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01/30/2013
Macadam Gardens is a young innovative start up in urban agriculture. Our first activity was the launching of our on-line shopping site, for urban inhabitants to find innovative and design products, so they can have their own kitchen garden, in house, on a balcony or a terrace.
Our goal is to aware people to agricultural and environmental issues inside our cities, to make them discover initiatives and products in this domain. We try to encourage initiatives thanks to article and interviews on our blog.
Macadam-Gardens was born after Thomas and Cédric meeting in 2011. As he was in his last year in business school, Cédric was working on a new business start up about urban farms and Thomas, already working in renewable energy, was thinking about testing an urban greenhouse in Toulouse.
Conviced by the interest of urban farming, we decided to put together our efforts to launch Macadam-Gardens in july 2012, with Jean-Marie, our great webdesigner. 2 month later, Alexandre, agricultural ingeneer specialized in urban farming, joined Macadam Team.
We were not really biodiversity activists, but we deeply wanted to act positive in this way and that’s why we all bring together for the project. The coming spring, we are going to sell old variety plants. We have decided to use seeds from Kokopelli, an association which works to preserve food biodiversity and free movement for seeds.
In 2013, which projects do you have ?
We are planning a new version of our website, for next spring. We’re going to have 200 referencies, we have 30 for the moment, and we are going to improve website ergonomics and browsing. It takes a lot of time !
We consider producting and selling old bio vegetables species since april. We are going to grow in a greenhouse in Seysses (31) we have restored. We think urban farming is a real opportunity to preserve biodiversity and to save old plants varieties. The fact to produce directly in the place of consumption allowed to free ourselves from supply chain constraints and to choose other varieties, instead of the ones we usually find in commerce.
At last, we want to work with an urban farm concept and launch a concreet experimentation before the end of the year. We are looking for a big vacant lot in downtown Toulouse, ideally a rooftop, to install an urban greenhouse, to create a small research center on urban market gardening.
Does the word BiodiverCity inspire you ?
The word “BiodiverCity” is interesting because the two words (biodiversity & city) seem to be contradictory. Nevertheless, when you see the impact of intensive agriculture on nature (pesticides, …) in countryside, we can think that maybe cities could be the place to preserve biodiversity. For example, people often say that honey produced in urban hives is richer than the one produced in countryside, bees have more choices of flowers to gather.
By Macadam Gardens we think that city has a real part to plAy for biodiversity preservation. One has absolutely to bring back nature in city and to give back life to old varieties, sacrified for productivity priority. Short distribution networks, urban farming and reflection about cities for tomorrow are encouraging signs of “BiodiverCity”.
For example, we involved ourselves in Guerilla Gardening movement, selling seedbombs for urban inhabitants to green urban forgotten spaces. We have
also the project to plant vegetable in city to aware people to urban farming and initiate to gardening practices, adapted to urban area. With Macadam Gardens, our goal is that each urban inhabitants can reappropriate their consumption, understand seasonality issues and to find the unique taste of old vegetables species.
Wich BiodiverCity initiatives would you like to share with us ?
We meet a lot of associations working for urban agriculture. A lot of them make shared gardens, we follow their projects. We wrote an article about transition and the association « Toulouse en Transition ». Projects about gardening bring together a lot of people from different universes and cultures. There’s a true solidarity that create beautiful initiatives like a rooftop garden in Toulouse.
BiodiverCity, it’s also bringing together different people for solidarity.