What plants need this summer is love - and lots of it. While this is no mean feat, the idea of a communal allotment has quite literally borne fruit: red and yellow tomatoes, kale, cauliflower, beetroot, salad leaves, physalis, gooseberries, zucchini and pumpkin are currently being grown in the Medienfabrik in Munich in a kind of agricultural competition.
All tenants have something in common now: how to make the vegetables grow
The vegetables are looked after by the tenants renting on the Ganghoferstraße premises, with the "Medien-Gardening" initiative brought to life by the Munich Asset Management team at Allianz Real Estate.
The raised beds are made out of metal, protected from slugs and snails and filled with almost 23,000 liters of potting soil. Around 75 employees working on the Medienfabrik premises use these plots to see if they have green fingers. Allianz Real Estate has set up a water supply system especially for this purpose, as well as providing a large chest full of watering cans, mini shovels, rakes and rubber gloves. All beds are labelled with the logo of the company taking care of the plants inside.
In the meantime, first gardening successes haven't been a long time coming. "The budding gardeners visit the allotment up to three times a day. They try to trump competition using secret tricks of the trade, throw jealous looks at the neighboring plants and use organic fertilizers to make sure they don't fall behind", that's how asset manager Ulrike Heun summarizes the project.
However, the key thing to emerge from this initiative is that people who up until now didn't have much common ground suddenly find it easy to talk to each other. Working in the garden gives them an opportunity to slow down and take a breather.
Prospective tenants are equally enthusiastic about the idea and want to be sure that if they do decide to rent the premises, they'll get their own allotments for their employees. Allianz Real Estate has already come up with a new concept for next year, with a pumpkin contest to find out who has the "biggest one" scheduled to take place between the Medienfabrik tenants.