SUMMARY TEXT SOME MORE TEXT HERE Nettle Garden, a connection between consumers, producers, nourishment and land Brândușa and Anselm moved to the countryside in 2013, to the village of Stanciova, Timiș county, drawn towards the idea of a lifestyle more deeply connected to the land and the nourishment it produces. At the same time, the two saw moving to the countryside also as a break from the academic medium, whose essentially theoretical products they didn’t consider too useful. The two met in Germany during their studies, Anselm being a Belgian citizen. Brândușa graduated with a Master’s degree in Rural Development and, prior to moving to Stanciova, she spent a study internship in India. The choice to settle their household in Stanciova was grounded on the existence of a community of young people relocated from Timișoara at the beginning of the 2000s; the group decided to move to the countryside with the purpose of creating a community and of implementing rural development programs. Drawn by the promotion the community made online, through a blog, Brândușa and Anselm came into contact with the members and moved to the village, with the possibility of living in a house renovated by the members of the community; “we only brought our backpacks with us”, Brândușa highlights. Shortly after coming to the village, Brândușa and Anselm bought a piece of land they could afford, with the purpose of building a house to live in and planting a garden. The construction of the house took two years, from 2014 to 2016, during which time the two lived in the community house. For the construction they analysed various alternative construction techniques. They mainly had to choose between a house made from cob and one made from bales, in the end opting for a house made from wheat bales built on a wooden structure, which they considered it offered better thermal isolation. Nettle Garden came into being from the desire of Brândușa and Anselm to produce ecological nourishment for themselves, but for other people, too, which they would sell in a community-supported agriculture (CSA) system. Brândușa manifested interest towards this form of agriculture during her Master’s degree, when she wrote her dissertation about this type of food production and distribution and which she wanted to try first-hand: “and this is why the dream slowly developed, we settle close to Timișoara, all good, so we can start growing vegetables at some point”. Beginning with the spring of 2021, the two managed to gather enough surplus in their production to start selling vegetables, in a CSA system, to around 10-12 consumers in Timișoara who subscribed to their baskets. Nettle Garden is basically the name Brândușa and Anselm gave to their household. It is about 2000 sq.m. and comprises the little bale house, with an annex housing the compost dry toilet and the shower, the vegetable garden, a few fruit trees which were already planted when they bought the land, two solariums, enclosed spaces for geese. In the farmyard, there were tools and farm equipment: electric-hoe, pitchfork to loosen the soil, a “wire boat” whipped up by Anselm to carry hay, but also spaces for stable waste and for compost. Two dogs and a few cats had their homes in the garden. Aside from the garden, they use two adjacent lands to raise hens and geese. One of the lands is rented from a local, and they use another one, abandoned and with uncertain ownership, to raise geese, reclaiming the priority, at least a moral one, in favour of the one who uses the land. Recently, they leased two ha of farmland, but they haven’t undertaken any farm work there yet. The dwelling space has a relatively small area, being built on the footprint of an older mudbrick house. It is composed from a room that serves as a living room, a kitchen, a studio, and an attic accessed through an abrupt wooden stairway, which is used as a bedroom and storage space. The house is heated with a stove built by Anselm using the system of a “rocket-stove”, which he adapted: instead of thick logs, it uses sticks and wooden shards which burn intensely to maximize the efficiency of the burn; the addition he brought to the system is a space made from refractory brick meant to store and radiate heat. Around the house, Brândușa and Anselm were in the process of painting a cement terrace, which they built in order to avoid spreading mud around. When I arrived at Nettle Garden, Anselm was experimenting with a new seeding method, using an instrument he DIY-ed from a leaf blower, to which he attached a plastic bottle used as a seed recipient. He explained that this instrument will help him in the no-till farming they are practicing, where the land is not ploughed or dug, but the superior humus layer is permanently enriched with the purpose of keeping life inside the soil as much as possible: “all the earthworms and the insects in the soil remain there and live their life”, says Anselm. The two insist upon the ideal of keeping life in the soil by using no-till farming, saying they do not agree with ploughing the land every year, as is the usual in classic agriculture, because, on the one hand, it destroys the living things in the soil, and on the other hand, it creates a hardpan layer, below the limit where the plough works, which becomes waterproof. Their technique is sowing the crop directly onto the soil, which they, eventually, lay to the ground or chop, to sow into this one the next crop which will be harvested, or the seedlings. Anselm explains it this way: “I’ve seeded it and the triticale grew all winter. It just sits there, growing, covering the soil and it turns into straws, and when the time came to transplant, we chopped everything with the brush cutter and we were left with a layer of minced straws. (…) And then you haven’t ploughed the soil, you don’t lose water, during winter something grew, I mean, if it was a little bit warmer and the sun would shine, something would grow and would become organic matter, which means it