New Stories From 'Urban Agriculture Notes'
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Holland: Kitchen Gardens: From Plot to Plate – A Photo Essay

By Ruud Sies

Kitchen gardens can supply up to half of all non-staple food needs, as well as a significant number of vitamins and minerals. This makes them an invaluable tool for food security in vulnerable communities.

By Ruud Sies (photographer) and partner Hanneke van Hintum (producer)
Resilience Food Stories
2020

Excerpt:

It was in the fall of 2016, that I made my first photo of a kitchen garden. It was somewhere on a dyke in Rotterdam, The subject of a kitchen garden is interesting above all for the beauty of the thing itself and for its universal character. There are millions of these little plots all over the world. Nothing else brings nature and culture so close together.

It is the battle against the elements that has to be fought out on thirty-five square metres that makes the subject so interesting. Nowhere do nature and culture come so closely together as in the kitchen garden, and there is nothing else that makes the seasons so visible.

Everywhere we go for Resilience Food Stories, we look for these small pieces of land where people grow their own fruit and vegetables, sometimes out of dire necessity, often as a hobby but always out of love for nature. There is nothing as satisfying as harvesting your own food, nothing tastes as good as your own strawberries, nothing is as healthy as eating vegetables you cultivated yourself and nothing as independent as picking your own beans.

Link here.