In spring, when you sign your lease and hold the key to your own plot for the first time, your head is full of plans: the first bed, the tomato variety you've always wanted to grow, mild evenings in the Laube (garden shed). A federal law is probably the last thing on your mind. And yet this one law is the reason you can rent your garden so cheaply in the first place, the reason nobody can simply turn you out, and the reason no weekend house is going up next door.
The Bundeskleingartengesetz (Federal Allotment Garden Act), BKleingG for short, is a surprisingly short, quiet law. It protects you more than it hems you in. It's worth understanding once, calmly, not as required reading, but so you know what you can rely on and where your freedom ends. We'll go through it in order: first the history, then, paragraph by paragraph, the parts that really matter for your garden.
How Gardens for the Poor Became a Law
Allotment gardens are far older than the law that governs them today. Their earliest forebears were gardens for the poor: small plots where families with no means could feed themselves on potatoes and vegetables. Gardens like these already existed in 1797/98 in Kappeln on the Schlei in Schleswig-Holstein, encouraged by Landgrave Karl of Hesse-Kassel; by 1826 they could be found in 19 towns.
The name many people still use goes back to a misunderstanding. Schrebergarten is named after the Leipzig doctor Moritz Schreber, who in fact founded neither a club nor a single garden. He died in 1861, and only afterwards was a site named in his honour. The first Schreber club was founded in Leipzig in 1864 by the headmaster Ernst Innozenz Hauschild, at first as an educational society. The gardens themselves were laid out by someone else again: the retired senior teacher Heinrich Karl Gesell, some four years later. Children's beds became family beds, and family beds became the first fenced Schrebergärten.
The gardens really came into their own in hard times. During the First World War, when food was scarce, your own plot became a question of survival for many. The state responded: it capped rents and required towns to provide land for growing. On 31 July 1919 those emergency measures became the Kleingarten- und Kleinpachtlandordnung (Allotment and Smallholding Lease Act), passed on the same day as the Weimar constitution. It was the first nationwide rule of its kind, and it brought in from the start what still forms the heart of allotment law today: a cap on rents, real protection against eviction, and a tenant's right to have the lease extended.
That 1919 act is seen as the true forerunner of today's law. Over the decades a patchwork of rules grew up, until lawmakers finally tidied it into one: the Bundeskleingartengesetz was announced on 28 February 1983 and took effect on 1 April 1983. Since then it has been the nationwide foundation, and at heart it is still true to the spirit of 1919: affordable, secure, communal.
What the Law Calls an "Allotment Garden"
Before the law protects anything, it first says precisely what it is talking about. On that definition an allotment garden is a garden that serves you for non-commercial horticultural use, in particular for growing garden produce for your own needs, and for recreation. This dual purpose is the key: growing and recreation, the two together. A purely ornamental garden is not an allotment garden in the eyes of the law, and neither is a pure leisure spot with a lawn and a barbecue.
Second condition: your garden has to sit within an Anlage (a garden site), where several individual gardens are grouped together with shared facilities such as paths, play areas or a clubhouse. Only when both of these conditions are met does a piece of land become an allotment garden. A single garden standing on its own, with no connection to a site, doesn't count.
The Dauerkleingarten (permanent allotment garden) plays a special role. This is an allotment garden on land that the local development plan expressly designates for permanent allotments. The only difference from an ordinary allotment garden lies in this designation by the municipality, and it gives the Dauerkleingarten the strongest protection of tenure the law provides.
Not every rented piece of garden is legally an allotment garden. The law expressly carves out five cases, among them Grabeland (digging land): a plot that, under the contract, may be planted only with annuals. Because permanent crops and a Laube (garden shed) aren't envisaged there, the special protection of the Bundeskleingartengesetz doesn't apply. So it's worth a look at your contract before you settle into a false sense of security.
The "One-Third Rule": the Best-Known Clause That Isn't Actually in the Law
Hardly any rule gets quoted around the allotments as often as this one: a third of your plot must be used for growing fruit and vegetables. And hardly any rule is so thoroughly misunderstood. Because the word "third" doesn't appear even once in the whole Bundeskleingartengesetz.
What the law actually contains is the open-ended term kleingärtnerische Nutzung (allotment-style use). Exactly what it means was spelled out by the Bundesgerichtshof (Federal Court of Justice), most importantly in a ruling of 17 June 2004. And the court was far more relaxed about it than popular belief suggests: a site does not require half its area to be given over to growing. It's enough if growing for your own needs clearly helps to define the character of the site, which as a rule can be assumed when at least a third of the area is used that way.