wasn’t dead. The more it grows and you have organic matter, the more you enrich the soil and it becomes looser, water seeps easier, there’s more life and it’s more fertile”. While Anselm was experimenting with the blower, together with Brândușa we made seedlings, with the help of a small manual press, by making little cubes of soil where we planted turnip seeds. She also presented to me a device made by Anselm, which made 200 seedlings at once, which they didn’t use though, as they preferred to plant different varieties. In fact, the garden was abundant in vegetable varieties. I helped Brândușa with harvesting them for the second day distribution. The tomatoes were, by far, the most prevalent; the 200 tomato stalks were very diverse, totalling 10 different varieties. Similarly, the eggplants were purple and white and in various shapes, the courgettes were too, of different varieties. Furthermore, Brândușa confesses she is passionate about experimenting with various uncommon vegetables: tomatillos, cucamelon, Palestinian white cucumbers, as well as mizuna, arugula, mangold. She even admits that this year’s diversity can also be a disadvantage and that she would prefer in the future to settle on less varieties, with the intention to do research among the consumers to determine the varieties she should settle on. The vegetables are planted in alternation with flowers; for example, between tomato rows one finds rows of marigolds, Brândușa saying she would want even more, with the purpose of helping both the pollinators, as well as pest control. She says associating marigolds with tomatoes is a classic combination, as they remove the tomato pests. The ecological agriculture Brândușa and Anselm practice implies the plants are to be exposed as rarely as possible to pest control treatments. The products they use are, most often, nettle soaks made by Brândușa herself, and on the rare occasions where they were forced to buy mass market products, they only used products which are certified for ecological crops and waited a longer time than recommended until the harvest. Although they are not certified as bio producers, Brândușa and Anselm claim they fulfil all the organic farming conditions, the cost of obtaining the certificate being the sole reason they don’t have one yet. The two use exclusively compost and stable waste, the latter which they have to buy for prices they find steep, considering they don’t own animals and, according to them, less and less people in the village do. The compost that results from matter coming from the composting toilet (humanure) isn’t used, because they aren’t fully confident in its safety, being rather a way to ecologically eliminate physiological waste, but sometimes they use it when planting trees. What they do use in the garden from the composting toilet is the liquid part: “diluted pee, because it doesn’t have pathogens and so it’s a good source of nitrogen and phosphorus. We dilute it 1/10”. For the seedlings they either use the seeds they kept, or bought online from other gardeners, from Romania and the Republic of Moldova. It is very important for Brândușa to avoid hybrid seeds, both because they cannot be saved in order to reproduce a similar variety, and because, for ideological reasons, she doesn’t accept buying seeds which are conceived so that the plant cannot be reproduced, and this happens even in the case of plants whose seeds she usually doesn’t save, such as carrots. Aside from the vegetable garden, Brândușa and Anselm are raising hens and geese; they bred the geese from a few goslings they bought and they sacrifice the birds themselves. From the woods, the two gather wild garlic, nettles and mushrooms, rosehip and cornelian cherry; the forest is also a source of dry wood for the fire and even logs which they used to make pillars for the terrace. Brândușa’s and Anselm’s lifestyle doesn’t exclude also using modern techniques and instruments in the garden. The vegetables are watered using a drip irrigation system, the birds are cooped up with an electric fence – the two agree it has been very effective in preventing fox attacks, which at some point they had to fight away. They also wish for a tractor, as a distant goal, to which they could attach no-till farming devices, because ”a tractor isn’t necessarily just a plough”, she explains. And so, the production techniques and the domestic routines of the two are in accordance with an ecological lifestyle, which highlights the respect shown to the land and nourishment. Besides, the domestic routines can hardly be separated from the food production, given that the two aim to live, as much as possible, with and from the land. As part of this lifestyle, the two adapt the classical practices, techniques and means of production, and experiment with alternative practices, routines and tools, which differ from those of the locals. The differences in practice have been noticed by the locals, which were curious and asked for information about how to build a house of bales, while suggesting other techniques: “kind of like, you won’t make it, you know. Or when we were building, neighbours would pass by and tell us, wouldn’t it be cheaper?, something something, if you’d use cinder blocks… I’m not using cinder blocks, that’s that”, Brândușa points out. But she describes the relationship with the villagers as a good one, being bothered however by the neighbours which are used to burning trash as a way of cleaning, or the ones which throw away trash next to their fence, despite the fact that there’s a sanitation and waste sorting service in the village. Brândușa also earned a reputation by being an educator in the village. At the same time, she helps the neighbours with repairing bicycles; she had a repair shop in Timișoara and also organized a repair camp in the village, “where people from other workshops in Europe came over, this kind of anarchist, independent shops”. But she gave up her repair shop so she would dedicate herself to the