Rosendals Trädgård

Sign at the entrance to Rosendals Trädgård

Today we visited Rosendals Trädgård and got to tour their grounds and eat lunch in their orchard. This visit was interesting to me (as every activity as been), but it has continued to be intriguing because we got to hear how they have worked as an organic garden. This whole trip I have been focusing on organic farming processes and the efforts that the producers we visit have put into being sustainable. I loved that we were able to see how the gardens create compost from the material in the gardens that they prune and recovery throughout the year. I've been a part of an engineering project where we designed a composting system, so this was somewhat familiar to me, but it was at a much larger scale than anything I've seen before. We haven't been able to see much of the composting that the other farms and gardens we've visited have had, so it was cool to see how they have divided their composting into many different small bins instead of continuing to rely on a huge composting pile that required a tractor to manage.

The picture to the left show two of the piles of finished compost that they keep at the gardens. Their composting process requires that the compost rest for around six months after it has gone through the thermophilic process that allows the proper bacteria and fungi to be selected for. They have had more compost than they need during a regular season so a lot of it does have time to rest under tarps like these. I'm glad that I had some background on how composting works but it is great to see it in action!