1935 Kleingärtner und Kleinsiedler Calendar Book for Small Gardens

Original 1935 Der Kleingärtner und Kleinsiedler calendar book for small gardens and settlements. If you know Germans, small gardens is practically a way of life. Small garden towns are everywhere providing nearly anyone with access to a small slice of rural life, a little garden outside the city with a nice little weekend house so you can grow your own food and get out in the fresh air from time to time. So of course it has to be well regulated.

This book contains loads of information about how to set up your garden, the things you might grow or raise and even building practices for your garden house and coops and cages etc... I personally found the example of someone using an old train car as their garden house. It includes a number of examples of wrong and right ways to build things and I love that many of their reasons things are wrong is basically noted as too complex to build, hard to maintain or degrades more easily over time, or just plain ugly. I am paraphrasing there, but that's basically what it breaks down to.

There are also several pages of advertisements which I found interesting, including an ad for kleingartener hats, because of course they had a hat just for this, and a very interesting enameled cats head to chase away birds which, while hideous in appearance, would no doubt sell well nowadays. I have never seen an original in person, but this has given me a new mission.

The book is lightly used, and has several modifications made by the user, including some notes or glued in pages from other publications. There are some stains on the cover that look like they probably were doing some canning or food prep and the book was left in the splash zone. There is a loop for a pencil, but no pencil is included.

All in all, I found this to be an interesting look into the early days of this foundational element of German life which has survived 2 world wars and is running strong today. If you haven't been to a garden party, I doubt you even know real Germans. Just like if you go to Finland, you're probably going to be invited to a sauna.