garden. However, at the present moment, Brândușa and Anselm cannot completely sustain themselves from farming. Anselm is a part-time (60%) employee as an inspector for ecological agriculture, while Brândușa gave up her jobs, including a part-time she had with EcoRuralis, to work in food production. The products of the Nettle Garden are distributed weekly, on a Wednesday, in the Faber space in Timișoara. The two haul the vegetables with their own car and they arrange them in the space where people come to pick it up. The distribution is made using a community-supported agriculture system, in collaboration with the Association for Sustaining Peasant Agriculture, towards around 10 to 12 subscribers. Brândușa shows that this system is not market-oriented, given that the consumers are willing to pay a higher price to sustain ecological peasant initiatives, maybe without expecting an equivalent return: “from what I heard, for some of them it’s important that we have a connection, they’re people who can afford to invest a certain sum of money into a household close to Timișoara, maybe even without getting so much in return, but with the thought of helping some people”. At the same time, her main objective is “being able to feed more people”. The vegetables are picked by Brândușa and Anselm on the distribution days, so that they are as fresh as possible. Alongside vegetables, their baskets include, as a bonus, eggs or plants picked form the forest: nettles, wild garlic. The harvest is weighed prior to the distribution and Brândușa counts the vegetables for each consumer, without portioning the quantities. The subscribers are encouraged to bring paper bags to get their products, after each portion is weighed with a scale. A WhatsApp group is used to organize the distribution and keep in touch. Distribution doesn’t mean just delivering the vegetables, but also, as Brândușa points out, knowledge about how they should be cooked, especially the lesser known ones, like tomatillos: “I’ll feel sorry if they don’t use something because they don’t know how and it ends up in the compost. I’d feel so bad, because I worried about that fruit. So it’s in my interest if they eat each gram of the vegetables they receive. (…) we talk on the spot, we look for recipes, they give advice to each other, we have a WhatsApp group and we post recipes there”. The distribution takes place in a generally sociable atmosphere, the relatively small group that comes constantly for the delivery showing a certain cohesion; they often stay for a chat and to socialize after the vegetables are handed out. The distribution space, specifically chosen by Anselm in a popular enough place for youngsters in Timișoara, is featuring various pieces of urban furniture made from wood, coloured in black and purple, in a geometric, modern style. Inside the space, you find a restaurant with a terrace and various shops placed in metal containers, selling even craft beer. Thus, after the distribution of the vegetables, for an hour or two, the consumers socialize and drink beer and other stuff they buy on the spot. The subscriber group comprises middle class people; a Political Science professor from the Western University in Timișoara, also a subscriber, notices: “this thing is very posh, professors, artists. I would like something for the working class”. At the end of the night, together with Brândușa and Anselm, we collected the crates and went back to Stanciova. A few members of the consumers group left together to keep hanging out in some other place in the Fabric neighbourhood. Research and text by Alexandru Vârtej Translation by Dana Andrei The research is part of Regenerative-Reliable-Resourceful, the mapping of resilient practices in the Romanian countryside that tranzit.ro develops in the frame of C4R and of the Experimental Station for Research.

From Legumim to Gastronaut Legumim (1) was in the spring of 2021 a naturally grown garden of vegetables which took shape the previous spring as the result of a project in collaboration by Mona Petre (freelance graphic designer and author of the page Ierburi uitate (2), where she is popularizing the universe of edible plants from the local spontaneous flora, as well as recipes which incorporate them) and Mihai Petrescu, following the experience he had with the Kultivă (3) workshops of the SNK Association. Between 2017 and 2019, the association held workshops on how to autonomously grow healthy food; the Kultivă garden in Chitila hosted in its third year 20 amateur gardeners which cared for small sized lots spread over 1000 square meters (0.1 ha). The two have also worked together while conceiving the project and the activities for the Historical Garden, developed on the premises of the „Dimitrie Brândză” Botanical Garden of the Bucharest University; the goal of the project was to imagine a „permanent and durable home for many botanical species and varieties eaten throughout the European dietary history, some of which were gradually abandoned along with the permeation of the plants brought from the New World”. Its role was, according to the page of the initiative, that of „collecting, preserving and distributing these species, continuing the research and educating the audience in regards to the diversity of edible plants”. Mona Petre is also involved in an initiative supported by Pro Patrimonio with the aim of creating a garden with plants which have adapted and resisted the desertification processes; this happens in the village Olari (Pârșcoveni commune, Olt county), together with the locals and based on a research of local ethno-botanical knowledge. Belonging to the Pantelimon commune (Ilfov county), the garden was inaugurated in March 2020, when Mihai and Silviu Ene (the administrator of the firm) started the planting (inside the two solariums of 300 square meters each), with tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, cucumbers, salad, kale and mangold: „The glasshouses are part of a project made by a center