Showing posts sorted by relevance for query European City Farm. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query European City Farm. Sort by date Show all posts

Tuesday, 16 September 2008

European Federation of City Farms Conference

The conference was excellent, very well organised with a great mix of lectures, workshops, trips to city farms and free time. There were around 70 people there, from Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden and Norway. The conference was held in English, but I had plenty of opportunities to speak German and Italian! The lectures were on:

The relevance of city farms to nature conservation fitted in with similar research that was done recently in the UK.

learning about history and nature by playing focussed on the role archeology can play in farm related education, farm museums are very popular in Germany. City farms in the UK are generally less likely to play a museum role.

the city seen as a playground was a slideshow demonstrating how different parts of a city can be play areas for children.

The workshop I attended was on creating youth exchanges between city farms in different countries.
The lectures and the workshops were held at the Panama City Farm and Adventure Playground. One of the things I liked about this project was that even the animals had adventure playgrounds! (Look at the goat!).
There were of course bunnies too, who I visited every coffee break.
German city farms are often combined with adventure playgrounds and also often have a Bauspielplatz (construction playgrounds where children build huts). In the UK, we are much more concerned (over concerned many of us would say) with risk and so we have fewer adventure playgrounds and those we have are less adventurous that the German ones.

We also visited four other projects which I'll post about in the next couple of days.

Thursday, 18 September 2008

Spielwiese Youth Farm, Weißig, Dresden

We had quiet a lot of free time during the conference of European City Farms. Some of used some of that time to visit the Spielwiese Youth Farm. This is a lovely farm for young people and children, in the hills around the village Weißig on the outskirts of Dresden. All the animal homes and play equipment are made from wood. The farm also owns several fields where the sheep, horses and geese graze. There are regular pony rides for the children, the horse below is Mona, an old Norwegian horse.


I posted a view of Weißig here on over Forty Shades.

Friday, 19 September 2008

Nickern Children's Farm, Dresden

On the last day of the conference of European City Farms, we went to the Nickern Children's Farm, which has loads of activities going on. The windmill in the photo above was constructed by a group of young people, entirely out of natural materials and is used to help children learn about wind power. The farm also has lots of animals, you can see photos of many of them on this page of their website (you can click on each photo to open up a whole new gallery.). I'll just share this photo of one of the many rabbits. This rabbit was very lively and insisted on trying to give me pieces of hay through the wire. Maybe it was trying to tell me something?

After we had looked round the farm we had a barbecue and danced to some Cuban music. You can read a haiku about the barbeque on Over Forty Shades here.

Wednesday, 17 September 2008

More City Farms in Dresden

During the conference of the European City Farms, we had site visits to a number of city farms and adventure playgrounds in Dresden.

The Johansplatz Abenteuerspielplatz is a lovely green adventure playground with a climbing wall, lots of cycling activities, a Bauspielplatz area (where the children can build huts etc) lots of trees and some rabbits. You can see their rabbits here and the photo above shows my favourite, not that you should have favourites amongst rabbits of course!

Eselsnest is a donkey farm and adventure playground with rabbits too. It's a very large area of sand and feels a bit bleak to be honest, but the animals are nice and they have lots of activities for young people. Eselsnest has a website here (in German only) but there are plenty of photos on this page here (click on each photo on this page to reveal a whole new gallery!).

Saturday, 7 January 2017

Hairy pigs and feisty goats at Gorgie Farm

We had a lovely wee visit to Gorgie City Farm today! We enjoyed meeting the wonderfully hairy Mangalitsa pigs for the first time! Here are the females

and here are the youngsters

You can find out more about this breed, which is an ancient European breed derived from the European wild boar here.

The pygmy goats were on fine form today! This group seemed quite quiet

but things were a bit more lively on the other side of the pen, at one point fighting broke out but I wasn't able to capture that on camera!



Meanwhile the sheep were mostly just eating

while in the wildlife garden the hazel catkins are already on display! Notice the wee red female catkin, which is showing well in this photo, though often overlooked