At a glance
- A rental garden is a ready planted vegetable plot you lease for one season. No club, no shed, no multi year commitment.
- The season runs from mid April to mid May · CW 16 to CW 20 until late October or November · CW 44.
- More than 20 vegetable crops are already in the ground when you take over. Part of the plot stays free as a wish bed for your own ideas.
- Budget 2 to 3 hours a week for the small garden, 4 to 8 hours for the family garden.
- Tools, water and watering cans are on site. You bring shoes that are allowed to get dirty.
- Anyone growing vegetables for the first time learns more in one season than in three years of reading.
There is a moment in February when you stand in the supermarket in front of a cucumber flown in from Almería and think: I could do that myself. And then the rest of the thought arrives. Where to find the space. How to prepare the soil. What to sow when. Whether the whole thing drowns in weeds in July because two weeks of holiday got in the way.
That is exactly where the rental garden comes in. You do not get a piece of bare field, you get a bed with something already growing in it. Someone else has ploughed, fertilised, marked out the rows and set the young plants. In May you take over a plot that is already working, and you carry on from there.
It sounds like a shortcut, and to some extent it is. The real service is a different one though: a rental garden removes the two hurdles that most vegetable growing plans fail at. The space and the start.
What a rental garden is, and what it is not
A rental garden is a plot on a larger field, usually on the edge of town, run by a farmer or a market garden. The field is machine prepared and planted in spring, then divided into plots and let out for one season. From handover, your piece is yours: you harvest, you water, you weed, you decide.
Sizes are tiered at most providers. Around 20 square metres to get started, about 45 square metres as a small garden, roughly 90 square metres as a family garden. The difference is not just the yield, it is above all the time it takes.
What you do not get is everything that defines a German allotment. No shed, no fence, no water tap of your own, no club membership, no eight year waiting list. And no obligation beyond the season: it ends in October, and whether you come back next year is something you decide over winter.
How it differs from an allotment
An allotment is a second home: a shed, a place to sit, fruit trees, neighbours you know for decades. In return it ties you to a set of rules, to communal work days and to a waiting list that in Munich or Hamburg easily runs a decade.
The rental garden is the opposite: no ownership, no structure, nothing to hand down. It is one season of vegetable growing that closes again in November. For many people it is the trial run before the allotment. For others it is exactly the right dose, and stays that way for years.
How a season runs
Handover in spring
Between mid April and mid May · CW 16 to CW 20 you get your plot. It is ploughed, fertilised and planted. Usually there is an introduction on site: where the water is, where the tools are kept, what grows in which row.
May and June: keeping up
July and August: harvesting instead of tending
Now the ratio flips. Courgette (Cucurbita pepo) delivers every other day, bush beans and peas come in waves, chard regrows as soon as you cut it. The soil is covered, the weeds have no light left. You water when three days have passed without rain.
September and October: the heavy part
Handing back in late autumn
In late October or early November · CW 44 the plot is cleared. Plant remains go on the compost, canes and nets go back into storage. After that the farm takes over again.
What is already in the bed
This is the point that separates a rental garden from an empty leased field: at handover, more than 20 vegetable crops are already sown or planted. The mix is chosen so that something ripens across the whole season instead of everything at once in August.
Typical crops are carrot, kohlrabi, cucumber, lamb's lettuce, parsley and dill alongside the ones named above. On top of that, many providers leave a wish bed: a strip that stays empty so you can sow whatever you are missing. If you already know you will not be happy without tomatoes, that is where they go.
Do not fill the wish bed completely
The temptation is to cover the free strip entirely in May. Leave a third of it empty. In July you will have a gap where the peas came out, and then you will want to sow lamb's lettuce or radishes there for autumn. A full bed in May is an empty bed in October.
What it costs in time
Two to three hours, unevenly spread
For 45 square metres providers reckon with 2 to 3 hours a week, for 90 square metres with 4 to 8. Those numbers are right on average and misleading in detail: in May and June you need considerably more, from August considerably less.
In practice that means two visits a week, one of them at the weekend. Anyone who only turns up every fortnight does not lose the harvest, but does lose the overview. The weeds are the reason, not the vegetables.
Holidays are the question that comes up most often, and the answer is more reassuring than expected. Vegetables in open ground root deeply and largely look after themselves. An established bed usually survives two to three weeks without you unharmed. What you lose is ripe courgettes that turn into clubs, and lettuce that bolts. What you do not lose is the crop.
The first night below 5 degrees
From late September · CW 39 the nights turn cool quickly. Squash and beans react sensitively, kale and beetroot do not. A layer of horticultural fleece over the cold sensitive rows costs little and extends the season by two to three weeks. Frost here is not an emergency, just a date worth knowing.
How much actually comes out of it
Honestly counted: a 45 square metre garden covers a large share of a two person household's summer vegetables. A family garden of 90 square metres carries a household of four through the season and leaves enough for preserving and freezing.
What a rental garden does not deliver is year round self sufficiency. There is not enough space for storage crops in quantity, and there is no winter: in November the plot is cleared. If you want to eat your own potatoes in February, you need more ground and a place to store them.
