Join our food forest works in Zambia, October 2026 Want to learn more about the rare and important miombo woodlands, and spend some time helping us mulch, test crops under different trees, build (!) swales, set up a nursery and/or document the existing forest? We are looking for volunteers who can join our work at the Minamba Research Farm and the Kambisa! Communiy centre forest garden upcoming October. We can provide (a cooked) lunch, breakfast & accommodation but you will need to cover your own journey (& dinner if you want something different from lunch). If you are interested and/or have questions, you can check out Minambaresearchfarm.org and contact me at klaartje@mobileorchards.com Hope to see you 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 .