FRESH, the World’s Wildest Supermarket (June 2012 Update)

An update on the FRESH project — the world’s wildest supermarket — underway here in Denmark. Urban farmers take over the world plot by plot.

Wow! Going money-free is the best decision ever. Everything is really free and laws of attraction really exist — how cool is that!

Instead of going to the giant May 1st party in the city park with candyfloss, Bacardi Breezers, and a bunch of politicians celebrating the international workers day, we arranged a May 1st international working day. D.I.T. (Do It Together).

More than 100 people turned up, working with the timber, constructing raised beds, axing, shovelling, playing music, eating soup, building hideouts in the ’woods’, sowing seeds and planting. Just like the last time, the age range was from three months to 70+ years and all generations had such a good day in the sun, in nature, walking the walk rather than talking the talk. Makvärket, an environmental and collective community based in an old ceramics factory in Knabsrup, had a workshop in which they built a cob oven, powered by our biochar oven and with exhaust drawn into a raised stone bed (like a rocket stove), heating up the raised bed in our tropical spiral (yet to be built). Here we are going to grow the impossible, just like Sepp Holzer. Makvärket also made a hammock out of an old fishing net — which was a great source of amusement for kids of all ages.

The energy in FRESH is amazing, and the look on people’s faces, having spent the day or just a few hours either working or playing, is rewarding enough in itself. The children crying when they have to leave is a bonus!

Sitting in the evening, seeing the shadows of our sprouting plants in the two meter high raised beds, listening to the birds singing in the sunset and the bats hunting in our little clearing, enjoying the end of yet another active day in the name of the revolution… This makes me realize that the revolution is no more than a stroll in the park, a good energy, a few sore muscles and a constant smell of pine and bonfire.

We talked about book-sharing and we want to make a library for people who want to learn about the system and how to make plants grow — a place for people to study. A couple of days later we met a lady on the bicycle path on the way to FRESH, who happened to be the new manager at the local library. So now we are going to lecture at the library, and we are planning to build a cob library with books about trees, bushes, veggies, birds, insects, and the cropping system. The library will be a ‘bookshare’, and the rest of the books will be provided by the local library. All it took was a meeting in FRESH with five of the library employees, all very eager to hear and see what it is about, and now they are talking about constructing a roof garden at the library. This is a good match-up, since the library is a big player in the municipality.

We are also setting up a kindergarten-day once a week for the local kindergartens, so the kids can learn a bit about essential living conditions and how to make everything non-toxic.

We are going to take over a piece of land which belongs to the municipality, situated only 50 meters from FRESH. It is going to be our new soil-lab in which we will experiment with perennial rye and industrial hemp, nettles, of course a lot of meadow flowers and herbs, and maybe a little fruit tree nursery — all for experimenting, teaching, and learning.

We do many projects in and out of town and have built raised beds in quite a few places. Our new ‘sandbag-lego system’ seems to do the trick. It is a raised bed with a wooden core and soil-covered mycelium and biochar. The difference is that it is specialized for urban farming. We fill the sandbags, used against flooding, with soil, with bricks as borders. Then we fill the outline with a bottom layer of biochar, which acts as a filter against toxins from the ground and binds the nutrients. Then woodchips and mycelium are added and finally the structure is topped with a layer of soil. It is so simple that anyone can participate and only people’s creativity can limit the design. You can build a castle or the Great Wall of China in the local park, or D.I.T. where everybody fills a bag with soil and places it anywhere they want within a limited piece of land — then you see what the energies of 100 or 1000 people can create together.

We are invited to all sorts of so-called sustainable fairs and events, but we make sure that all our participation is money-free. We only do money-free food-producing community gardens that are for everybody. The sharing and do-it-together mentality thrives with this new consciousness which everybody is talking about.

Our next project is a community garden outside Århus, then a sandbag-raised bed workshop with the kids in Urbanplanen, a public housing area (Danish standard, which is better than most places). Here Makvärket will build an outdoor kitchen in cob with the kids and we will hold a sandbag workshop. In June they have a festival where the whole city is invited to come and, with the residents, change the place into a food forest — or as far as we can get.

A new FRESH is starting up in town in Amager, Copenhagen, and a FRESH has seen daylight in Sicily, Italy. Also, we have been invited to do FRESH workshops in Palestine in the autumn, so everything seems to be flowing.

As we now seem to get everything we ask for, often before we even have to ask, we come with hope and enthusiasm, still believing that anything is possible and that boundaries only exist in people’s minds. Since we are not limited by money, we can be free, uncompromising, and take the land back as we take our lives back.

We’ve made a google map of all the different projects and will update continuously.

Best wishes from FRESH as we strive to prove that food comes from nature, is free, and that the world is ours.