As we really enjoyed our time visiting lots of interesting places around Tartu, we decided to leave a new post to share some stuff we really considered to be worth mentioned here.
We came to visit an selforganized garden-project, called “Vaksali kogukonna aed”. They are located at a nice spot next to the mainrailwaystation. The place is surrounded by an old building which was once used as police station and now works like kind of temporary use. Basicly they started growing and constructing the garden just at the beginning of this year but there´s already quite a lot to discover. Due to the fact that it is open for everybody, you can just go there and built, plant or construct new thing or join and organize activities. There is also a compost-station and greenhouses out of recycled materials and an oven made of clay.
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When we arrived we were lucky to join an apple-recycling-event. Thus we supported the people organizing the event by producing apple jam and more than 150 litres of apple juice. In order to understand this project here a short description: In general in atumn there are always lots of apples in Tartu, this year without special reason there were even more than usual, so that nobody is able to use them all. Therefore they just fall down from the trees and lie everywhere. The idea was then, instead of becomming “trash”, use all these apples for useful things. So people from the garden-project spread the message that all these apples can be brought to them. They told us that at the end they got even more apples than they had expected. After all we could help them cut a crazy ammount of apples for the jam and bottling the fresh pressed juice.
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In the streets we also saw sometimes boxes full of apples which peoplecollected in their gardens for everybody to take away for free. Nice idea!
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More Dumpsterdiving
Near the mainrailwaystation we were also lucky to find a good place for dumpsterdiving (I´ll try to mark it in the list).
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We found tomatoes, aubergines, watermelon, pears, cucumber, bananas, grapes and more. Even very nice and useful baskets to carry all the food by bike.
The weird thing about the tomatoes is that these were the local ones but due to the fact that they´re quite more expansive than the imported ones, people don´t buy them they end up in the trash as leftovers. But good for us, we could use them all for the pizza-party at friday evening at the garden place. We used the handmade oven to prepare very delicious pizza and also found some opportunity to tell and inform a bit about the biketour.
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P.S. Thanks a lot to Jiri for organizing the event and for giving us the possibility to join
More interesting recycling spots
Talking to people we heard there is another old reused fabricbuilding. So we went there to find out what people are actually doing there. The first place we found is a small work- and repairshop where everybody can come to not only fix but also try to improve things at the bike. People who want to create a special type of bike construction can get support, advice and useful tools, machines and stuff there. See
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Moreover theres is right next door the printing museum. It´s an old soviet fabric, now rented by some artist and transformed in to museum. In times of modern offset-printing-machines, they still use different kinds of old ones which work manual. The machines come from all ocer the world and they are trying to keep them alive.
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They also do a lot of recycling work there. For instance they use old sovietic “overproduction” books, which nowadays nobody wants to read anymore to make new things out of them. Also the old clothpieces which are used for cleaning the ink of the printing-machines, get a new live as bookcover.
All in all it was a good opportunity for inspiration and definetely a good way to see how many things can be be used and reused avoiding more trash.
More Tartu-adventures
We were also surprised when we visited an outside kindergarden where the kids spent their time outside all year and about the a very fancy pirate-looking wooden boat, which is built just out of natural materials.
People we met were welcomming us very openminded and pleasent, the boatcrew invited us joining a boattrip and the sauna, too.
We are very glad we could finally stay at a dry place (thank you Rea) since it was raining so much during the trip to Tartu. We also want to thank Kertthu a lot for sharing nice places in the city.
Meet us in Tallinn or on the road ;)