Part C. learning curves
- whats needed next? Next steps in their ‘gardens’? - what is the way forward and how to gather this information into a small brochure. - who and how to present this the next day at the conference (13 april) - what can be interesting to people next day about a workshop like this?
OUTCOME: Grasp the interconnectedness and complexity Inter-dependency of community to what we eat ‘strength in whole, rather than detail plant community as inspiration for our communities (biomimicry)
nik