What a wonderful country for growing fruit and veg!

Instead of the report.

WWOOF-UK worked in partnership with SustEd – Sustainability Education to recruit and send four young Wwoofers to Belgrade, Serbia for a 6-day training course on community growing. This was a partnership project with Ama CenterWWOOF Serbia and BugdayWWOOF Turkey, as well as EkoSense from Croatia. So 20 18 to 30 year olds arrived in a hot and dry early September at Bastaliste, the first community garden in Serbia, ready to exchange their experience, skills and culture.

What a wonderful country for growing fruit and veg! Great markets and still a country of smallholders selling their produce in local markets – so a visit to the market and local smallholders was a key part of the course.

Of course local traditional music featured strongly in our course – all by great fortune as there was a traditional wedding in our neighbour’s garden with live band and firey Quince Rakija on offer to us all!

As well as all the principles and background to different systems of growing, and features of different crops, we mainly worked on practical garden and eco-construction projects – of course alongside much of the wedding festivities and music next door. We built a firepit area, compost, compost toilet, cob oven and planted, harvested and cooked a variety of crops. As a result eight new enterprise ideas were presented, either for developing in Serbia or back home.

So after six full, hot days of growing together, we all left with more ideas, enthusiasm and skills for community and intercultural action. So this training course could be the first of many others between European WWOOF organisations, using this course as a template.

 

Adam Cade, SustEd UK