Building green cities with “Adopte ma tomate” a french application for collective gardens.
Discussion with Octavia Ivan, CEO of the start up and Romanian entrepreneur living in Toulouse (France) since five years.
1.How did you start this exciting project?
The start up Adopte ma tomate (e.n: translated as “Adopt my tomato”) was born by a happy accident. Actually, I participated in a Hackathon, it’s like a type of workshop and programming sprint in a collaborative way. There were different teams and I have chosen agriculture and alimentation.
This Hackathon called Wo’Mixcity is dedicated to the fight against global warming and also to promote the place of women in the digital professions. They had conditions like one woman has to lead each project and others can propose ideas, then during the weekend you constitute a team and you develop the project.
So I proposed an idea and I said if there is no one else willing to take over the project I would like to try. So we created Adopte ma tomate during the weekend.We didn’t have time to really develop the idea in only 3 days, but we started to think over it. At the end of this Hackathon we arrived at the second place and with that, we won a three weeks accompaniment with an incubator. So for me it was the right moment to start !
And why Adopte ma tomate ? Because, as a child, I was living in the countryside during the communist period, and having a vegetable garden and some chickens made the difference between being able to eat or not. After moving to Toulouse it was quite a shock for me to eat “hypermarket vegetables” and I realized the real value of knowing how to grow your own food. So our challenge is to help people gain their food independency back . And we are convinced we can do it by gardening in teams and not by ourselves. We want to give the possibility to people to easily create and manage teams of gardeners in order to create gardens.
2. How did you get to know this Hackathon?
I always say that there is a part of luck and opportunity that you need to take. During my alternated training of 2 years I all the time the word “Hackathon” and I was curious to know what was it. saw some Facebook posts about a Hackathon event, it seemed interesting, so I subscribed. It was just like that !
3. What is the philosophy behind your project? Do you want to create like community gardens or collaborative gardens?
I will try to explain because community can mean one thing for you and another thing for me. Actually, as I was saying, I have the belief that together we are stronger ! But when you have a garden, it’s quite a lot of work during the year for one person ! And those of you who tried gardening will understand what I mean. We noticed that there are people starting a vegetable garden because they are motivated and curious, but, unfortunately, they are not finishing the job. There are several reasons for that: people don’t know how to do it, they don’t have the time or it’s too much work for them.
So we questioned ourselves and active gardeners experimented with gardening. And we understood that, in order to make it last, you need to put together many people in one spot and therefore create a team. It means that you can rely on the others to share the work, learn new gardening skills or share the costs. In other words, it also means that you can go on vacation.
It’s important for French people, especially because in the summer, during two or three months, lots of people are going back and forth for vacations. We noticed that gardens created by a team of organised people had more chances to survive.
“We noticed that gardens created by a bunch of organised people had more chances to survive.”
This was one point. The other one is that I’m coming from the countryside. In the countryside of Romania everyone knows everyone, and everyone helps everyone. When I came here I didn’t find that. We live in an apartment building and we don’t know our neighbors. We don’t talk with our neighbors. And for me this is weird ! I thought like what the heck?
(laughs…) Gardening with your neighbours is one way of getting to know them :)
4. But you are in a city?
There is another important part to take into consideration about the inter generational connection. It’s coming again from my childhood. In my little village, older people were looking after younger people and there was something magical about it because an old person has a rich life experience to share and a way of looking at things and moments… This connection is diminished nowadays. I do miss my grandparents and the way they loved and respected people and nature!
The connection between generations is important is for us also because in most of the cities the owners are old persons and the gardeners are young active persons. So we really need to put them together if we want to help increase the number of vegetable gardens within neighborhoods.
5. Everybody can contact others in your web application. They speak together and they work together. They will share things. But for taking decisions, how does it work? Do they take decisions together?
This would be the ideal team.. But when you join a shared garden for the first time, you have many questions. It’s the same for the garden owners sharing their gardens. We wanted to make it easier for them. So we created a form to fill out for the garden owner. When a person s shares his garden there are some questions he needs to answer. For example, what surface does he want to share? How many persons does he want to have in his garden? How is the access? Is there any water source? Are there any tools available? Which kind of cultures will be there or are there already? And the last one, it’s about “nature buddies” which means that they will not accept chemical products in the garden. So the owner will validate one or all of these options and therefore defining the bases of the relationship.
Free access means that you can come to the garden whenever you want. You don’t need the owner to be there. When it’s not specified it means that the owner needs to be there. So it’s kind of clear.
