A garden moves
In mid-July 2011, some residents of Hamburg's St. Pauli neighborhood rubbed their eyes in amazement. A convoy of people in rubber boots, carrying boxes, handcarts, wheelbarrows full of soil, seedlings, and young tomato plants in pots, passed them by with gardening tools on their shoulders. At the rear of the procession, a group of more or less sturdy men balanced a transparent plastic greenhouse through the streets. A garden that can move – the idea sounds paradoxical. After all, a patch of green space generally represents a connection to the earth, the growth and decay of nature, a growth and blossoming that intensifies over the years. Here, however, a piece of green space, with all its accessories, had clearly taken on a life of its own.
The impetus came from the international summer festival at Kampnagel, which was themed "Common Goods." This mobile urban vegetable garden was conceived as a community project. Everyone was welcome to sow, plant, water, and ultimately eat the harvest. Unfortunately, a suitable location wasn't available at first. So, the plant cultivation began in the rectory garden of St. Pauli Church. However, the project was eventually able to move into an old parking deck on Grosse Freiheit, where special raised beds made of colorful plastic crates were stacked.
Green concept on Euro pallets
This idea originates from Berlin, where four years ago the filmmaker Robert Shaw
and his friend Marco Clausen founded the Prinzessinnengarten in Kreuzberg at Moritzplatz. In their search for suitable land for a vegetable garden, the two encountered the harsh realities of available urban land. So they developed their gardening concept as a modular system: A standardized Euro pallet supports two layers of four plastic crates each, forming a bed measuring 120 x 80 centimeters. It can be transported to any location using a pallet truck and forklift. This allows the gardeners to be independent of the subsoil, utilize any type of vacant lot, and, if necessary, move on with all their belongings.
