Samhain 2025
Dear readers,
We can feel the days getting shorter now, so we are preparing our gardens for a winter sleep, preserving our harvests and saving seeds for next year. The time of Samhain has arrived.
How Ann Doherty changed city living with a farming collective in Amsterdam
“I had always wanted to farm but I thought that I would have to marry a farmer to do it,” says Ann Doherty, the founder of Amsterdam’s food-growers’ collective Cityplot. It turns out that the city has plenty of agricultural potential – if you know where to look.
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Edge Creativity: Designing Life in the Margins
The most productive parts of your garden are probably the spaces you've been ignoring—those awkward corners, the strips along fences, the ragged margins where different worlds collide. In permaculture, we call this the "edge effect," and it's one of the most creative principles to work with because it's so effective.
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Learning from the dunes: how to design gardens that support native wildlife
Every walk through the dunes of Kennemerland became research into ecological design, succession dynamics, and the incredible biodiversity that emerges when nature follows its own blueprint.
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Hollyhocks: City Survivors
Sylvia Avontuur writes an ode to one of our favourite summer flowers, the hollyhock
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How we teach kids about food
Cityplot’s school garden curriculum is as much about cultivating a child’s love of nature as it is about growing vegetables
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Zoë’s rhubarb-strawberry jam
Zoë is a chef & educator, and a member of Cityplot. Every early summer, they re-fall in love with rhubarb, especially when it's freshly harvested. The combination of rhubarb & strawberry is one of their absolute favourites!
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The village gardens are growing
Gardening experiences and memories from past years contribute to building a new community garden in southern Sweden
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A witchy brew or two
Two seasonal, beginner friendly recipes for medicinal wonder salve and herbal hair tonic
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Sowing tomorrow's diversity: a regenerative approach to food forests
Imagine a world where every apple tree is genetically identical to the next - not just similar, but exact copies. This isn't science fiction; it's the reality of our modern food system, where cloning has become the standard practice.
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Marauders in the garden
This season, at the Stadsboerderij Osdorp urban farm where we grow herbs, flowers and vegetables for the weekly community dinner, various marauders have required a lot of time, effort and cleverness from our garden team so far this season.
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Free the seed! (part one)
Two local seed-related initiatives and a beginner’s guide to your first season of seed saving
Seed saving at any scale is a practice that makes the aspiration towards “seed sovereignty” a concrete experience.
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Free the seed! (part two)
A beginner’s guide to your first season of seed saving
Seed saving at any scale is a practice that makes the aspiration towards “seed sovereignty” a concrete experience.
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What spring tastes like: dandelion cake
I used to think that dandelions were blooming in great quantities everywhere for most of the year. They give off a vibe of ordinariness and permanence – just part of the landscape.
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Mindful Watering in Times of Drought: Permaculture Approaches
The Netherlands is facing an exceptionally dry spring. Climate extremes are a practical reality in our gardens, presenting us with new challenges each season.
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Finding my Dreamland
My dream is to find a beautiful piece of land and live a self-sufficient life there in harmony with nature. Just being surrounded by nature would already be a dream, but actually producing my own food and wood, at least for a big part, that’s the final destination.
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Pond building in Sweden
Documenting failure is also important. Sadly, I was weak and gave up on a liner-free natural pond, but look how pretty! It will still host wildlife, and that was the goal.
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From tiles to tomatoes
The transformation of a backyard into an edible oasis
As I sit here in my garden soaked with the warm March sun, listening to the first insect buzz of the season, my heart is filled with gratitude for the wonders of nature.
Ecologisch Tuinieren in Potten en Bakken
Eetbare steden creëren: voedsel verbouwen zonder tuin
Heb je weleens met een verlangend hart naar die prachtige moestuinen gekeken en gedacht: "Dat wil ik ook, maar ik heb geen tuin"? Je bent niet alleen!
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Rangoli soup recipe
This nutritious and colourful soup recipe using many different beans came from our tradition of creating a rangoli design using beans as colours. We bring out this art form to celebrate seeds every year at the Reclaim the seeds festival in Amsterdam. This year the participants were really creative!
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