Izabela Zalewska-Kantek, Idea maker 2014, also an ECF grantee, invited me to participate at the Seminar "Germination for the Future" that she organized as culmination of her project. It was a wonderful event, a great opportunity for Urban Orchards - Pick Your (city) Fruits to share the process of our project, sharing thoughts, learning with the other presenters, and enjoying a very nice gathering of people around educational gardens. It was also very pleasant to be with 2 Idea Makers (Izabela of course, and Yaroslava Tytarenko, who was also invited to present her project "Library supported Tourism") and to talk with Joanna from Krytyka Polityczna, whom I had met in Marseille last year (Krytyka is a hub collaborating with ECF).
Next day, Izabela arranged for me to meet Karol Podyma, who had spoke about meadows during the Seminar, but who also has a project to recover an old orchard in Warsaw, in an area that was from the military and has become a public park, where he "discovered" old apple trees amidst a densely planted part. So the old trees were pruned and trimmed, some invasive trees were cut down, and a few fruit bushes were planted. It is a really nice orchard, and it was interesting to see how its developing. They also want to plant new trees and to have activities to bring the community in. We could find many contact points between our projects and approaches. Kamil Baj, who presented his urban beekeeping project at the Seminar, is going to bring bee hives to this orchard, which is something we had been talking about in our own orchard!
Izabela and her really nice daughter Kamila, prepared a fantastic program for us, besides the already wonderful days with the seminar, Karol's encounter and our working session, we went to visit the University's Library Roof Garden (with a great view of Warsaw), to Łazewski park (Izabela used to be a guide of the park, so we had a really nice visit with a lot of details and stories), and then, a visit to the botanic garden in Konstancin, that has.... 430 different varieties of apple trees!
Rows and rows of apple trees, some old, some young, of many different shapes and sizes. A really beautiful place! Raspberries without spikes. Maybe a good variety for the orchard, Raspberry or blackberry plucking without stung and scratched hands sounds nice but also a bit like cheating!! Cornus officinalis (Japanese cornel dogwood). The dried fruit is used in Chinese herbal medicine. | Malus hupehensis - Tea crabapple Mespilus germanica - very different from the Portuguese Nêspera! |
And many more fruits. I was particularly interested in the peaches, as they were trimmed in a way that supposedly avoids diseases. That is to be looked into with more detail, as we were told by many to avoid planting peaches in our orchard (there is a saying in Portugal that goes "Quem não quer deixar nada aos seus herdeiros planta um pomar de pessegueiros" , or he who does not want to leave anything to his heirs, plant an orchard of peaches), I guess if we nail this pruning technique we'll have many delicious summer peaches!
The time spent in Warsaw was indeed very rich and stimulating. I am very grateful to Izabela and Fundacja Virid'or for the invitation and for all she did to make it such a memorable experience.