Urban agriculture, a fad? In Bayonne, the Graines de Liberté association has been working since 2012 to develop shared agroecological gardens. After confinement, it constituted with others the collective autonomy Food Basque Country. The opportunity to clear a passage between squash and herbs to better understand the challenges of this agriculture, after our visit , at the beginning of July, of the “largest urban farm in Europe” in Paris.
In Bayonne, everyone knows the Breuer residences. Or the old “ZUP” in the north of the city, which we no longer call “ZUP” if we want to please the town hall, which broke the piggy bank to renovate it from top to bottom in 2013. Symbols of modernity when they emerged from the ground in the 1960s, the buildings are intimidating - 900 m by 200 m! - when we walk along them to reach the garden of the Brana elementary school, located a few meters away.
This is where Lili, agroecology facilitator, and one of the three employees of the Graines de Liberté association, awaits us . In an hour, six children will succeed us - for a luxury “learning vacation”: school in the morning, workshops in the afternoon in the garden. Lili, not yet overwhelmed, shows us around.
" For five years here, it is an experimental garden ", begins the animator with enthusiasm, while we try to gauge at a glance the size of the garden, and see abundant plantations which do not seem, in nothing, experimental.
The Covid-19 crisis having gone through this, the installation of the vegetable garden could not be done, like the other years, by the children, and Lili and Laurent, the co-founder of Graines de Liberté, ensured the interim, coming every day to sow, transplant so that the children can benefit from it on their return.
In mid-July, the result is impressive. Apart from the cabbages which, in the foreground, replanted the day before by the children, " are a little hungry ", spread out on both sides of the ground: the milpa, an Amerindian squash-bean-corn association , emblematic of permaculture because it combines three companion plants (“ the corn acts as a support, the bean climbs around, the squash keeps the ground cool ”), an “ edible hopscotch ” where the lasagna were installed in March , which made it possible to harvest 19 kilos of potatoes given to the children, a large “spiral of aromatics” open for picking for the neighbors of the school (California sage, burnet, thyme, Vietnamese coriander, etc.) and in the middle of which also rise plants of cucumbers and pickles, artichoke plants which have bloomed (" We forgot to pick them up, but like that the children realize that it becomes a pretty flower ") , not far from fruit trees, plants of strawberries and raspberries, of a beautiful row of sweet potatoes, radishes, Jerusalem artichokes, all kinds of mints, " for herbal tea, cooking, mulching, and those -they are in bloom for pollinators », And - perhaps in our eyes, the highlight of the show - small but valiant chickpea plants. Each plantation is identified by an engraved panel, if we believe the calligraphy, by the students.
Finally, a tunnel greenhouse is installed - sponsored by the botanist Francis Hallé , can we read on the site - which allows sowing earlier in the year. “ Here, in the spring, it's a nursery ,” explains Lili in the stifling heat. Everything outside comes from here, we didn't buy a single plant. We harvest the seeds of one year, we swap others, and we supplement with Kokopelli (an association that sells seeds free of rights and reproducible) : we would like, now, to launch the seed library of Graines de Liberté . "
If the garden is "experimental", then it is not out of false modesty. To adapt to the constraints of the field, several techniques have been used since 2014 (cultivation in mounds, hopscotch) and the project evolves from one year to another at the same time as its educational vocation, developed with the teaching team of school, “ thoroughly ”.
“We make them keep the pips. Otherwise, for them, fruit, it grows at Lidl "
Sowing, planting, exploring the garden with magnifying glasses to " explain the importance of animals in the garden ", construction of plant barriers with green waste, all the stages make it possible to make children aware of healthy eating and preservation of the environment. biodiversity, by allowing them to experience gestures and skills rarely known in town: “ They love to lug around the wheelbarrow, they have the impression of being in the countryside… And then we give them a taste, too, because they don't not all know the fruits. They keep the seeds, dry them and we are going to make a little nursery, so that they understand the whole cycle. If not for them, it pushes to Lidl! "
During the year, the garden welcomes the students of the school twice a week, offers activities with children from nursery school and nursery school, also receives visits from residents of a neighboring retirement home. .
But this year, a new dimension has been added to the educational role: " The Covid, we don't know how far it will go, so we said to ourselves that we were going to do more, explains Lili: go to the end cycle, make our seeds (let certain plants go to seed to collect the seeds for the following year), and see how much we are able to produce. Cucumbers, we have already harvested 80. What if we doubled the plants? Since the start of confinement, we are three families to come and help themselves here, and not to have bought a single cucumber, a single salad. "
Bouquets, wheelbarrow, grind: program of an educational workshop
As for all those who, this year, have discovered a sudden passion for gardening or have improvised a micro-vegetable garden on their balcony, confinement has therefore, here too, served as a training course. Next year, a vegetable garden installed with the same application could " feed a few families who are in difficulty ", Lili hopes.
This is how over the weeks the subject of food autonomy, which Graines de Liberté does not claim, however, has carved out a place. So many green spaces in the city, and nothing grows there! “ While maintenance costs 40 euros per square meter: just to mow, it's a bit expensive… ”.
