We are taught from a very young age which plants are beautiful, edible and useful and which are bad, destructive and should be weeded out. Most plants we produce only exist in monocultures, we ship them around the world, if they are to be sold in supermarkets they have to be immaculate, look exactly how people expect.
The systems with which we feed ourselves has become broken and we now have to face the consequences with climate change, disappearing biodiversity, world hunger and overproduction at the forefront of problems.
We think there is enormous potential present in our own backyards to start a change in how we relate to nature and food, in the form of weeds. But instead of utilising it, we fight it. We ignore it, pluck it out and poison it, so it doesn't destroy the images of well-kept backyards and streets. Weeds or “Unkraut” in German is disregarded despite the reality that some of these plants are in fact very versatile and efficient in use. They are very resilient, have an enormous reproduction rate, grow almost anywhere and we can process and use an extremely large percentage of the whole plant. Nettles, Ribwort or Dandelion are good examples of such plants that exist in our backyards.
Our product should act as a communication tool. We use a non destructive way to collect seeds and are assisting in spreading them where the wind couldn’t. We shift the focus to a plant which is often overlooked and spend the time to acknowledge its value. We want to indicate the potential the “Gutkraut” around us can have, not only for what it can do for us in an immediate fashion, but the systematic change it could bring to our thinking and communities.