Community Gardens Smala

Help us create permaculture AND biodynamic gardens in our ecovillages

During the containment of COVID, we thought that a little more food self-sufficiency in Switzerland would be useful.

Imagine in 2040, we mainly eat what we produce locally, with at least half grown around our homes, in vegetable gardens free of pesticides and other agrotoxics.

This dream can come true, that is the challenge we set out for ourselves. What if you take part in it?

It is also a human challenge: to succeed in lasting cooperation, in order to properly cultivate relations between us and with the land.

We started to collect rainwater, prepare the soil and young shoots, choose trees and living combinations, mulch, energize, butt, vermicompost, make manure and climbing teepees, plant and replant , water a lot at the beginning, cultivate and nourish the earth, harvest then transform, preserve and finally enjoy.

In August 2020, you can take a visit to Lavaux, and help our two ecovillages to create model vegetable gardens.

We help each other for food sovereignty

Help us help others! La Smala has been creating and animating school children since 1993. We have now started two small ecovillages in Grandvaux (Lavaux-VD) and Cheiry (Friborg). We live there and cooperate. It is a living laboratory for ecological transition, member of the European network of Living Labs, www.enoll.org, and of the global network of ecovillages www.ecovillages.org You can see all of it in this August, for 4 hours, with a guided tour, aperitif, meal, concert and conference on our art of living in an ecological community.

Objective at the end of 2020: 1 ton of vegetable production on 200m2, or about a quarter of the basic fruits and vegetables needed for 15 to 20 people over a year.

Summer 2023 target: 2 tonnes over 200m2, and inexpensive practical lessons (50.- chf per day, with lunch).

Our Living Lab works with university researchers and pioneers in dynamics and permaculture to show the real practical challenges of a community vegetable garden, the time needed to plan for each step, the right tools, the right suppliers…

We will document simple routines for beginners, to inspire others to develop a true mixed biodynamic and permaculture vegetable production. We buy the rest through as few middlemen as possible, directly from farmers in our region. The novelty that we are preparing is a complete catalog of practices and suppliers to make this transition a success, with visits and courses every month.

Help us get started, then come and visit, question, try ... and why not adapt our practices to you?

WITH YOUR HELP, our non-profit association will be able to finish building a solid base to welcome visitors and organize training. Your support will allow us to:

• rent machines to complete the garden layouts with our team of volunteers, including a nice storage space in natural raw earth
• improve the rainwater harvesting system and water treatment to soften it
• create educational signage with multilingual educational panels
• produce template tables to plan tasks and routines over the year, with the number of hours needed each week, to help others get organized without having to reinvent the wheel
• complete the orchard with Pro Specie Rara trees
• publish the documentation (video, texts, articles, practical advice, schedules) which will be under the CC-BY-SA license, as on wikipedia, in free access for all
• if possible organize a small best practice competition to invite other pioneers to share their knowledge and be paid to create documentation that is useful to all (for example: a softener with micropollutant filter, an easy-to-repair wooden manual mixer, labels without polluting glue to manage stocks ..)