Climate Action Awareness Through a Shelter-Kenya

First phase of our food forest establishment is in progress. We already engaged a Syntropic consultant,  who started by training our residents and our staff on Syntrophic Farming. We held one day onsite workshop on Syntropic farming. ‘Syntrophic Farming is an innovative approach to regenerative agriculture which allows us to create dynamic, successional, and economically viable ecosystems that restore degraded soil biodiversity.’ Syntrophic Farming imitates the natural regeneration of forests and provides a harmonious integration of our food production systems  

This method of farming will help us replicate and accelerate the natural processes of ecological succession and stratification, giving each plant the ideal conditions for its development, placing each one in their “just right” position in space (strata) and in time (succession).   

The Syntrophic consultant advised us to do a pilot planting on one part of our farm, so as to first establish if the fruit trees are doing well and learn a few tricks to inform our project for better results.   

We first purchased enough food trees seedlings for our piloting part of our project. At the beginning of October 2021, we started to plant the lines of food trees, intercropped alongside vegetables (spinach, kales), legumes (beans) and some herbs for mutual benefit. The tree seedlings include but not limited to; avocado, guava, pawpaw, lemon, orange, bananas, passion squash.  

On 5th No2021, we had a field visit where we toured Gathengera Permaculture Design Fam. The farm is doing indigenous trees and food trees nurseries. We were able to benchmark our ongoing project with this project and learnt a number of good practices that we are planning to implement on our Food and Eco Forest Project.