Our ecological balcony*

    Dear potential readers,

 It has been almost 20 days that I didn’t write to you, but I didn’t really forget you. Our meetings with the children of Atolye have become less and less since the school started and the kids are busy thinking and planning this upcoming,hard-working year. However, our activities in Atolye are being continued with great success and that’s why I am back! To share with you our last activity!

The last one month I have been incidentally keeping the large plastic bottles of drinking water at home,waiting for the ideal time to take them to the rubbish bin. For some reason, I had a denial in doing this chore, because I sunconsioysly believed that I could use these bottles somehow. After quite a patient search on the internet, I bumped into a picture where bottles quite similar to mine had been used for creating a small balcony garden. You will immediately say that this idea is quite obvious to come in mind, but to be honest I didn’t really thought of it. In Greece, we don’t buy such bottles from the supermarket, because we drink water directly from the tap, so probably that’s the reason why such an idea didn’t come in my mind right from the start. These plastic bottles, in combination with the forgotten and quite dirty balcony of Atolye, was the best combination that we could ever ask for…

we were about to make our own small balcony garden!

            Children arrived at Atolye ready to get dirty for such an activity. We already had our plastic bottles needed, some cleaning products, some rubbish bag, the fresh soil and of course our seeds for our tiny cultivation effort and we were ready to start.

The procedure started by throwing away what was unnecessary from the balkony and by keeping what we had to keep from the piles of magazines, newspapers and some souvenirs of the past that happened to be over there. Apart from that we had to throw the old coals used for the stove (somba) of Atolye and clean the floor from the dirt and dust. After this part of the activity was done, the most joyful part begin. Children opened the package of soil and poured it on the balcony using a plastic coverage to avoid making it dirty again. And then, some small kavgas started of who will take which seeds and who will take the plastic bottle which was best cut for becoming our pot. And the kavgas stopped when the children were playing by digging their hands 

on the ground, feeling this special dirt,                            

but this naturalness of the groud at the same time.

      We placed the seeds slowly slowly in the ground like it was a unique ceremony and we prepared small carton-flags of our names so that each of us could place his/her name on his/her bottle. I didn’t like this ownership that kids decided to have on (their) pots, so I didn’t really prepare this carton-flag, because to be honest I don’t feel that I own even the smallest piece of the nature.

Now our balcony is clean and beautiful and soon it will be filled with the existance of those seeds bringing fruits.nWe are expecting dere, ispanak and maydanoz to grow and for this reason we are watering them every day. 

I hope that we won’t wait that much, because these last 4 days of our activity children were always asking whether their seeds have given any fruits already!!!