"As a rule" means the third is a rebuttable assumption, not a rigid limit. The court itself names reasons why less might do in a given case: an unusual plot size, an awkwardly shaped piece of ground, or soil that in places won't take vegetables at all. And what gets judged is the character of the site as a whole, not your single plot held under a magnifying glass.
The Third Only Becomes Binding Through Your Club
And if the law doesn't mention the third at all, why does it turn up in so many garden bylaws? Because the associations took the court's reading and wrote it into their Rahmenkleingartenordnungen (model allotment bylaws). These state that fruit and vegetables are to be grown on at least a third of the area. Your lease, which refers to those bylaws, is what makes the requirement binding for you.
So the chain runs like this: the law names the purpose, the court interprets it, the association casts it into bylaws, and the lease turns it into your obligation.
In practice there's a neat rule of thumb that goes with it, the Dreiteilung (the rule of thirds): one third for growing, one third for recreation, one third for paths, the Laube and a terrace. Usually only the growing third is actually binding. How you split the other two thirds is largely up to you. Growing here includes fruit trees and shrubs, vegetables, herbs and berries, in a raised bed or a small greenhouse if you like. A plain lawn and purely ornamental beds, by contrast, count as recreation, not as part of the growing third.
How strictly the growing third is enforced varies from region to region and association to association. In Berlin, for instance, the regional gardeners' association decided in 2005 that at least ten percent of the plot must be "under the spade", meaning actively worked vegetable and herb beds. That's a Berlin specification and doesn't apply nationwide. What counts on your own site is written in your garden bylaws.
The Laube: 24 Square Metres and No Permanent Home
Unlike the third, the numbers on size are there in black and white in the law. Two of them are worth knowing.
First, the garden size: an allotment garden should be no larger than 400 square metres. That's a guideline (a Soll-Vorschrift), not a hard ceiling. Justified exceptions and older, larger plots enjoy protection of their existing size. Second, the Laube: what's permitted is a shed in simple construction with a footprint of at most 24 square metres, including a covered sitting area. People love to skim over that last clause. The covered sitting area counts towards the 24 square metres, it isn't added on top.
And then the sentence that sparks most of the disputes: by its very nature the Laube must not be suitable for permanent living. The law deliberately speaks of suitability, not of an outright ban, but settled case law draws a clear line from it: making the garden shed your permanent home is not allowed. Staying over at the weekend, spending your summer evenings out there? No problem. Being registered as living there and actually residing? That's another matter.
Living in the Laube full time, or using your plot for something other than gardening, is no minor slip: it's one of the grounds on which your landlord may end your lease. Anyone who loves their garden keeps the shed what it's meant to be: a shelter, not a little house. In building law, moreover, the 24-square-metre allowance of allotment law does not replace a building permit you might otherwise need; the rules of the Baugesetzbuch (Federal Building Code) still apply.
But what if your Laube is older and bigger? Then protection of existing rights has your back. Sheds that were lawfully built before 1 April 1983 and exceed 24 square metres may keep being used unchanged. The new federal states (the former East) have their own parallel rule: there the cut-off date is 3 October 1990, the day of reunification. If a right to live there existed back then, it stays. The landlord may, however, charge a reasonable extra fee for it.
The Rent: the Fourfold Cap That Keeps Your Garden Affordable
Here lies perhaps the loveliest gift the law makes you. The rent for an allotment garden may be at most four times the local rent for commercial fruit and vegetable growing, measured against the total area of the site. Put another way: the price is tied to what the land earns a market gardener, not to construction or land prices. That's exactly why an allotment garden often costs only a few hundred euros in rent a year, while a comparable piece of building land would be unaffordable.
Allotment rent is tied to what vegetable land yields, not to the value of building land. That one sentence in the law is why a garden of your own doesn't cost a fortune.
Increases are reined in too. The rent may be changed at the earliest three years after the lease was signed, or three years after the last adjustment. And if your landlord raises it, you get a right to terminate in return. So you're never simply at the mercy of an increase.
Protection Against Eviction: Why Your Garden Is Pretty Safe
If any part of the law deserves to be framed in gold, it's this one. An allotment lease can't be ended the way you cancel a newspaper subscription. First the form: every termination must be in writing, not by email, not spoken over the garden fence, but as a signed letter.
