To each his own: garden plots

0 Comments | Swiss News, June, 2002 | by Kim Hays

If you yearn to garden but only have a few window boxes at your disposal, then you are a candidate for what the Swiss call a "family-garden." Here we look at the ins and outs of getting one.

Even if you live in an apartment in the middle of Zurich or Geneva, it will only cost around Sfr250 a year for you to rent a garden in one of Switzerland's 375 tracts of gardening land. The average plot is 200 square meters (around 43 feet square), and usually you are allowed to build on it--a small house, a terrace, perhaps even a tiny greenhouse. The tracts of land are without electricity, but they have shared water and toilet facilities, and most tenants outfit themselves with bottled-gas stoves, kerosene lanterns, and outdoor grills, so that they can enjoy a picnic or barbecue. Just don't expect to be permitted to spend the night there.

Friendly Neighbors

You shouldn't expect solitude, either. On most of the city gardening lots in Switzerland you will be surrounded by hundreds of people, many of whom rent a garden not only to grow produce and flowers but also to escape the close quarters of apartment living. Family gardens are sociable places, where people invite each other for morning coffee or chat as they weed their flowerbeds. Werner Schaublin, a gardener in Basel-Land and the president of the Swiss Family-Gardener Association, points Out that many of Switzerland's 26,800 family gardeners have had their plots for decades, and over the years they grow close to their neighbors. Chances are that your garden-neighbor won't live too far away from you, either, since there are enough large gardening tracts in Switzerland to allow city-dwellers to rent a plot a short walk or bike ride from home.

Join the Club

To rent a garden, you must contact the appropriate municipal official. You can find out who that is by getting in touch with the Gardener Association's representative for your region (see sidebar). Like most things in Switzerland, family gardening is well organized. Each region is divided into sections, and each section has its local clubs, which work with the city to establish rental procedures, oversee fair transfers of property from one tenant to another, and enforce rules for the upkeep of the gardens and the lot as a whole. In addition, the clubs organize parties, open-house events, and twice-yearly workdays, when members get together to lay fresh gravel on the paths, clip hedges and clean up debris. Club members also receive the national family-gardeners magazine, Garden Friend, which is published in French and German and offers tips on everything from finding edible flowers to growing great celery.

Garden Zones: Temporary vs. Permanent

In the course of renting a garden plot, be sure to ask how the tract of land in which it is located is zoned. There are two types of lots, "permanent" and "temporary." Lots designated as permanent are zoned either as "land for leisure and sport" or, better yet, as family-gardening land exclusively. Temporary lots are zoned for building, and gardens on these tracts are never safe from destruction, even though in some cases the land remains unused for decades. Andre Wyttenbach of Bern's garden administration is in charge of maintaining the city's 26 gardening lots and distributing the 2,200 family gardens they contain. But only about 60 per cent of these are on "safe" land; the rest are on areas that are currently zoned for building. In fact, part of a large garden tract in northern Bern, which has been under cultivation for over 30 years, is due to be taken over for construction during the next few months. "Everyone who has a garden on that land knew that someday the building would begin," says Wyttenbach, "bu t they were lucky for so long that they forgot about the threat. We have offered them gardens in other parts of the city, but nothing we have is close to their homes, so they're upset."

One of the ways in which local garden clubs and their regional and national associations serve members is by fighting to have tracts of family-gardening land zoned for that single purpose. Even land that is zoned for leisure activities is not always safe; recently in Zurich a large lot with hundreds of gardens was saved from becoming a soccer field only after a fierce political fight. In Biel gardening land has been lost to highway construction, and in Basel-Land the legal battle to keep a group of gardens safe went as far as the Swiss Supreme Court-and was won. So when, as part of tile annual costs of renting a garden, you are required to pay your club dues, remember that your money is helping to fund the pro-gardening lobby all over Switzerland.

Organic Gardening

Another cause that the regional and national family-gardening associations have adopted is organic gardening. New tenants are strongly encouraged-although not required- to follow what the clubs refer to as "near-to-nature" gardening methods, which keep the plots free of dangerous chemicals, "There's no doubt that this kind of gardening is more work than the ordinary kind," says Hans Heiniger, the head of Bern's club. "But at least you aren't poisoning your own food."