The Garden Department began a year ago in the form of a self-organised, student gardening initiative. We exist as an outdoor classroom/garden on the campus of the Rietveld Academie and Sandberg Instituut, open for all students and staff to use.
The garden itself is of an ongoing, unfolding design that has organic fruit trees and bushes, vegetables, herbs and perennial plants at its core. In the garden is a large wormery that will compost the school's organic waste. We are in the process of cultivating plants from seed in the windows of various departments and developing a mushroom farm as an indoor branch of the garden in the Rietveld building's basement.
Over the next two semesters we will be organising a year-long Permaculture course that the Rietveld-Sandberg community can enroll on. We will also organise monthly events with invited guests, covering themes such as queer ecology, commons and communing, trauma-informed landscape design and medicinals for healing, social justice and climate change, inner and outer ecosystems, and quantum agriculture.
We usually garden together on Saturdays and/or Sundays and all are welcome to join.
The monthly theme is focused on maintenance of our outdoor worm-hotel and green compost as well as spreading mulch on our beds to prepare them for colder times ahead.
Caring for the worms, caring for the soil and caring for each other<3
We will provide fresh herb tea and there will be lunch provided by the Canteen.
Bring warm clothes!
On Wednesday November 13th we will begin weaving our willow trees into a willow dome! DesignLAB1 will together with Angie begin the project. We are excited to see what will emerge!
Come join us next Garden day 10 October!
Autumn-equinox is now past us, and as we are looking towards darker time, we still cherish the light and abundance together in the Garden.
Join us for this event by Garden Department alumni:
In July & August the academy is closed — but you can still come and enjoy the garden!
We invite you to come Garden with Wednesday May 22nd from 10h-17h! It’s time to weed the beds so that we can sow carrots, beets and much more in the garden
The Garden needs love and care! We hope you will join us in tending to the Garden, to prepare it for the upcoming warm season.
Do you long to expand your practice into soil? We invite you, and all interested, to join us in caring for our garden.
Grow a crop, curate a bed, celebrate the seasons, weave with willows — all the while being part of a living, creating ecosystem!
We’ll have our last gardening day of the year this Thursday Dec 7 from 11-15h.
The frost has arrived so we’re preparing the last beds to tuck them in for the winter.
Please join if you like! We will provide hot tea!
Friday the 1st of December from 14:00 @ the garden:
...a care practice / a way of stabilising in a world of chaos / an act of rebellion!
Join us for garden days or join our signal group for more pics, updates and spontaneous garden activities <3
We are excited to welcome back Linder van den Heerik to the academy this Thursday for a talk about permaculture. We will learn about permaculture as a design methodology and philosophy, discussing ways in which it can connect to artistic practices and the art academy. Linder has previously taught two successful permaculture design courses through the Garden Department with attendees across the bachelor and master programmes with teachers, staff and students.
For this session we will be joined by Marie Ilse Bourlanges and Liza Prins for a session on ethics and locality regarding textile production, specifically that of linen.
We are slowly getting the winter programme rolling, starting with a visit from Four Sisters Project on Tuesday the 17th!
Dear all,
We invite you to join the Garden Department however you desire. Are you a mushroom grower? Do you make your own compost? Maybe you specialise in bird calls or perhaps you can talk to plants. We want to encourage you to share and build your knowledge in a community-led environment, where there is space to learn from the abundance of teachings from nature itself.
During the final weekend of Chapter 5IVE, Het Hem will delve into the value of gardening. Maintaining a garden, or 'cultivating' a piece of nature has many metaphorical meanings. During this afternoon various speakers explore the impact of gardening on a personal, a social, an artistic and a philosophical level.
The Garden Department won the "Green & Water" prize from the Zuidas Duurzaamheidsprijs (Sustainability Prize).
Almanac #1 is fresh out of the garden and available now at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. Created by the Garden Department, Almanac #1 is a serial publication thats contents focus on the regeneration of soil, the community, the history of the Rietveld garden and the importance of process within a creative practice.
12:00 @ the Garden
The Garden Department is excited to announce the 2nd Permaculture Design Course (PDC) taught by Linder van den Heerik with guest teachers Joanne Malotaux and Saskia van der Linden
Happening in the Garden on Wednesday the 3rd of November from 15:00-17:00
Workshop/ ritual/ celebration /writing / coming together in the garden.
Experience the Garden as cycles, rhyhms, paces, synergies & physical manifestations…
Dear all living organisms wandering around the academy and Amsterdam!