What surprised me most was not the quantity but when things arrived. I had kohlrabi in June and kohlrabi in October, and they were two completely different vegetables.
What people say after their first season
Where to find rental gardens
The provider we looked at more closely for this is meine ernte. The Bonn based company has been renting out planted vegetable gardens since 2009 and now runs around 30 sites across Germany. It started in 2010 with six cities in North Rhine-Westphalia and Hesse.
The list of sites is spread across the country and almost always sits on the edge of a larger city: Aachen, Bochum, Bonn in several locations, Bottrop, Brühl, Dortmund, Düsseldorf with three fields, Essen, Herne, Frankfurt, Wiesbaden, Böbingen in the Palatinate, Stuttgart-Möhringen with two fields, Kiel, Hamburg with Barsbüttel and Norderstedt, plus three sites in Berlin. If you live in or around one of those cities, the drive is usually under half an hour. That is the number that matters: a garden you drive 45 minutes to will not get visited in July.
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Too late for 2026, not for 2027
As of late August · CW 34 the rental gardens for the current season are all taken. If you want a plot in 2027, put your name on the waiting list and you will be notified when booking opens or a plot frees up. The moment to note that down is now and not in March: the popular sites fill early.
Who this is worth it for
Four cases where a rental garden fits
- You have no ground of your own
A balcony is enough for herbs and tomatoes, not for potatoes and squash. A rental garden is the shortest route to real open ground growing, without a property and without a club.
- Children should see where food comes from
The educational value is hard to overstate and cannot be substituted. A child who pulls a carrot out of the soil themselves will also eat it.
- You want to know whether gardening suits you
Before you join an allotment waiting list or buy a plot of land, one season of rental gardening is the most honest test. It costs half a year and no commitment.
- You already garden and want more space
If your raised bed on the terrace has hit its limits, this gives you the room for the crops that need it: potatoes, brassicas, squash, onions.
What a rental garden cannot do
To keep the arithmetic honest, the limits belong here too.
You do not decide what gets planted. The farm chooses the planting plan, usually weeks before you see the field. If you want to grow one specific tomato variety, the wish bed is the only place for it.
You do not build anything that lasts. No berry bushes, no fruit trees, no perennial herbs. Everything you plant has an expiry date in October. Anyone who wants rhubarb, asparagus or a currant bush is in the wrong place.
And the soil is not yours. You can look after it for a season, but you never see what your compost habits would make of it over five years. For many people that is the point at which they eventually move on to an allotment after all.
It carries on after the season
The plot is gone in November, what you learned is not. And winter is when the gardening continues at home: sprouts on the windowsill, a propagation kit for sowing indoors from February, seed for next year's wish bed. The same provider runs a small shop of its own for that, with organic seed, propagation supplies, sprouting and mushroom growing kits.
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And then: write it down
The difference between a first and a third garden season is not strength and not tools. It is remembering what happened when last year. When the lettuce bolted. Which week the courgettes started. Which row was planted too tightly.
That is exactly what Gartenkern is for. You set up your rental garden as a garden, divide it into areas, record the plantings and keep a diary through the season, with photos. Next spring the open question is no longer whether you planted too early, but the date on which you did it. And if you rent a different site the following year, or end up with an allotment after all, the knowledge travels with you.
A season in a rental garden is half a year that tells you a lot about your own rhythm. The rest is note taking.
Common questions about rental gardens
When can you book a rental garden?
Booking for the coming season usually opens in winter, often from January. The popular sites are taken by spring. If the season has already started, the provider's waiting list is the only route, and plots that free up are allocated through it as well.
How much time does a rental garden take per week?
For a small garden of around 45 square metres, budget 2 to 3 hours a week; for a family garden of around 90 square metres, 4 to 8 hours. The workload is higher in May and June, because weeds grow faster than the vegetables. From August it drops noticeably and the work is mostly harvesting.
What happens to the garden while I am on holiday?
An established open ground bed copes for two to three weeks without you. The plants root deeply enough to supply themselves with moisture for the most part. Ripe courgettes and cucumbers grow too large in that time and lettuce bolts, but the bed as a whole stays intact. If you can, ask a neighbouring plot holder to water once during a heatwave.
Do you need your own tools for a rental garden?
No. Hoes, rakes, spades, watering cans and a shared water tap are on site. What you should bring is gloves, sturdy shoes, a knife or secateurs for harvesting and a basket or crate for the way home.
Is a rental garden worth it financially?
If you simply set the market value of the harvest against the season's rent, the larger gardens usually break even and the small ones roughly so. The real return is elsewhere: in vegetables you cannot buy that way, in half a year of moving about outdoors, and in the knowledge you have afterwards. If you look purely at price, the shop is cheaper.
What is the difference between a rental garden and an allotment?
A rental garden is leased for one season, arrives ready planted and ends in autumn. There is no club, no shed, no communal work duty and no multi year waiting list. An allotment is permanent and allows fruit trees, shrubs and a shed, but ties you to a set of rules and, in large cities, to long waiting lists.
Sources and further reading
- meine ernte: rental garden concept and sites
- meine ernte: frequently asked questions about rental gardens
- Our plant profiles for the crops in this article: courgette, bush bean, kohlrabi, squash, chard
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