On Mondays, I walk through the garden. I usually try to do it when I get to work, to see if I need to water if it hasn’t rained, or to check how the tomatoes, lettuce or chard are doing. Yes, as you may have heard, we have a vegetable garden at work! And how lucky we are. When I tell my friends that I have a vegetable garden, they ask me if I live in a house, but no, I don’t, we have the vegetable garden at work, I answer.

The PCB community garden project allows me to have the contact with the land that I wish I could have at home. For those who love plants and only have a balcony and would like much more, or for those who don’t even have a balcony, having a vegetable garden at work is a real plus, and since it’s a team effort, it’s not a lot of work that all the same is very gratifying.

In addition to being able to grow our own vegetables, of which we now have quite a bit of variety, it has allowed me to meet people from the PCB from other institutions or other departments who have the same interests as me. It has also allowed me to discover new vegetables, like kale, which I didn’t usually buy, but now we’ve planted some, both red and green. The world of vegetables or aromatic plants is limitless; right now we have broad beans, beets, fennel, carrots, mustard, lettuce, endives and a few other plants. There is a sense of satisfaction that is difficult to explain.

The community garden is a project open to the entire PCB community (sostenibilitat-pcb@pcb.ub.es).

Personal experience of volunteer M. Gasull, from IRB Barcelona