Allotment gardens, plots, and garden plots don't enjoy the best reputation everywhere. You hear about strict regulations, meticulously landscaped gardens, and stuffiness behind the garden fence. But allotment gardens are so much more than that! For city dwellers, they're the piece of nature they long for amidst the noise of cars and exhaust fumes. The result: wild oases, colorful vegetable gardens, and beehives. We wanted to know: Is there really still any truth to these prejudices, or have we long since done away with them? To this end, we spoke with Carolin. Carolin lives with her family in Swabia and has had her own allotment garden since mid-2018: Parzelle14.

Nature has its own rhythm. From December to March, it is largely dormant. But even in the cold season, you can still gather some native wild herbs, as long as Jack Frost doesn't strike. Wild herbs have never been cultivated and are therefore particularly robust and nutrient-rich. They still contain many important ingredients, such as bitter compounds and secondary plant compounds, which have often been bred out of our modern cultivated vegetables to create a more homogenous flavor. Very useful during the cold-prone winter season.

Halloween may be over, but pumpkin season is far from over! You're sure to find a pumpkin or two in the pantry of urban gardeners—because pumpkins, if stored well, will keep for quite some time. For just such a case (and many other cases ;-)), we were recommended the following delicious recipe by Kptncook. For the pumpkin ratatouille, you'll need—of course! —pumpkin . So delicious! It's super easy to make, so get cooking! Enjoy!

Autumn is a colorful, yet often rainy, season. Take advantage of the opportunity, as the leaves and rain fall outside, to get creative in your cozy, warm home—and start looking forward to next spring! How about creatively decorating flowerpots? Your favorite plants can spend the cold season protected in them. Then, they can move outside to their new "home" and attract everyone's attention. And not just because of their blooms!

Have you discovered delicious vegetables in your grandma's garden and are itching to have the same variety in your own? Did you grow the tastiest tomatoes ever in your garden this year and would like to spread them around the world? Or are you simply fed up with buying the same boring seeds year after year for a lot of money? Then we recommend you: simply harvest your own homegrown vegetable seeds and not only secure enough seeds for the coming gardening season, but also protect very special, rare varieties from extinction. How does it work? It's easy! We'll show you how to collect new seeds from your harvest and what you need to keep in mind.

Have you already collected a good amount of seeds and want to store them for the next season? No problem! The most obvious method would be to store the seeds in seed packets , label them, and store them in a box on the shelf. Another option is to roll the seeds into seed bombs, thus preserving them for a long time. This works wonderfully with flower seeds, but it's also a great way to process and store your collected seeds with vegetable seeds.