field work station for de onkruidenier

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Mobile work station for collecting and processing weeds

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De Onkruidenier (The Weedgrocer) explores the use of urban vegetation in daily life. For The Weedgrocer, weeds don't exist: many 'unwanted' plants such as nettles, ramsons, or goosegrass are valuable edible herbs.

 

Overtreders W designed a mobile fieldwork station for The Weedgrocer, consisting of a field kitchen, a drying cabinet, a harvesting bench, and two workbenches. All pieces of furniture are designed as hand carts. The field kitchen and the drying cabinet together form a small shed in which The Weedgrocer can work sheltered from wind, sun, and rain. 

 

The fieldwork station is made of Dutch common weeds, showing as an object what De Onkruidenier stands for. The wood comes from the douglas fir, a tree originally from North America that was planted from the 19th century onwards in the Netherlands, because of the quality of the wood. Later on, the tree spread in the wild and is now a common Dutch species. The walls of the drying cabinet are made of withies from the white willow, traditionally used for wickerwork. The roofs of the drying cabinet and the field kitchen are made of linen cloth impregnated with a mixture of linseed oil, turpentine, and resin, products of the flax plant and pine trees.

 

The fieldwork station was launched at the palace garden amid an unmowed lawn, the way former Queen Juliana preferred her garden. During Ball!, the big summer exhibition of 2016 De Onkruidenier used it to produce (and consume) orange weed gin from weeds found in the garden. It has been traveling with The Weedgrocer on his expeditions throughout The Netherlands ever since.

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