Community Garden, 2012, at Freies Museum
In collaboration with Niels Rieckert from Allmende Kontor, the artist and garden activist Ulrike Solbrig started a community garden in the courtyard of Freies Museum in June 2012. Allmende Kontor is a networking initiative for community garden activities and urban farmers in Berlin that introduced itself with a huge community gardening project in 2011 utilizing parts of the former Tempelhof Airport.
 When Solbrig realized that there was already a long list of people that where waiting to join the gardening activities in Tempelhof but couldn't join due to space constraints, she asked Allmende Kontor to extend to these hopefuls an offer which allowed them to join a workshop for building raised bed boxes at Freies Museum where they could garden for the rest of this season. 16 people turned up and got themseves involved in the arduous construction process. Niels Rieckert from Allmende Kontor provided used palettes, but didn't supply much in the way of practical insight into how to build the boxes. The result was that those who had no experience in such tasks at first seemed lost but then relaxed and went ahead on their own accord. Their attitude evolved, if there wasn’t one proper way to do it, anything that worked was good, they couldn't fail. Some helped build the beds for friends, some stayed to garden, others eventually departed and some that were sorry that they couldn't join the initial building activities, where thankful for the empty box left over for them, a gift from strangers.
Now we are a community garden with 8 active gardeners including one who, unfortunately, is ill at the moment and who we hope, will get better soon!
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