Life is a process and so is the development of a new project. The community garden in Luxemburg City is flourishing, thanks to a group of people who put a lot of efforts, sweat and love in the garden so that the first crop can be admired right now.

In a short period of time from January to now, decisions had to be made and the group process had to move on because the garden has its special lifetime and needs to be done on a precise moment in time otherwise you miss the year. If you listen carefully and if you are open, the garden tells you its own story and what needs to be done. Have we listened carefully? We hope so and here comes the short story of my garden, your garden, our garden. The garden at the beginning of the year in wintertime….

Our first visit to the garden in January 2012. Lots of ideas arise and the first steps of design are discussed, and many meetings follow (below one at Konrad’s)… The design works start at the beginning of March… Our hands start doing things, learning along the way… Two half-circle raised beds with rock boundaries, as well as two multi-layered beds with branches, leaves, compost and earth. We also build a huge Hügelbeet! Weekends spent happily at the garden…

On 7th April, apprentice gardeners meet up with Katy to work on a design for the garden. Many of us start sowing seeds of tomatoes, pumpkin, courgette and many other things on their balconies to bring the seedlings to the garden later on. On 21st April we get some visitors… Richard and Michelle who are both permaculture teachers and their daughter Grace. They are currently travelling the world to document low-impact living projects…

May 2012. A good functioning of the community garden centres on the values of solidarity, tolerance and conviviality. For Labour Day, we organised a communal gathering full of inspiring conversation and good humour. We also planted four varieties of potatoes with the cardboard and straw technique. In our community garden there are no boundaries or allotment for individual people.  All important design decisions are taken communally by all participants. On 21st May, François the architect installed pean poles for climber beans that we received from Steve Schwartz.

June 2012. The multilayered Hügelbeet and the raised beds are very fertile grounds for our vegetables and require but little attention. They have developed quite fine, and our vegetables like it there. On the pictures you will see the layered bed with salads, cabbage, tomatoes and tagetes.

The Community garden at the beginning of the summer 2012… Tania and Malika from the Natural History museum made an inventory of biodiversity and documented no less than 37 species of wild flowers. Some flowers in the garden are depicted below: calendula, Nigelle de Damas, Phacelia, cornflowers, camomile…

Here is a list of wild plants found in the garden recently; there are 37 so far and probably more. Sorry only scientific names in latin! You may look them up yourselves in wikipedia and get nice pictures too…

Fields near paths:
- Conyza canadensis ou Solidago canadensis (wait for flowers for determination)
- Medicago lupulina
- Hieracium aurantiacum
- Aster x salignus
- Sonchus asper
- Sonchus oleraceus
- Capsella bursa-pastoralis
- Sedum acre
- Tripleurospermum maritimum
- Myosotis sylvatica
- Trifolium album
- Plantago lanceolata
- Verbascum densiflorum (perhaps V. phlomoides)
- Trifolium repens
- Senecio jacobaea
- Senecio vulgaris
- Achillea millefolium
- Vicia hirsuta
- Senecio vulgaris
- Convulvulus arvensis
- Geum urbanum
- Bromus sterilis
- Geranium sp (wait for flowers for determination)
- Centaurea jacea
- Centaurea cyanus (bleuet; corn flower)
- Malva moschata
- Tragopogon pratense
(Raised bed:)
- Stellaria graminea
- Anagallis arvensis
- Papaver rhoeas (coqueliquot; poppy flower)
- Lapsana communis
- Lamium purpureum
- Lolium perenne
- Myosotis sylvatica
- Poa trivialis
- Mercurialis perennis