Knowledge Transfer through School Projects, Neighborhood Gardening and Plant Health Clinics
The percentage of the world's population living in cities increases drastically, year by year. Most citizen loose the contact to the basis of live: food production and what it means to grow a healthy plant. Three different strategies to transfer knowledge in crop plant growing and protection to non-farmers were presented in this evening workshop.
José Alberto Caram de Souza Dias, a virologist from Brazil, explained us lively how he came to the ‘Planting Potato With Science’ project. In Brazil, there is a phrase “Go planting a potato” which lead to the humorous project name. The addition ‘with science’ is especially important, because in this school project pupils get also in contact with scientific work for the first time. José’s pupils have to observe and care for five potato plants, where four are healthy and one is infected with potato virus (PYNTN). They can observe the growth of the plants and the disease spreading due to transmittance by aphids. The participants of the IPPC workshop liked this school project very much and thought also about establishing similar projects in their home countries.

Mahendra Pratap Sivastava told the audience about the idea of Plant Health Clinics (PHC) to help non-professional farmers. He insists that there are clinics for ill human beings and animals/pets, why should it not be possible to have free (!) PHCs, where diseased plants would be examined and instructions how to handle this disease would be provided.
Urban gardens offer also a great possibility for citizens to stay in touch with the nature and the basis of life. Vanessa Hörmann from Berlin presented us the community garden “Prachttomate” (glory tomato) that she and her friends established five years ago. The joint growing of crops teaches people on the one hand how healthy food is produced and one the other hand facilitates the community building which is especially important in big and anonymous cities.

Urban Gardening – Community building, knowledge transfer and quality aspects
At the Friday excursion, nine participants visited two urban gardens in Berlin. The main aspect was the community building and the plants in urban gardens as a medium therefore. Additionally, we discussed the problems which are related to the production of vegetables and fruits in urban areas, e.g. the problems of residues of pollutants. As this was an excursion of the International Plant Protection Congress, we took a look on the phytopathological situation in those urban gardens and some practical advices were exchanged from one garden expert to another.

The first stop was the community garden “Prachttomate” (glory tomato) in Berlin-Neukoelln. “Prachttomate” gave us a nice insight into urban gardening. It showed us that it is possible to live in a big city and still have a nice garden producing own food, even though the main idea of such a garden is not actually the food production but more the social aspect. Small gardens as “Prachttomate” give city people the possibility to spend some relaxing time in “artificial” nature, and communicate with others away from the daily routine and stress. It offers a reminder of how life outside of a city could be and encourages cooperation between all participants because the work cannot be done by a single person but requires team work. “Prachttomate” is free for everyone to join and to work with the garden-community at two gardening times a week. In special projects post-drug addicts, teenager or kids from the neighborhood learn about gardening, botany and bees that are also kept in the garden. The whole garden is a nice and comfy place with possibilities to lay down or even party and barbecue there. It is decorated in a very creative but simple manner so that everyone feels welcome.

After visiting „Prachttomate“, we went to another urban garden called „Prinzessinnengärten“. We learned that this second garden resembles in general the idea of switching from our daily routine, concerning consumption and environmental pollution, to a more nature oriented way of living. The idea of the garden is to make city-people more familiar with nature by showing not only adults but also kids different herbs, many kinds of common and exotic vegetables in different unfamiliar colors and shapes (such as tomatoes) as well as exotic fruits from all over the world to illustrate the high diversity of crop plants which is not represented in our supermarkets.

Another aim of the garden is to open people’s eyes to alternatives to our daily luxury with the aim to pass into a more “green life”. For that, people have the possibility to buy healthy food and drinks in the gastronomy, to help gardening and buy the harvested food or young plants for their own garden. In addition, a bike workshop is provided, which is accessible to everyone who wants to fix his or her own bike and learn how to fix it by themselves. Even a small house was being built by hand and with natural material in the garden, which was really impressive to see.

At the end of our visit we walked around in the garden und picked herbs in order to cook our lunch in a small cozy kitchen in the middle of the garden. We had noodles with our freshly made pesto. One thing is for sure: it was informative, fun and delicious!

Pictures and text by Vanessa Hörmann, Rania Saleh and Marlene Leucker