“Reaping What You Sow”

Award-winning documentary by Christian Beyer accompanies the establishment of Bamberg’s first pick-your-own garden

Since the Middle Ages, urban gardening has been practiced in Bamberg. These late medieval structures of gardening from farmsteads to adjacent acreage have been exceptionally preserved to this day, in the centre of Bamberg. The Market Gardeners’ District with its wide and open spaces, within the World Heritage site and its buffer zone does not only characterize Bamberg’s townscape, but also forms an important contrast to the densely constructed town of Bamberg. The Market Gardeners’ District together with the City on the Hills and the Island District is an integral part of the World Heritage site.

In 2016, Bamberg’s gardening tradition was included in the National Inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage. In the very same year, the local transition group launched its first pick-your-own garden on the outskirts of Bamberg with the help of the long-established gardener Heinrich Neubauer and Wilhelm Schubert, a former Manager of the Bavarian State Institute for Viticulture and Horticulture. For seven months, filmmaker Christian Beyer accompanied this development and captured how the group grew their own vegetables in organic quality and this changed their preception of food production.

The film entitled “Reaping What You Sow” is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PJ6BmU1-Tk. It was awarded at the Bamberg Short Film Festival in 2018 in the category “Made in Upper Franconia”.

Currently, the local transition group creates another pick-your-own garden within the historic Market Gardeners’ District.

Photo: Christian Beyer