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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