Changes at "Cover Crops for wintering, resilience and neighboring ecosystems"
Title (English)
- +Cover Crops for wintering, resilience and neighboring ecosystems
Body (English)
- +Summary of the challenge
- +Cover crops and intentional increases in plant diversity can be great allies on the road to resilience. But the rural/urban divide, industrial/traditional framing gaps and the cost/profit pressures have created a fragmented and disconnected knowledge space, where small scale farmers and new amateur ones rely heavily on the internet and social media for information and viral, one-size-fit-all solutions. This leads to a lack of diversity, personalization or complete ignorance on the subject of cover crops.
- +Detailed description
- +As I’m writing this, my neighbor, a retired policeman, living in the countryside, is mowing his yard for the 6th time this year. Meanwhile myself, an IT engineer turned climate activist and moved to the countryside, and Mihai, an established artist, recent gardener at an urban kindergarten, are sharing our concerns about the huge cracks in the ground, our reluctance to use drinking water in the garden, now that we ran out of collected rainwater, and whether or not we should mulch this year, out of fear of snails and slugs. All three of us are acting based on the current downpour of information and expectations our globally connected world is subjecting us to. Since we don’t have gardeners for neighbors and due to the individualistic nature of our society, we turn to the internet for answers and inspiration. Our current topic is “cover crops” and the internet is full of advice: Landsberger mix maximizes protein output and yields 6-10t/ha of roots in the soil; winter break, summer break, sabbatical, vineyard mix, compacted soil, nemato-stop, flower meadow for auxiliaries, Landsberger mix, etc are a few of the 12 different seed mixes an online shop from Switzerland (the first in google search) has on offer; our local garden center recommends a Japanese mix of seeds (it’s the latest trend); and the rabbit hole goes deep. The same way our knowledge landscape is fragmented, so are our villages, yards and agricultural lands: fences, neat squares of monocultures, Instagramable garden beds, strawberry pyramid next to the potted lemon tree and a box full of seeds from all over the world, some with colorful names, some with encoded cryptic ones. But our neighbor’s invasive lawn grass doesn’t care about fences, biodiversity, drought or our concerns for ethical and holistic approaches. We are at a loss. But we are motivated. As colleagues in the Sustainable Cluj Association, as brotherly gardeners, as concerned citizens, as educators and artists we want to change the status quo. We believe in open access knowledge, seeds and common goods. There has to be a better way to learn, share and practice care for our soil, our plants and our biodiversity. We care both for our raised beds, our wild areas and our neighbor’s lawn. And we’ve started working on a better understanding on how to work with local plants, to ensure a greater resilience to both our soil, our cultivated areas, our wild ones and to all the multispecies cohabitants that share our space. The simplest version of our goal is: what is the proper year long sequence of seeds and planting that maximizes the resilience and biodiversity of our garden. A more complex version is: how to create local open access kits of knowledge, seeds and community support that allow anyone to prioritize care for the soil and its inhabitants, in opposition to the social and economic pressures that promote an arid extractivist mindset. Once we create and test a local recipe in Cluj-Napoca, we would like to try it out in other areas, to make sure we understand which parts are universal and which need to be adapted to the specific needs of the local context. Our needs are mainly: scientific support for understanding the complex relationships and how to fulfill several overlapping criteria, logistic support for identifying the best sources for seeds and partners to develop and test our solution in several different areas (ideally with varied climate and fauna). While our main personas involved are our gardener selves, we also bring with us the educators, the artists and the activists in us. We are capable of creating lesson plans, design learning interactions, create art and culture interventions and facilitate participatory processes that lead to policy proposals and adoption. Let's first trust the small steps and see where they take us.
- +Which SoilTribes priority area(s) does your challenge address?
- +Commons Stewardship
- +Regenerative Transitions
- +How does your challenge respond to the selected SoilTribes priority area(s)?
- +We believe it is up to all of us to open ourselves to others, human and non-human cohabitants, and create common goods and support services that help us navigate the polycrisis and the divided social and knowledge landscape that make us act irrationally and detrimental to soil, biodiversity and human health. By caring for not only our garden, but also the neighbors and the wild areas in between, we can create nourishing and safe spaces for thriving ecosystems. A year round mix of local seeds and planting practices can be an powerful nature base solution to the heat, water and invasive species stress that most of us face. We hope not only to gain resilience, but to regenerate our soil, our seed banks and our relationships with the multispecies neighbors we all have.
- +Which EU Soil Mission goal(s) does your challenge contribute to?
- +Prevent erosion
- +Reduce soil sealing / reuse urban soils
- +Conserve soil organic carbon
- +Reduce desertification
- +Enhance soil biodiversity
- +Challenge typology
- +Seeds (small, replicable initiatives)
- +Expected outputs / actions
- +Awareness-raising / communications
- +Creative or cultural events
- +Capacity-building (training, guides, mentorship)
- +Participatory processes
- +Prototyping or technical testing
- +Who is involved or affected by the challenge?
- +A local kindergarten, Sustainable Cluj Association NGO, local urban gardeners, two school climate clubs, the local SoilTribes partners: Cluj-Napoca City Hall, the University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine (USAMV Cluj), and the Turn The Tables (DEAR programme) project and consortium.
- +Where is your challenge located?
- +Cluj-Napoca, Cluj, Romania
- +Which SoilTribes pillar(s) are you connected to?
- +Public Sector
- +Academia, Education & Research
- +Civil Society
- +What public policies or institutional frameworks does your challenge engage with or seek to change?
- +We address the lost local knowledge and community support of the traditional farming practices and the challenge to integrate latest scientific discoveries about multispecies care in a capitalist system that prioritizes cost efficiencies and denies responsibility for externalities.
- +How do you imagine the Bootcamp will benefit your initiative — and others?
- +We hope to find the scientific support for our initiative, to connect to other similar or synergetic projects (like Curiosoil curiosity kit), and to find leads towards local sources of seeds and support. We would also like to find 2-3 other gardeners willing to test and adapt our cover crops in their gardens.
State
- +Accepted
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