Learning to Grow Learning to Grieve: Fermented Plant Juice

How do we mourn while building futures?

This question guides Michelle Teran’s artistic work and research. It emerged from her long-term, practice-based experimentation at a community allotment garden in Rotterdam South, where she explored how acts of cultivation can become tools for collective reflection and care. From this perspective, engaging in culture is inseparable from growing: It means cultivating ideas, customs, and social behaviors alongside bacteria, soil, and plants.

Building on this approach, Michelle Teran will lead a curriculum of four interconnected gatherings at the Regenerative Garden of the Spore Initiative. Each meeting is structured around a practical technique and introduces participants to fermentation and composting methods used in natural farming. Working with locally available ingredients—plants harvested at different stages of their growth cycles, organic matter, rainwater, soil, and indigenous microorganisms—participants will collectively produce soil amendments that enhance microbial activity and support healthy plant growth. At the same time, these shared practices create space to name ecological grief and attend to the emotions that arise through close engagement with damaged and changing environments.

This series will be interesting for those engaged in natural farming, cultural and pedagogical work around nature, urban gardening projects and community support work. We encourage a continuous participation in the entire series.

The series starts in April, just before sunrise, while local plants are emerging and will focus on preparation of the Fermented Plant Juice (FPJ) – a natural liquid input made by fermenting fast-growing plants with sugar to extract nutrients and multiply beneficial bacteria. It is used to stimulate plant growth and soil health. FPJ is valued because it supports healthy, vigorous plants while improving soil biology in a gentle, sustainable way.

Each session of the series emphasizes care-informed ways of listening and responding—both to the land and to one another. Attendees will be invited to attend to what is growing, ready for harvest, in need of support, or dying away. Expect engagement with materials and their transformation, harvesting and cooking, recipes for people and soil, co-regulation with daily news, questions for reflection, exploratory walks, and other forms of collective action.

The insights and practices developed through these gatherings will be documented as “soft scores”: flexible sets of instructions or guidelines for collective action. The soft scores are designed to be responsive to the evolving dynamics of those involved—including not only people but also plants and other more-than-human participants.   

The soft score series will continue in June around the solstice, when the harvested garlic will be fermented. September centers on cultivating and cooking—but not overcooking—indigenous microorganisms. In October, right after rainfall, when the ground is moist, a public gathering and presentation will end the series. Visitors will spread the soil amendments, throughout the Spore’s garden. These amendments will boost microbial activity to prepare for the next growing season.

To enroll in the series and receive a schedule of the sessions, please contact us at participate@spore-initiative.org. Please explain why you would be interested to attend this series. The number of participants is limited to 15 per workshop.

English will be the main language of instruction, community facilitated translation into German is possible.

Dieses Praxis wurde von Michelle Teran gemeinsam mit Learning Grounds, einem informellen Netzwerk aus Rotterdam, das Künstler*innen, Kulturschaffende, Forscher*innen und Gärtner*innen zusammenbringt, entwickelt. Durch die praktische Arbeit mit Grünflächen schlägt Learning Grounds Alternativen zu trennenden Infrastrukturen vor. Mit dem Fokus auf skalierbare, verkörperte Praktiken fördert das Netzwerk neue Lebens- und Beziehungsweisen und verändert unser Verständnis von Kultur sowie unsere Vorstellung davon, wie die Zukunft gestaltet werden kann.