Do you have a garden?
Is it common to have gardens in your country?
What are people growing there?
Here most people have one, except for those living in big cities.
Growing food became very unpopular in the last 30 years but now is slightly raising in popularity among young German families.
People in cities can also rent mini gardens, called "Schrebergarten".
I grew up in a house with a big garden and I want to have one in future again.
In this thread I will just talk about plants and trees that I have always loved and want to live with again.
Pic 1 is a sweet chestnut tree.
Sweet chestnut trees are native to warm areas around the Black and the Mediterranean sea and their fruits were eaten in the Caucasus already in prehistoric times.
Later, the romans cultivated them all around their empire for the food with the very high nutrients and wood, and they even brought the sweet chestnut to the warm areas of south Germany around the Rhine river, where I grew up.
The fruits have a sweet and elegant flavour, they can be roasted, cooked, made to flour for bread and even sweets like sweet chestnut cream.
Pic 2 is how the chestnuts look when they fall down and are ready to be harvested.
Children love to go outsides to take them home. We have entire forests made of sweet chestnut trees in south-west Germany which even was the main resource for food at some point in the past for the poor people.
If you have ever smelled fresh roasted sweet chestnuts on a cold winter day or the dark honey that bees make from their blossoms, you know why I love them so much.
Since the climate is getting warmer, Germany is considering to replace many of our spruce forests with chestnut forests, because the sweet chestnut loves the hot and dry weather.
Pic 3 is a quince tree.
They don't need much to survive and they like the German climate, hence they are (or were) very common in our gardens. The trees don't grow much taller than 3 meters and yet it easily produces up to 50 kilograms of fruit, once they are grown up.
The fruits are rather hard so they need to be made into jam, jelly or juice.
Personally, I love the fresh pressed quince juice the most.
My grandparents planted a quince tree for me when I was born, maybe that's why I feel so close to it. My grandma used to make super tasty cookies out of them for Christmas.
RIP grandma.
