GROW Place Luxembourg | Transition, Permaculture and Soil
“We care a lot for the soil and give workshops and training to spread the knowledge about healthy soils,” says Tanja Walisch, Environmental Scientist at CELL.
The Centre for Ecological Learning Luxembourg (CELL) is one of GROW’s community champions that has distributed and placed 1,000 sensors on the ground.
Map of the soil sensors in GROW PLace Luxembourg. For a live map visit the link below.
CELL work is based on permaculture ethics and principles. The group also believes in citizen science, which is central to the GROW Observatory project. CELL’s action groups in the transition network have been initiating and accompanying participatory projects involving citizens since 2011 in Luxembourg. Last year, CELL initiated and conducted the first participatory science project with community gardeners and scientists here in Luxembourg.
“We felt GROW’s theme of soil and climate and the participatory aspect of the project fitted well with CELL’s purpose to take care of soil and climate, and build resilient communities,” said Walisch.
As for the data they have gathered from the sensors so far, they found that soil moisture has a high spatial variation. They’ve also found that soil moisture was varied considerably on different soils land use/exposition during the dry spell in June.
This was illustrated well by one of CELL’s participants who posted values from sandy and loamy soils during the very dry spell in June and realised that there was a difference of a little over 20% between his site (clay soil under a light forest) and a south facing field with sandy soil (7%) from another participant.
Moving forward, CELL has more projects in store. This summer, CELL will build an Earthship with the participation of volunteers. In 2020, CELL will organise the second edition of Transition Days. CELL will also go a step forward in the urban gardening field in developing edible cities and apply more permaculture in what they are doing.