for recuperation for children with disabilities – we rented from them and we started making the garden. The people from the center realized that it is a project in itself which they in fact cannot sustain. So everything was here as you see it, it was already laid out. Only no one was using it, it was quite sad, especially since the glasshouse were built as they should, solid, they are sturdy”. In the initial phase of the project they created a Facebook group with the same name (counting over 180 members, most of them the same who followed the activities of the Historical Garden; the group adheres to the set of values belonging to the Association for the Support of Peasant Agriculture (4)), whose purpose was that of facilitating the connection and communication between producers and consumers and posting online the list of available vegetables according to the seasons. The vegetables could be picked-up weekly, every Thursday between 17:00 and 20:00 at a Bucharest address, but there was also the delivery option, for a fee, to the homes of the consumers, in the neighbourhoods Pantelimon, Vatra Luminoasă, Traian, Dristor and Titan. The seedlings were grown by themselves from seeds sent mostly from American producers: „collectors of rare or old seeds from all over the world. We knew about them because that is were the seeds for the Historical Garden came from. And we had to take them from there, even if it is not very sustainable when you think that they were brought from the United States, but we couldn’t find any reliable source, I mean to make sure they have a history I can rely on and strains which are truly old; I’ve been looking for them, I found some belonging to some Germans and in Romania we got some from EcoRuralis”. The problem of trust appears under the conditions where one in two tomato strains from Romanian producers which they cultivated proved to be problematic: „Because what they have tried to do by plant breeding resulted in that tomato which all sellers look for, with a long shelf life, with a uniform colour, which, in fact, is the plastic tomato, which is horrible if you ask me, no juice, no taste, however you might care for it”. The restriction period associated to the pandemic, but which allowed for the mobility of people involved in activities such as gardening and agriculture, facilitated their commute towards the garden and through the city when the deliveries started. The summer season came also with a lesson which he deems important to whomever imagines a basket-of-vegetables type of project: „After you produced, you have that mood where you work and work and work all spring, then comes the summer boom when it’s the hardest, because all of a sudden you have an over-production. And that’s exactly when people are leaving to the seaside!” – it made Mona and Mihai rethink the configuration of the project, especially since a part of their crop ended up being processed: curry pickled cucumbers, after a British recipe specific to poor kitchen during and after the Second World War. Midway in July, when I visited the glasshouses, the tomatoes stalks, the peppers and the eggplants where half picked, but the destination of the vegetables this year was exclusive to testing products from the future processing point they built in Bucșani, using European funding for social business, and the temporary name of the new project is Gastronaut. To start-up the processing plant, Mihai contributed with the household which belonged to his grandparents. At the beginning of September, when I accompanied him there, the furnishing works happened against the unique smell of baked bell peppers which two local employees were turning over to fry on a cooking stove. „We try to hire locals and buy vegetables, when we are lacking any, also from the locals”, said Mihai, while, on the road to the processing plant, we stop at a relative of his which cares for a garden of peppers that they will use for the zacuscă tests. „It’s interesting how after the June rains most of the peppers looked compromised, and now, at the end of August and beginning of September they seem to be bouncing back”, adds Mihai. During the tests, the temporary processing point is placed in an annex of his grandparents’ former home. Under the veranda the peppers are baked, and the rooms are populated by technology elements which help the thermal or congealing preparation (a pressure cooker, a vegetable oven and a cooler). For now they will store everything in a large capacity cooler because Mihai only recently managed to identify a source for jars. The yard of the household is crossed by a ditch almost one meter deep, on the bottom of which the water pipe goes towards the few containers which are the premises for the future processing center. Beyond this, there is an orchard and in its middle stands tall a walnut tree with an ample crown. The last week of September, Mona, Mihai and the three employees gathered to begin the product testing: one day for tomato juice (with onion, garlic and oregano), the second with classic zacuscă. More tests will be made with one type of tomato juice with peaches, which they will also buy from the locals. The challenges are coming from identifying strains of fruits and vegetables coming from ecological sources, from trying to test the economic reliability of the products, so that they will not end up being sold for too high prices, but also from identifying possible distribution networks (Bucharest grocery stores, most likely). Notes: (1) Roughly translates to We grow vegetables. (2) Translates to Forgotten herbs, https://www.facebook.com/IerburiUitate (3) https://www.facebook.com/kultiva.romania (4) https://asatromania.ro/carta/ Text and research: Bogdan Iancu, Monica Stroe Translated from Romanian by Dana Andrei The research is part of Regenerative-Reliable-Resourceful, the mapping of resilient practices in the Romanian countryside that tranzit.ro develops in the frame of C4R and of the Experimental Station for Research.