Aardbol + Arbol = Ardbol

As we were getting used to the idea of going to Spain, our normal life was going on. Maaike had the opportunity to create a food forest in a land owned by the ProRail company. As a rail company they have a lot of land and a portion of it is not in use. During this project she connected local inhabitants to food forest builders.

At the end of 2020 Maaike asked me to join her on working on our plans for the food forest in Spain. She was learning Spanish and helping realizing the food forest project within her company, while I was focused on my programming work. I replied that because of our kids we could not go to Spain until 2025, at that time five years away. If I would start now it would go too fast, I'm not good at going slow. But she was right that working together was nicer. So we did.

Screenshot of first website made by Maaike

So I too started to read more on food forests and joined online groups, like climate cleanup. Although Maaike progressed fast with her Spanish, in order to talk to (local) governments and other organizations we needed a Spanish speaking person in our team. We already had decided that we would not go for a small house with some trees around it, as some early pension plan, but a real project to show how farming can be done in a sustainable way.

Hence we needed help. I looked around and met Liselotte, we had a first meeting on 14th march 2021. Again a big stepping stone in our journey. This could very well be the start of our endeavor. First we needed a name. We wanted to help the earth with trees, I noticed that 'aardbol' (Earth, or world globe, in Dutch) and 'arbol' (tree in Spanish) were almost the same, so combining them was easy: Ardbol. some days later we registered the domain names and Ardbol was official.

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travelling to Bárcena without a car

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The first two months in Spain

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The first week of work

After the transaction we had time to think about what we could do in the village, as now we are the owners. The next option for us to go to Spain was in the autumn holidays. Earlier on we tried to combine it with Spanish classes for the kids, but we couldn’t arrange extra free time from school, so we had to stick to the one week of school vacation. We thought about starting at one of the houses which is in the relative good condition, like getting a door, so we could close it and store stuff there. But we had no electricity or tools as we had no space to keep stuff safe. So we were kind of stuck in a chicken and egg problem. To get out of this we set up a plan to get a container which we could lock. But that would not be there for this vacation. Then Maaike’s parents asked: “Would it be of any use if we were there with some tools to clear away the burrs, bushes and so on?” Of course that would be great! We were happy that they were enthusiastic and by itself there was a plan to do ...

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