The important part before starting the team and garden, is to define the conditions of working together (e.g. costs sharing, tools sharing, working schedule and frequency, crops sharing, number of barbecue…).
6. So organic gardens are not compulsory? Would you forbid chemicals in gardens?
We would never be able to forbid anything in someone else’s place. But we strongly advise not to use them. Our communication will accentuate this more and more in the future. How could anyone eat a vegetable they’ve sprayed with chemicals only few weeks before ? Our early adopters are already convinced and when they don’t know how it works they come and ask.
“Our early adopters are already convinced and when they don’t know how it works they come and ask.”
7. Do you think this kind of gardening is like a new trend or something old which comes back? I mean for centuries people gathered and shared a piece of land in a collaborative way.
It’s all of that. If we are curious about the history we can see that almost all countries originally were agricultural countries and then we had international trade, industries and consumption . The industrialization of all activities brought us money and a higher life quality, meaning we no longer need to do the“dirty work” ! If we look at France, for example, for many years after the Second World War, there was the need to feed the people. A system of mass production was established and then, we had companies like Mosanto coming with solutions for higher productivity. The problem was that we didn’t know how to stop it. We just go on and on ! Then machines came in and the manual work became less and less a trend.
I think it’s now the third or fourth generation which is not in contact with the land that is feeding us. Young people in the cities have no idea whatsoever how to plant a a seed or plant ! So yes, they start to realize that it’s not natural to be this far away from nature .
In the meantime, there is a real situation of climate change and all the impacts that it represents. We need to change how we do things!
So yes,fortunately, it is a trend which can help us to have more impact, and in the same time it is also a necessity ! I hope we can manage to gather more people together and find an alternative way to how we produce and consume food today.
For example, we are working with real estate developers who are building new ecological neighborhoods. And it’s interesting to see they are starting to ask themselves how they will use the land before building. How they will include productive parcels and green spaces.Their customers are active youths, when they buy a house, it’s not only for the construction ! They also buy a neighborhood, so they have to take this into consideration. We are starting to work on projects which will appear in a few years. It’s going to take time, and time is what we don’t have anymore !
“The industrialization of all activities brought us money and a higher life quality, meaning we don’t do the dirty work anymore !”
8. What is the next step in your project?
The application is available in France. Actually, it’s available in French and English, so anyone talking those languages could use it, but until now, collective gardens are available in France, Belgium, Switzerland and Germany. Once we become a reference in France the next step would be to cover Europe also.
What we want to show is that gardening can be easy. We provide a tool for helping the gardeners and making gardening fun. So that everyone can go for it. Imagine a city where you have green spots all over and people gathering around them to garden together. No matter what your salary is, what your job is, or what your language is, you are equal in the garden !
“No matter what your salary is, what your job is, or what your language is, you are equal in the garden !”
9. Yes, I think it’s not only for the vegetables, it is a new lifestyle. Imagine living with the nature and it’s seasonal rhythm. Depending less on the industrial consumer society. Having an ecological impact while producing your own vegetables and making new friends !
Adopte ma tomate is a tool for team gardening, but our vision of tomorrow goes beyond that. We dream of greener and more friendly city. Producing and consuming locally seasonal products means less and less pollution for packaging and transportation, less waste. This is one way to change the cities durably. Let’s do it together !
10. It’s great ! So what are the feedback ? Are there many people doing that already ?
We have over 4800 users all over France and over 120 gardens shared so far. Some of them are beginners, others are experimented but all of them are determined to garden! First, they learn how to garden. Second, they get to know their neighbors. On top of that, there are some amazing side effects like becoming sensitive to biodiversity and protection of nature. We are happy to see that, for our users, it becomes almost impossible to use chemical products in their gardens.
11. So it’s amazing. You started two years ago, can we say it’s growing really fast ?
It is growing slower than expected. But that is actually normal. Gardening is strongly linked to the seasons, to the level of “readiness” of the urban inhabitants and to many other factors. In hindsight of my experience I would say that there is still a majority of people not ready yet to try this experience. Let’s admit, it’s easier to go to Carrefour (en. famous french supermarket ) and buy vegetables. It’s about changing the way we do things and this is very difficult. So we have to be patient. We don’t want to be aggressive, even though sometimes we should be more aggressive because we don’t have time. Climate change is already here.
For those who want to make this change, we are here for them. Is this the best approach? We can’t be sure! But it’s our way of contributing to the bigger change.
