Where it all started, the allotment garden

Martin Lette, father of Khymo and important helper of GoF, told us allotment plots were available near the city of Weesp where we were living at that time and he already started on his plot. At that moment an idea arrived in our minds: what if we would together with our friends rent a piece of land for ourselves? We had talked about the problem of not having a place for ourselves where we could come together without having to ask our parents each time if friends could come over. 

Having a garden could bring us a lot of joy, we thought. I had just finished a study Eco and Wildlife where I did an internship on a permaculture farm in Belgium and this had made a big impression on me. I had seen that people can find a lot of happiness when gardening and growing their own food so close to nature. If we would share the work it would probably not even be that much effort, we thought. We would also share the cost and this was a joke if you would compare it to the rent of a house. We thought the rents were ridiculously high and the rents only went up since that day.

Back to the garden 

One of our friends immediately stepped away from the project but it turned out he never really wanted to join in the first place. My girlfriend Amber did want to join our garden and was very happy to get her hands in the dirt. It was already late in the growing season when we could start gardening but the six of us started in good faith and we were looking forward to it. That year I started working at the local greenhouse and the first growing season was almost over and my generous employer gifted us a whole bunch of plants that we could plant right away. It was really great to see all these plants mature in the following years, like a small fig branch grew into a super healthy fig tree and many more. Many days and summer nights were spent at the garden, we felt truly free to do whatever we wanted. “Let’s build a pergola” Sander said, and we did, we continued with that spirit and later we would build a lot more, like our garden house. Sander was becoming a successful graphic designer and was happy to use his creativity in the physical world. Unfortunately the gardening association did not like all of our builds and we had to take some of them down. We also tried some permaculture-techniques, like planting wormwood to help with its lemon-like smell against pests. We also built a raised bed because that’s what they did in Belgium. We still had a lot to learn.

Harvesting Joy

We did not have a lot of yield that year but wow, we always felt so good after a day of work at the garden. We enjoyed planning what to plant where and what kind of structures we could build to help the plants. The state of the world was always a popular subject in our group and we had our concerns about the natural world, where did we fit in? How could we help make positive change? We were talking about it a lot: what if we could live together like this and grow our own food in harmony with our environment, wouldn’t that be perfect? 

And I think this is where the little seed of “the Garden of Freedom” was planted. 

The search

It still took a lot of time before the little seed grew into a larger idea, meanwhile Amber and I rescued our dog from Greece , traveled to Portugal to work at an olive farm. A year later we would go to Spain with three campervans to look around for land where we could eventually start a permaculture farm. That search continued in France last year and was successful. We visited 10 potential sites to start farming and also visited two places where they were doing the things we wanted to do and learned a lot. It was a great journey and we will go deeper into it in a future article. I hope you enjoyed this one and catch you later. 

Lots of love, Tijn.