Without notice, or "with immediate effect" in everyday terms, you can be given notice in only two exceptional cases: when you're at least three months behind on the rent and still don't pay within two months of a reminder, or when you (or people you allow onto the plot) disturb the peace of the community so seriously and persistently that the landlord can't reasonably be expected to carry on.
Everything else is an ordinary termination, and that's possible only on an exhaustive list of six grounds. This list is the heart of your protection: if a reason isn't on it, no notice may be given.
- Breach of contract: despite a warning you carry on using the plot for something other than allotment gardening, or you seriously breach your duties, for instance by living there permanently, subletting without permission, or letting the plot fall into neglect.
- Reorganising the site: the termination is needed to shrink gardens down to the guideline size, improve paths, or lay out play areas and parking.
- Own use: the owner or a relative wants to garden the allotment themselves and no other suitable land is available.
- Commercial use of the land: planning law permits a different use, and the owner would suffer significant disadvantages without it. Both conditions have to apply together.
- Development plan: the land is soon to be put to the different use laid down in the local development plan.
- Public project: the land is soon needed following a planning approval procedure or for the purposes of the Landbeschaffungsgesetz (Land Acquisition Act).
Even then you're tied to fixed dates that buy you time: as a rule notice can only take effect on 30 November of a year, and depending on the ground it must be declared as early as February or August of that same year. And with a fixed-term lease, own use and commercial use of the land are ruled out as grounds for termination altogether.
If you lose your garden because of a reorganisation, a development plan or a public project (grounds two to six), you're entitled to reasonable compensation for your plantings and structures: the fruit trees, the berry bushes, the Laube. For grounds five and six the principles of expropriation compensation even apply. So the work of years isn't worthless if it really comes to the crunch.
Check the form
When a notice lands on your doormat, look at the form first. If it isn't in writing and signed, it's invalid.
Check the reason
Match the stated reason against the list of six. Only those grounds count; any other pretext can't support a termination.
Check the timing
Check the effective date and the deadline for declaring the notice. A termination served at the wrong time doesn't take effect straight away.
Bring in your club
Turn to your club or regional association. Their expert advisers know these cases and will help you assert your rights, right through to compensation.
Non-Profit Status: Why the Club Is Needed at All
The low price and the sense of community don't happen by themselves; they hang on kleingärtnerische Gemeinnützigkeit (allotment-garden non-profit status). An allotment organisation is recognised as non-profit by the responsible state authority when it's on the register of associations, submits to regular checks of how it's run, and writes three things into its statutes: that it exists above all to promote allotment gardening and give its members expert support, that its income flows to allotment purposes, and that even if it dissolves, its assets stay within the world of allotment gardening.
That sounds dry, but it has a warm consequence: nobody is allowed to make money out of allotment gardening. Surpluses flow back into the sites, into the paths, into the expert advice. The club, then, isn't a bureaucratic ball and chain but the very structure that keeps your garden cheap and alive.
Allotment Gardens in Numbers
Just how big this quiet movement is takes many people by surprise. A few numbers to give a sense of scale (they're approximate, depending on the source and the year counted):
- There are around 900,000 allotment gardens in Germany; the umbrella body BDG alone organises a good 867,000 plots.
- They're used by roughly five million people: the tenants and their families.
- The whole thing is organised into 20 regional associations with over 13,000 clubs under the federal association founded in 1921.
- Together the gardens cover some 44,000 hectares, a vast green network, most of it inside the cities.
- Berlin is the allotment stronghold with roughly 66,000 to 71,000 plots, followed by Hamburg, Frankfurt and Munich.
The spread is striking: about half of all plots lie in the eastern German states, home to only around 15 percent of the population. And demand is high: in the big urban areas you wait on average about three years for a garden, in Berlin and Hamburg at times seven or eight.
A Piece of Land That's Yours Without Being Yours
In the end the Bundeskleingartengesetz is a quiet promise. It says: this patch of earth is yours to tend, to harvest and to enjoy, without owning it and without laying out a fortune. In return you look after it as a garden, keep the Laube small, and are part of a community. A fair trade, and one that has stayed the same at its core since 1919.
Next time you walk through your site, past the hedges, the watering cans, the sheds, you'll know: this quiet order is no accident. It grew out of gardens for the poor and times of need, was interpreted by the courts, and is carried by the clubs. Your garden is a project that spans many years, and it stands on a foundation that has outlasted a whole century. Look after your part, and the law will look after its own.
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