Helping out at Food Forest Lingehout with EY

Have you ever wondered what it takes to maintain a food forest? Well, our partners at Ernst & Young can now tell you that it takes quite some effort! Sixteen of their dedicated employees helped with many kinds of tasks that needed to be done at our planting partner Voedselbos Lingehout.

From planting vegetables to weeding the fields to clearing out some brambles and plants that were preventing our trees from growing well, they experienced the full scope of tasks needed to properly maintain all trees and produce. 

Luckily, the great weather and delicious strawberries helped to make the job a lot easier. Better still, after a lot of rain the past few months, all trees and shrubs were growing very fast now the first really sunny days had finally arrived.

Even though the wet winter and spring have made the snail population boom and devastate some of the vegetables, their presence shows that the soil is already regenerating its biodiversity. In future, the restored biodiversity will create a balanced ecosystem that will hopefully prevent such booms and limit the maintenance needed.

Eventually, this regenerative food forest should therefore need less maintenance than a “regular” agricultural field that is intensively farmed, watered and sprayed with pesticides. 

For now, we will keep helping Voedselbos Lingehout to plant more trees and to maintain them for years to come. We already have planned to help expand their agroforestry project with a further two thousand trees next planting season. We will keep monitoring how the trees are doing and we will keep you posted on the progress of this amazing regenerative project!