A vegetable garden and orchard inside the Vatican walls, which historically provided food for the Pope’s household, is now cultivated using exclusively organic farming techniques. Source: EWTN News.
The private garden covers almost 400 square metres of cultivable land inside the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery property, where Pope Benedict XVI lived during his retirement and now reside cloistered Benedictine nuns from the Abbey of St Scholastica in Victoria, Argentina.
Sometimes known as “the Pope’s garden,” the vegetable plot “has always been a defining feature of the Vatican Gardens because the Vatican Gardens were originally created primarily for that purpose – to provide sustenance for the [Apostolic] Palace,” said Stefano Giampaolo, a forestry expert and head of the Gardens and Environment Service of the Vatican.
Mr Giampaolo explained that now the plot is more accurately understood as the vegetable garden of the Vatican Gardens – an area that covers roughly half of Vatican City at 23 hectares.
The Benedictine nuns at Mater Ecclesiae Monastery, who pray for the Pope, eat the fruit and vegetables grown in the garden and use them to make jams and other food preserves. The excess produce is given to a Vatican soup kitchen run by the Missionaries of Charity.
The move to biological farming techniques has been underway for several years, partly in response to Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’, Mr Giampaolo said.
According to Gilberto Bianchi, the gardener responsible for the orchard and vegetable patch since 2008, the Vatican has a “desire to respect nature” in how it cares for the plants and trees on its land.
But it’s far from easy.
“Clearly, running a completely organic vegetable garden presents challenges, partly because insects are aggressive, and we use natural predators in the soil to control them,” Mr Bianchi said. “No chemical fertilisers or insecticides are used.”
The expert gardener is part of a team of 35 gardeners and administrators who oversee the Vatican’s green spaces and provide the flower arrangements for papal ceremonies.
FULL STORY
Vatican vegetable garden goes 100% organic (By Hannah Brockhaus, EWTN News)