Summer is coming to an end, school is starting and we still have to take care of ourselves and each other - luckily the Garden is full of wonderful colours, fruits, herbs and smells open fir everyone to enjoy and care for together ❤
Lecture by Marc Siepman, how lives on donation sinds 2014 with his family.
18:00-19:30, 1h lecture and 30mins Q&A
The Garden Department is excited to announce: A Permaculture Design Course (PDC) taught by Linder van den Heerik with guest teachers Joanne Malotaux and Saskia van der Linden.
Open to all current students, teachers and staff of the Rietveld & Sandberg, limited to 20 participants.
The Garden Department/Studium Generale/Centraal Museum Utrecht present:
17:00-18:00
Welcome to the Worms is hosted by the Garden Department.
The lecture takes place in the Theory stairs, with a hands on demonstration in the garden at the worm hotel.
In autumn we take care of the soil.
10:00-19:00 GARDEN + PAVILION
From 2pm until approx. 5pm we are working in and on the school garden. Feel very invited to come by and give a hand. You don't need to have previous knowledge about gardening.
GREEN OASIS - yes yes yes
Yess! It is raining. Seeds we put into the earth last week are already showing up as little green seedlings! Exciting.
6:00 PM - 7:00 PM
2019
ecology, commons, relationality
The Garden Department is excited to announce: A Permaculture Design Course (PDC) taught by Linder van den Heerik with guest teachers Joanne Malotaux and Saskia van der Linden.
Open to all current students, teachers and staff of the Rietveld & Sandberg, limited to 20 participants.
The word permaculture is a contraction of "permanent agriculture", later adjusted to "permanent culture". It is a design method and philosophy based on 3 principles: care for the earth, care for humans and fair sharing.
This course is a fully certified permaculture design course, after which you will receive the internationally recognized permaculture certificate. Spread weekly over 15 classes the course introduces you into a variety of topics and concepts of permaculture design and gardening.
Course modules include: Principles of Permaculture, Soil, Plants & Trees, Companion Planting, Hydrology & Climate, Design Methods, Ecology and Ethics.
- The course will consist of 15 sessions on Tuesdays, 13.00 - 18:00, starting 20 April
- Spring term: 20 April – 1 June
- Summer break (including possible camping trip to Linder’s garden)
- Fall term: 7 september - 26 October
If you want to follow the course, please make sure you have your Tuesday afternoons free before applying!
Please send your motivation letter no later than April 8 to: garden.department@rietveldacademie.nl
Please write PDC as the email subject, and include your name, if you are a student or staff, your department and year, confirm that you can follow all 15 sessions and write a short motivation about why you would like to attend the course. We hope to accommodate all interested students and staff, but only 20 participants can follow the course. We will notify you on April 12.
About the teachers
Linder van den Heerik:
Linder has been a driven and passionate permaculture educator since 2010. Through his activism and political engagement on topics such as climate, social justice and environmental protection, Linder discovered permaculture as an approach to many of the current day problems that plague the world we live in. In 2015 Linder started a permaculture market garden together with colleague Alex Schreiner, and in 2018 published a book in Dutch on permaculture design of smaller gardens.
Linder’s teaching style is interactive, associative and passionate, with a pragmatic and realistic approach, backed with a strong sense of ethics and linked to current day affairs.
Saskia van der Linden:
Saskia has taught in high schools and colleges as an art teacher and teacher trainer and recently joined the team to teach about ethics. Saskia approaches permaculture ethics from a standpoint of applied philosophy -- not just ethics as a vague goal of virtue, but a pragmatic approach that helps to hone our ways of thinking and doing and make ethical dilemmas easier to handle.
Joanne Malotaux:
Joanne studied biology and forestry at Wageningen University, then received her teachers degree and started teaching biology in high school. In 2020, Joanne made a big career change and together with her partner took over his family’s farm and transitioned it into an agro-ecological farm for the future, based on permaculture principles. In our course she will teach a module on ecology.
More about the course
This course is a fully certified permaculture design course, after which you will receive the internationally recognized permaculture certificate. Over 15 sessions the course introduces you into a variety of topics and concepts of permaculture design and gardening.
With a mix of extensive theory and an understanding of the workings of nature, we will offer you tools and insights into natural gardening and farming techniques and help you build up your plant knowledge and understanding of ecology, while constantly linking permaculture practices to the real world solutions they offer for designing a more sustainable and fair world for all.
The course will require you to study from textbooks as well. Linder will discuss with participants which textbook would suit them best. Sometimes there is homework involved, but not always. Towards the end of the course each student will all work on her/his/their own design projects and make a report on the end result that will be part of the examination.
Requirements for certification
- 80% attendance
- homework done
- design for individual projects
- group design for final group project
