The first radishes have already been harvested in the hill beds.
The oak leaf lettuce sprouts, the spinach also develops well.
Today tomato, cucumber and eggplant seedlings are waiting to get into the ground.
The still young garden on the Westend campus of the Goethe University survived the ice saints unscathed in this unusually cool spring.
The summer crops should no longer experience night frosts, believes Juliane Ranck, co-founder of the vegetable heroes.
The initiative manages more than a dozen gardens in the "Green Lung" north of Günthersburg Park. Now the university has been successfully recruited for “urban farming”. The vegetable heroes were helped by committed students and the AStA who had similar ideas. “We struggled with the bureaucracy for a year and a half,” says geography student Emil Unkrig.
Because the actual goal of creating the garden on the main campus failed because of the development plans.
The new university president Enrico Schleiff, who has been in office since the beginning of the year and himself a biologist, then found another area.
This is now a bit out of the way, hidden behind poplars and hedges at the noisy intersection of Miquelallee / Hansaallee.
But it is an area of 2000 square meters.
At the beginning of March, the university first had the wilderness reclaimed.
In just a few weeks, the students managed to transform the area into a sizable “permaculture island” with the help of the four “animators” from the vegetable heroes.
Support from the AStA
Several times a week 40 students now regularly help with gardening, which works according to the rules of so-called permaculture. This relies on humus-rich hill beds, the compost comes processed and free of charge from the organic bins of the Frankfurt waste disposal company FES. With the support of the project, the AStA wants to show that agriculture can also function differently in view of the climate crisis and species loss - and that it is possible to grow untreated vegetables and herbs in the middle of a city. “We want to set an example,” says Moritz Schmitthenner from the ecology department of the student committee.
A sophisticated mix is used for the planting, which requires a lot of logistics. This is what the vegetable heroes Ilka Wittig is responsible for, who has raised thousands of seedlings in the first step in the expanded basement of her own home over the past few months. The “young plant mother”, as she is called in the initiative, then provides a plan that has been worked out with the help of Excel spreadsheets. A drawing gives instructions for the beds down to the smallest detail, every centimeter is calculated. With spinach as a preculture, the eggplant Zora is then planted 14 times as the main culture. In addition, Batavia lettuce is allowed to spread 48 times. Marigolds are sown in between.