by Marianne Graff
Published on March 6, 2025
Photo Credit: Andrew Millison, “How 8,000 Food Forests Grew Africa’s Great Green Wall” https://youtu.be/1LCTVO_Y5Rs?si=VTQYbaBOW6ac1TFd
I just posted an article on Substack about a way to created food abundance in your neighbourhood for a few low cost, or for free. https://tinyurl.com/3ttdmbbn
It’s an idea akin to ‘seed banking’ , on a community scale. The idea was sparked by a video I saw by Andrew Millison about a family in Senegal he visited (see image above).
They created a food forest within 4 years that was enough to support them as a family, both financially and food-wise, and seeing the transformation of their land was startling and inspiring.
As the title of the video suggests, this particular food forest is part of a veyr large initiative to green up a large part of Africa, to form a living barrier, or ‘green belt’ that stops the Sahara desert from expanding, and provides much needed food for the local people.
While this is impressive and filled me with wonder at people’s ability to work together and achieve such great results on such a large scale, what caputured my attention even more in this video was the idea of one family building a food forest in just 4 years that could provide food for them year round, and also enough to sell and share with others in the community.
They were sharing seeds and seedlings as well as ripe produce.
This is sus a simple idea and small act of generosity, but it has a huge impact.
It creates food abundance for all in an area for free.
This is a great way to save money on food and make a strong community.
I love solutions that don’t involve big cash investments or banks, as you can tell from other articles I have written recently on the subject of community based funding ideas to get ahead in life, or fund small start ups and projects:
How to Get a Hand Up Instead of a Hand Out https://tinyurl.com/A-Hand-Up
Tandas – How to Save Money And Build a Trust Based Community https://tinyurl.com/mexicantandas
Seed Bank Ideas https://tinyurl.com/seedfundingidea
This idea of sharing food grown in your back yard reminds me of the neighbourhood we grew up in in Alberta, Canada.
I remember how our neighbourhood was when I was a very small girl. I remember the heat radiating off the sidewalks in summer and the glaring light reflecting off the windows and all the new house. We had moved into a newly build subdivision and none of the houses had landscaping or trees yet. It was blinding, I remember.
It took ten years for all the houses to have half decent looking yards and enough trees for shade. And very people thought to grow fruit trees instead of ornamentals. Even the city missed the boat on this. They distributed elms (which all suffered from a disease once mature, and most died).
My Dad was one of the few people who planted some edible trees: an apple tree, and two crabapples. They ne grafted a brand onto the apple tree to create and apple-crab that was delicious. I remember a few summers where we passed bags of apples over the fence to neighbours and received a few bags from their trees once their fruit was ripe, but in retrospect, the neighbours could have done so much more.
If each household had planted even one fruit tree, and shared it with others. And if they had coordinated who would grow what, to ensure variety, what a bounty this would have produced.
The whole neighbourhood could have drastically cut its summer grocery bills by growing and sharing their harvests with one another. They already had a lot of neighbourhood parties and knew each other quite well, so it wouldn’t have been a stretch.
I think that even if you are living in a house with an established yard, it wouldn’t be hard to add in a fuit tree here and there.
What Would It Take To Create a Food Forest That Spanned A Neighbourhood?
Here’s a list of what it would take to establish a food sharing network and make edible forests that span a neighbourhood.
- A bit of time talking to your neighbours and getting to know them. Deciding who will grow what and who wants to participate in a fruit exchange.
- Spending some time to research and find out which trees are likely to thrive in your area
- Source where to find slips and seedlings or suckers sprouting from an established tree in your neighbourhood, or where to buy a tree or plant you want.
- Spend a few hours harvesting your shrubs and trees when they are ripe.
- Spend a few hours preserving them (freezing them, making jam or canning preserves).
Worth the effort? I think so. For just a few hours a year you could save a lot of money on fresh fruit and add variety to your meals throughout the winter, when the price of fresh fruit skyrockets (as if it hasn`’t aleady, with inflation).
For those living in apartments, you could do this on a small scale, with microgreens. A bit of coordination with your neighbours and you could have a delicious food trading network for pennies compared to what you would pay for the same greens in the supermarkets. And not nearly as fresh and tasty, since supermarkets have to ship food in from far away.
I encourage you to think about it! What could you grow yourself, and maybe share with others?