Pluktuin Schipluiden

Pluktuin Schipluiden is a pick-your-own garden on the edge of Schipluiden, laid out and tended by volunteers, where anyone can come and harvest vegetables, fruit, herbs and flowers.

Over about five years the volunteers have planted around 85 kinds of fruit trees, bushes, vegetables, herbs and flowers. Their website calls the garden biologisch, though it holds no organic certificate; what qualifies it here is that no synthetic fertiliser or pesticides are used. Sheep's wool is laid around the base of trees and plants to keep grass off the roots, nettle manure goes onto crops that need a lot of nitrogen, such as cabbages and courgettes, and pests are left to ladybirds, hoverflies, lacewings, parasitic wasps and hedgehogs. There are beehives with their own colonies, but whether honey is sold, we couldn't confirm.

Picking runs from about April to October, starting with the tulips. Volunteers are usually at work and know what is ready, so you harvest in agreement with them. You decide what your harvest is worth and pay that amount by scanning a QR code at the stand by the exit, or by bank transfer, which pays for upkeep and next season's seed. The garden lies along the ring road around Schipluiden, near the lorry park.

Garden waste goes into a compost system, a worm hotel and a bokashi pit, and the compost is spread back on the beds to feed the soil.