The Autonomie Alimentaire collective demands a right to garden for all on municipal green spaces
To " cultivate in the interstices ", and "to allow all citizens to be able to make their vegetable garden on the communal green spaces, in lawns or in fallow land ", Graines de Liberté launched in mid-June, with eight other associations of the Basque coast, all united in the collective “ Food Autonomy Basque Country ”, a petition . The document, addressed to the mayors of several communes of Labourd, aims to demand a “Right to garden for all” which would apply “ without financial request to communities ”. The associations argue that they have, together with the population, " the skills and the raw materials "To revive these unused spaces, cite the remoteness of nature and the biodiversity crisis, harmful to" our health and well-being ", but also examples of" food resilience through urban agriculture in Russia , Cuba, Spain. "
In parallel with the petition, the collective invested a wasteland, in a district backed by town and countryside, for collective and symbolic action which brought together some 70 people at the end of June: an operation to plant squash. We meet on site Laurent Bernays, the co-founder of the Graines de Liberté association, accompanied by Aboubakar, who arrived from Guinea a year ago, and who will begin training as a farmer-market gardener next September in Hasparren, at 20 km south of Bayonne.
We discuss at the edge of the land, which covers 5,000 m2. A few meters away stand the young squash plants. “ The land belongs to the agglomeration community ,” explains Laurent. We have an agreement to build an urban farm, but the course has not yet been launched… So we wanted to take action in the meantime. And we will share the squash in the fall with people from priority neighborhoods . "
Under his Vietnamese conical hat, Laurent denounces an overly reductive vision of urban agriculture, which only counts market enterprises. “ Everything that is citizen self-production is part of it! Anything that is an agricultural project in cities, whether on a roof, on a roundabout, here on a wasteland, must be encouraged and accounted for. On this wasteland, we will do education, and small production, but then we have to study how all the last areas of Bayonne can be kept as potential for the development of urban agriculture. "
"Each city must think about its food autonomy"
The co-founder of Graines de Liberté estimates that there would be in Bayonne, a city of 50,000 inhabitants, still “ 70 hectares of agricultural land ”, one of the challenges being to preserve them. But elsewhere, “ each city, each village must think about its food autonomy by installing farmers: this could even be financed by the State. For me, agriculture is common! It is often said that at Graines de Liberté, we do education, but education is agriculture today: the school garden, the prison garden, the neighborhood garden, the garden of the psychiatric hospital ( here, a list of shared gardens created for different audiences by the association ), all this contributes to a strategic stock of self-sustenance. "
“ When I created Graines de Liberté,” Laurent continues, “it was a time in my life when I was looking to find out where we could grow crops. I was going to the Red Cross to get food, I was coming back from a trip, I had no more money. And there was a 5-year wait for a private garden! I said to myself: my grandparents were peasants, I am going to cook. And I did. I started sowing in the roundabouts, in the leisure centers where I worked, in the city. "
Today, Laurent defends both the development of food autonomy and the change in the relationship with the land. Autonomy, because it does not exist in the Basque Country, where " about 90% of the land " is reserved for meat, cheese, for export, and where little market gardening often concerns peppers, also for export: “ For vegetables, we are fed by Spain, and organic Landes (…). We have to think about the strategic food stocks that have been abandoned. We have seen to what extent, in a tense flow, during the Covid our situation is precarious: the truck drivers just have to go on strike and it's over, we have nothing more to eat. "
"The system we are in pushes you to be all alone in your tractor like crazy"
The “ philosophical change in relation to the Earth ” - a vast program, of course - is its other hobbyhorse. Adept at meditation, he develops it in particular through workshops of full presence in the garden. “ When we water, we don't water just because it has to grow. We are in relation with water, water is the cloud, it also crosses us, it is there when we cry: the children understand that very well. "An intuition that then, in adulthood, we unlearn, no doubt also overtaken by" an imagination of the suffering of the earth ", and" this habit of our society of being relentless in what we do " , suggests Laurent.
“ Of course, working with flexibility in life is complicated. For a farmer, it's complicated, because the system we're in pushes you to be all alone in your tractor like crazy. But it can't work like that. We must get out of this system which puts people in competition, organic people and others, those who are helped by the CAP and others. It does not work. "
“My job is not to 'save the planet' and feed everyone. Urban agriculture also means finding poetics in life ”
And to add: " Permaculture will not solve the problem of hunger in the world, nor industrial agriculture: no system is resilient as long as this market system exploits everything, people, the land, and that the half produced is wasted. So my job is not to "save the planet" and feed everyone. Urban agriculture also means finding poetics in life, in our relationships. And get people out of isolation. Today, even more with all these new statutes of autoentrepreneurs, people are isolated. The workshops are collective. It's not quantifiable, but it's good for society. Here we have sown gourds, but we have sown joy. "
While waiting for a " policy which will make it possible to change the production system, the relationship to the land, to the living", a policy "which will recognize that we have made a mistake ", Graines de Liberté will therefore continue to cultivate its gardens. " It's the cities that are slow, people have been connected to the gardens for years, " Lili told us a few moments earlier, in the garden of the Brana school, while admitting the effect of confinement: she didn't never had so many proposals as this year to “come and help” on its various projects, and has been overwhelmed by requests for a permaculture workshop that it is due to give the following week. “ People want to know the BA-BA She slips. Because nothing is obvious. Like this wooden sign seen earlier in the school garden which reminds us: “ The earth is all we have, let's take care of it. "
