OUR URBAN farm
Øens Have is an urban farm, a seasonal restaurant and a place for memorable events. Our vision is to make the city greener and ecosystems less alien, as well as to grow local communities around food and ecology.
Øens Have is a sprawling green oasis at Refshaleøen with vegetables, fruits, herbs, flowers, buzzing bees, clucking chickens, wild birds, insects and microlife. Increasing urbanization has caused us to be less in touch with nature, and cut us off from a natural understanding of cycles and ecosystems.
By creating an easily accessible, regenerative urban farm, we want to inspire urban citizens to reconnect through our weekly volunteer day, tours, workshops, courses for kids and food experiences and…..
A place of living for a range of different organisms
A community for curious people that are hungry after fresh and organic produce
A workplace where we together build knowledge and excitement for the interaction between city, nature, and food production
A green oasis in the middle of a concrete jungle A vision for a future with more room for nature in the city
Join us as a Volunteer and gain insights of working at an urban farm where we use regenerative and organic principles.
We strive to follow Organic and Regenerative practices. Øens Have is Certified Organic as of 2023;
Organic: requires the use of approved seeds, compost and natural fertilizers and restricts the use of GMOs and certain chemical additives.
Regenerative agriculture does not have a widely-accepted, official certification, but is more of a framework. The idea is to go beyond ‘sustainability’, because we don’t want to merely sustain our current, problematic systems. Instead, we want to regenerate by actually improving our soil health, encouraging biodiversity and creating circular processes which incorporate so-called ‘waste’
Examples of what we do at Øens Have:
Minimally disturbing or tilling soil
Allowing plants to flower for bees, then saving seeds
Feeding weeds to our chickens, then using their ‘waste’ as compost
Crop rotation and cover cropping
THE STORY BEHIND
Together with Denmark’s first urban farm Østergro, the greenhouse restaurant Gro Spiseri, the food community Fællesgro and an incredible number of enthusiastic volunteers, we have established Øens Have: the largest urban farm in Scandinavia. In collaboration, we work to promote ecology in the city through food experiences, fresh organic produce, community and communication.
In collaboration, we work to promote ecology in the city through food experiences, fresh organic produce, community and communication.
To create Øens Have, we transformed the plot of land that formerly housed B&W shipping company’s canteen into a lively and green urban farm. Our aim has always been to demonstrate how we can use organic practices in an urban environment to grow vegetables and flowers under the blue sky; how we can create a fantastic habitat for hens, honey bees, birds, insects and microorganisms right here, in the center of Copenhagen.
At the heart of our urban farm are two beautiful yurt-tents built by Lyse-Nætter. These tents house our lovely restaurant , hands-on workshops, insightful lectures, one-of-a-kind weddings and other events and green teaching courses. They are also a gathering space for the communal lunches we share with locals and visitors from all over the world at our weekly volunteer days.
In our minds, the purpose of urban farms is not to feed the entire city. Rather, a farm like Øens Have grows to build connections between the producer and the consumer, the rural and the urban, the Human and the non-human. We want to reintroduce our local community to the origins of the produce in our supermarkets, and offer the opportunity to be directly involved in the side of the food system we don’t normally see, living in a city.
We want to see dirty hands! And we want visitors to feel that Øens Have is both a hive of activity and a calming respite, where everyone is welcome. We invite you to come and enjoy this special space with us.
We look forward to welcoming you
