Food Forest Workshop, Osnabrück, Part 2

Part 2: Visiting a Food Forest

By the time I took my two flights, train, and bus, I arrived at the Osnabrück Cathedral and Theater on the day of their local pride parade. The streets were teeming with young kids and young adults with colorful outfits and banners. It was a festive and fun atmosphere. I couldn’t help but to compare this with the celebratory agro-forest polycultures that were swimming in my head.

Pride Parade on the day of my arrival in the heart of Osnabrück, Germany

It was Saturday, the workshop wouldn’t start till Monday, and I had one thing to do before that; visit the nearby Ketelbroek Food Forest in the Netherlands. Osnabrück is only three hours away and it seemed a shame not to visit. And it would serve as an interesting example for me to talk about in our workshop. There was one hitch. I needed a ride.

Sunday morning I took a short tour of the horticultural research facilities at Osnabrück University. My tour was given by Sebastian Deck. Sebastian was a key person in helping to set up many of the high-tech facilities that they have for testing plants in different environments and controlling every condition. He was also my ride to Ketelbroek.

Agro-engineer Sebastian Deck

After our little tour, we set out to Ketelbroek. During the drive, it was great to chat with Sebastian about my thinking for the workshop and to hear more about his work studying crops grown in Costa Rica. We arrived in the small village of Groesbeek at the home of Wouter Van Eck and Pieter Jansen. They greeted us warmly into their home and we had a quick cup of tea while we looked over plans of other food forest projects that they were working on.

The Ketelbroek Food Forest, which they created, is relatively well-known and populates many posts on LinkedIn and Instagram about the amazing possibilities and potential for food forests. Created in 2009, it was originally a cornfield. They researched many species of edible plants and eventually planted 400 different species. Of these species Wouter says that about 150 are ones that he actively harvests and 70 are ones he would recommend to other farmers.

Ketelbroek Food Forest to the right

The forest is about a five minute walk from their house and sticks out like a sore thumb amongst the other industrial agriculture fields in the area. When you first come to it, it’s quite a wild forest. Of all the food forest typologies that I was imagining for the workshop that I was going to give the next day, I think Ketelbroek was on the farthest end of the ecological to industrial spectrum. This forest and its stewards clearly values ecology over control and predictability. Ironically, this makes their food source far more resilient.

An indicator of success in a food forest, whether you are just simply introducing a few extra species to avoid being a monoculture or you have a massive species list and a lot of genetic biodiversity, food forests benefit from the mutualisms of the different plants and the subsequent insects and animals. When you have a polyculture, pesticides and herbicides are less necessary, if not unnecessary. Diversity mitigates the impact of herbivores, for example.

Oh, gooseberries!

Ketelbroek appears to be a very healthy ecosystem. It even supports a beaver family at the edge of the forest that has created a dam which forms a wetland area, now with fish, amphibians and a stork. This was not originally planned. Nor were the unplanned plant species like thistle and stinging nettles which Wouter and Pieter have become very tolerant of, as their habitat value and ecological benefit have tended to outweigh any predetermined plan they might have started with.

Signs of Mr. and Mrs. Beaver

I got to taste edible rose petals, tree leaves that tasted like French onion soup, flower buds, and more. And there are many more species which you can learn about if you visit their website, but I was struck by the all the parts of the plant that they are harvesting. It’s not just a lot of fruit, which is what I imagined early on in my food forest research. Considering it was the beginning of June, there was a lot to sample.

I think a lot of people imagine a food forest being full of only edible plants. But in this case, there were actually plenty of species that were not edible in any way, but served other functional roles. A mole, for example, had planted a series of trees along a path that do not bear any fruit. But Wouter and Pieter planted hardy kiwi vine next to each tree on the shady side. This provided a shaded trellis for it to climb on creating all the conditions that the productive vine needs.

Overwhelmed by the edibility of it all.

The trip to Ketelbroek was amazing. It gave me “food for thought” and made some of the books I was reading about and had been hearing about from my friend Samantha for years come to life. In a nutshell:

Biodiversity creates benefits in numerous places in these polyculture food systems, you just have know what to look for and open your mind to what success and productivity could look like.

On the way home, my mind turned back to the ways that digital tools can help make all this complexity easier to plan for. That’s what the workshop was all about.

Part 3 coming soon…