Gardener Simeon Guttenhöfer will guide you through the estate garden and explain his visions. Participation: 7 euros
The estate garden in Hugoldsdorf has been used for horticultural purposes for centuries. Before 1945, it was the estate's house garden. After the expropriation of the lords of the manor, the people who lived closely together in the two manor houses, many of whom had been expelled from the East, divided up the grounds into plots. After reunification in 1989, the house and grounds were abandoned and almost everything became overgrown. When the property was bought free in 2006 to turn it into a usufructuary property, the high-trunk orchard, the hedges and old groups of trees were removed, the garden was made usable for our own vegetables and the park was generously cut free. Paths were created and kept clear and individual places, a meadow, a tree, a seating area, were maintained.
I, Simeon Guttenhöfer, have been on site for three years now and have started to expand the vegetable garden, make compost to increase fertility, maintain the orchard and make the area even more open with two small suckler cows. So far, it's not about economics, but about practicing the art of farming down to the last detail as well as working for the love of it. The biodynamic way of working is an inexhaustible source of both. It links farm work to the cultural work of other people on site. What could modern agriculture look like? It needs points of view that arouse universal interest so that human labor does not have to be completely replaced by machines, and that allow the natural basis to be seen and experienced not as a dead matrix but as evolving beings. And it must be practical, manageable and still achieve an increase in fertility. These are difficult but unavoidable requirements. I think about this and try things out. You can see how such experimentation manifests itself on the guided tour. - And of course not forgetting the historic grounds and manor house.
