As most of Europe crisps in record temperatures, and even in my lush oasis the grass is starting to yellow, most the trees in the syntropic lines are putting on new growth, the trees over five years old are looking very happy, and yes, the last trees planted at the end of spring have suffered losses and are wilting, although I'm sure the majority will survive,and the bonus of syntropic systems is no matter when in the day somewhere there's a shady place to put my chair.

What do syntropic farmers do while they're waiting for the trees to grow? In theory as the number of rows grow so does the complexity of maintenance, propagation, and preparing of new sites. A good system should build early crops and biomass fast, followed by new planting material. Then fruit, nuts and finally timber and firewood or biochar. How can you calculate the time taken to keep a system running smoothly? I realise I'm asking hypothetical questions because my context is a original food forest, not a new syntropic system. My reason is to debate what's to come.

Hey guys ! Had a bit of a break from the platform, but planning on posting more often again ! I had the opportunity to interview Scott Hall again about a method of syntropic agroforestry he calls Successional Accumulation - an approach that aims to establish systems with little to no external amendments and, in many climates, little to no irrigation. (In brittle climates, some irrigation and mulch are still usually needed to suppress weeds and retain soil moisture, but the requirements are far lower than with the typical Plant All at Once approach.) For many people, it may seem like Scott is reinventing the wheel or proposing something that Ernst Götsch never practiced. But in reality, Ernst started his farm using a very similar approach; he simply never coined a specific term for it. Today, Plant All at Once is used in the vast majority of syntropic systems. While it can produce impressive results, it is also demanding because it often requires large quantities of amendments and biomass to support primary species and crops. In brittle climates, these inputs can be difficult and expensive to obtain, especially during dry years when straw bales are expensive adn scarce. Access is another challenge. Many farms are located in remote areas, and the cost of transportation for all materials continues to rise. That's why Scott's ideas are so interesting. Successional Accumulation offers a different pathway - one that seeks to build fertility and biomass progressively using trees only, rather than importing large quantities of biomass upfront. Enjoy the interview - there are some real gems in there!

After listening to YouTube videos on simple Pioneer planting, this seems the natural progression for small low profile projects on poor sites, and with limited resources. Going one step further would be to allow sites to go wild, cut and scrape the brush and make dead hedges on to the proposed tree lines and allow the the Pioneers to grow in the inter rows, when the dead hedges are degraded move the saplings to the rows to make a controlled infestation. Otherwise what I have done is find a local pre disturbance (demolition site ) and extract pioneer plants to use in your infestation, only l didn't call it a infestation, just being resourceful, obviously ask the land owners permission before taking weed saplings. On most abandoned sites in my region, elderberry, buddleia, pseudoacacia, birch, willow, broom and gorse grow quickly and are a nuisance to the land owners. All these plants and eleagnus, horse chestnut, poplar and many more I retrieved from a old factory site being redeveloped, less than a kilometre from the farm .

Hey everyone, I wanted to be transparent with you about something I’ve been thinking about. I’m realizing more and more how much work goes into running this platform - filming, editing videos, organizing interviews, managing content, bringing people in through Instagram, answering questions, and keeping everything moving forward. I genuinely love doing it, but it takes a significant amount of time alongside my other projects, farm work, and consultancy opportunities that are starting to come in. Right now, I’m putting around 3 extra hours into this every single day on top of my job - sometimes more (when filming). Because of that, I’m considering introducing a small monthly contribution for access to the platform - something in the range of 5€-10€ per month. My thinking is that this could help in a many ways that would benefit us all: - Make the platform more sustainable long-term - Allow me to keep producing quality content without burning out - Build a more committed and engaged community, rather than having lots of people join, take one look, and never come back. - I also want to take the quality of this platform to the next level. I don’t just want to keep making videos from home - I want to travel more, visit farms and projects in person, sit down face-to-face with growers and practitioners, and bring back real on-the-ground interviews and insights that we can all learn from. I also want to offer mini-courses, I’m working on a course on Stratification which will be quite detailed and want to do the same for important concepts such as Succession, the Macro-Organism and ect… All in all, that will take more of my time, planning, and travel costs, but I believe it could make this platform far more valuable and unique. Having some support from the community would give me more freedom to reinvest into this project and make it the best syntropic agroforestry learning platform possible. This isn’t decided yet - I genuinely want your honest feedback before making any changes.