Hej!
My name is Madeleine, I’m from Germany, and I did my ESC at Kalø Økologisk Landbrugsskole in Denmark with two other volunteers, Carl and Antonia.Kalø Landbrugsskole is a farming school that teaches organic farming. All classes are taught in English, and many of the students come from other countries which makes it easier to integrate into the community.
Working at Kalø
As volunteers, we worked on the school’s organic farm and in the school kitchen. The farm is a place where students can learn by doing, which is why we try to have a wide range of animals. The farm has dairy cows, pigs, sheep, ducks, and a wide variety of vegetables that are grown there all year round. The three of us volunteers took turns working in each department every month (animals, vegetables, and kitchen) so that we could experience each season in every area of work.
The daily duties for the vegetable team are maintaining the farm shop. This meant cleaning, restocking shelves, packing products and harvesting vegetables. But we were also responsible for things like seeding, watering the plants, transplanting them, removing weeds, and looking after the greenhouses.
In the animal department, I fed the animals, cleaned the stables, spread straw, scraped manure, and made sure the animals had everything they needed. I oversaw letting the cows in and out of the barn, and I also learned how to milk them. Although the work was hard, I especially liked working with animals. One of the most memorable experiences I had was when a sheep gave birth and I also had the opportunity to try to shear a sheep for the first time. I also learned to use various machines, such as tractors and mini-loaders.
In the kitchen, our main job was to help the kitchen staff make meals for the students. We baked sourdough bread almost every day, chopped vegetables, did the dishes, and labelled products for the farm shop. We also helped to process fresh milk and vegetables from the farm. I learned how to create and maintain a sourdough starter from scratch, and how to make yogurt and cheese from raw milk.
Our Solidarity Project
Vision and masterplan
Like our work we also wanted our solidarity project to be a combination of farm and kitchen. On the weekends, when the canteen is closed, we share a kitchen with the students. After a while we started to notice that flowerpots with herbs kept appearing and dying because no one was looking after them. This gave us the idea of creating a tea and herb garden, where students can harvest some fresh herbs for cooking. In addition, we also wanted to make a small scale tea production for the farm shop.
We started planning our project in March. It was important to us to build as sustainably as possible and not to buy any new materials. The raised beds are made from used disposable pallets that we were able to pick up for free at the local hardware store. We found all other materials, including the seeds, on the farm, as they had been used for projects in previous years. Since we were able to get 20 pallets from the hardware store, we based the size and number of raised beds on that amount. Fortunately, we were also able to occupy four unused raised beds, already existing on the school grounds for our project. In order to ensure a secure and level base of the beds we started to even out the ground and then embedded stone slabs for the corners. We then screwed three pallets together for the long sides of the two large beds and added one pallet on each short side to build the frame. For a little more stability and to deter rodents, we stapled rabbit wire to the inside. We then covered the inside with foil. To optimize the nutrients in the soil and the water content, we first filled the beds with a layer of branches, a layer of straw, then a thick layer of compost and finally a thin layer of potting soil.
Planting
Due to the freezing temperatures in April nights, when we first started to implement our project, we had to seed our herbs and tea plants in seeding trays so that they would not die of frost damage. We selected coriander, parsley, basil, oregano, thyme and dill as our herbs as well as peppermint, sage and chamomile as our tea plants. Once the seeds had germinated, we moved them to the greenhouse, which in addition to a warm environment also provided enough light so that our little seedlings could grow. After a few weeks the plants had reached a height of two to four centimeters, and it was time to plant them in our raised beds. Over the course of the next six weeks, we took turns in watering and weeding our plants to ensure an optimal growth and plant wellbeing.
Harvest
Soon it was time to harvest the first herbs and tea plants. The chamomile, sage and coriander were the first ones to be ready, so we made sure to harvest them on a relatively dry day. Once the plants were harvested, we spread them out on trays lined with baking sheets and let them pre dry overnight. The next day we continued the drying process and to make sure our harvested plants would be fully dried we placed them in the oven at fifty degrees Celsius for two hours. After our plants came out of the oven, we packed them in bags in order to store them better. We placed those bags in the student kitchen so that the new students could enjoy our first batch of sage and chamomile tea and use our dried coriander as seasoning for their food. This will hopefully eliminate the abundance of dead single use herb plants that once used to line the shelves of the student kitchen.
Evaluation
Despite our eventual success, we too had some problems in the beginning. The first of them being to even find a place for our raised beds, because not all lucrative locations could be easily watered and some of them had to lie idle and therefore could not be built on. After careful consideration with our boss, we eventually agreed on a spot next to already existing raised beds, which met all our needs. Soon enough we faced another big challenge, which was that not all of the newly planted seeds germinated. One the one hand this was simply due to the age of some of the seeds, which is why in the end we could not grow parsley. On the other hand, the lights in the seeding room were not sufficient for our seedlings to grow, which is why we had to redo the entire seeding and later placed the second batch in the greenhouse, where the natural sunlight could help them grow. This set us back about three weeks in our time schedule and as a consequence we were not able to harvest all plants during our time in Kalø.
We could not harvest all the chamomile, sage and basil yet, as it was not ready. As a result, we only produced tea in relatively small quantities. If our project is continued by the next volunteers, I imagine that their tea production could be greater than ours.
ESC Solidarity Projects 