CHENNAI:It will be one year now that I’ve moved to the South of France to a small, picturesque village near the backwaters. The farmers in this area are using chemicals, which have been contaminating the water and the soil for decades.
Because of this, citizens are greatly involved in environmental issues. One of the concrete initiatives is a community garden started by ‘La Fabrique Citoyenne’, called ‘Jardins Partagés’. This concept isn’t actually new, it came to life in the middle of the nineteenth century in European cities, to offer a space for factory workers to grow their own vegetables at a minimal rent.
The movement of community gardens is growing in rural as well as urban areas, where the connection with nature is missing.Not only do the members get to harvest and eat safe produce, it is also helping them interact and bond with different kinds of people and breaking social barriers in cities where many public parks are being converted into community gardens.
Soon after moving, I started growing vegetables at home, but something was missing. I then joined the Jardins Partagés, a community garden which has more than 40 members, and is just a five-minute cycle ride from my house. It is a great place to learn and exchange knowledge. Everyone shares the same love for Mother Earth, and grow plants in a natural way in spite of difficult conditions brough upon by drought, wind, infertile soil and snails. This hectare of land on which the garden is located, used to be an orchard. The soil had become dry and infertile, but in the last three years, it is slowly becoming fertile again due to the efforts of the gardeners working on permaculture beds.
We get to attend regular training sessions on permaculture, sawing, seed saving and more. We also have the opportunity to meet gardeners from other community gardens in the area to learn from each other. During the winter, the vegetation slowed down, so we did some drip irrigation work, planted trees and added some flowering bushes to attract insects. We just finished our first seed-exchange event, and it was a big success. There was a lot to learn, and I ended up with a dozen different types of seeds at the end of the day.
This helps us in becoming autonomous, and we end up avoiding buying produce from outside. Growing your own food is a form of passive resistance in a world ruled by petrochemical/pharmaceutical lobbies.