Citizen Science
Cooperation with gardeners is an important part of our research. With citizen science as a research method, we want to integrate diverse knowledges and expertises of gardeners into the research results.
Together with gardeners, we investigated the harvest success of selected plants (strawberry, tomato, pumpkin, cucumber and/or pepper plants) in their own beds. They documented when their plants (1) developed buds, (2) flowered and (3) bore fruit. They also measured the size of the fruits at harvest. This makes it possible to obtain research data from horticultural practice. In 2020 and 2021, gardeners examined a total of 154 plants. We are still evaluating these data, but we can already see that 70 of these plants did not produce a harvestable yield and 22 of them did not produce any fruit at all.
In the second phase of the citizen science research, we will discuss the results and possible interventions together in summer 2023 and adapt them to practice.
