Croq' Jardin - a teaching garden

We'd heard about a garden project in la Roque-d'Antheron, and decided we needed to check it out. 

Croq' Jardin is an educational organic garden with a range of activities around the themes of biodiversity, history and uses of plants. The garden covers 1 hectare and is made up of:

• about twenty allotments used by families or groups (including school groups), 
• a nature trail on the history of vegetables and organic gardening, 
• a garden of medicinal plants, 
• a water path showing different mechanical ways of lifting water (great fun for kids) 
• an orchard with many different varieties of fruit trees, many of them 'old' varieties 
• they have a community project where 10 local families work in an small commercial greenhouse tunnel growing veggies for themselves while learning the skills of commercial vegetable production. 

A section of the garden with only old varieties of veggies and flowers - roses here.

Two of the allotments used by community members.  The tunnel in the background is one of the classrooms.

Geoff being a water engineer.

The concept of organic gardening is to create an environment where the biological components are in balance and there is no need for the use of pesticides or chemical fertilisers.   They practice companion planting (plants that discourage certain bugs are planted next to plants that those bugs normally attack).  The fruit trees stems are all painted with a clay and manure mixture to prevent insects laying their eggs under the bark and thus prevents the subsequent larvae damage.  They have a mobile chicken coop in the orchard to help control insects there.  They encourage the planting of mixed crops and of many different varieties, to prevent plagues of insects breaking out.  They make all their own compost and have almost finished constructing a compost facility that can handle 40 tonnes of organic matter a year and will be a place where locals from the town can take their organic waste matter.  They have a chipper and chip branches for use as mulch to prevent water loss.  They have numerous 'insect hotels' in the garden that create space for 'good' insects to live, and they have many bird feeding stations.  There is a small wetland pond with a wide variety of wetland plants creating habitat for frogs and insects that live near water.

**disclaimer** this is what we understood from Jean who runs the garden, but who's english is limited and our gardening french non-existent, so insect names/types were unfortunately lost in translation/charades.

We were amazed to find a section of the vegetable garden which grows with no watering! Just specially prepared soil. Here they were growing all sorts of things from peppers, tomatoes, beans and even lettuce! They run programmes and workshops for all age groups of school children as well as adults, pensioners and disabled people on composting, insects, biodiversity and vegetables and they have a solar cooker going every day as part of the programmes. They have 2 types of composting toilets (including a Ventilated Improved Pit-latrine from South Africa!) and explanations on these form part of the education programme. Once a year in spring, Croq'jardin holds an "All in the garden" party where people come and exchange seeds and seedlings and gardening knowledge and they run workshops on the environment and gardens.

The waterless veggie garden. Note the lettuce on the left which looks remarkably happy!

When we were there they had a school group of about 40 3-5 year olds who were learning about scented plants, different leaf textures, fruits and flowers, and there was this great activity where they had to walk through containers of different materials and describe how it feels (sand, aggregate, round pebbles, dry leaves, green leaves, sea sponges, etc. What fun!

Kids feeling different textures with their feet.

We were lucky enough to have the manager of the garden show us around and learnt that the garden hosts around 2000 children a year - about the population of kids aged 3-10 in the surrounding four towns!