Syntropic agroforestry at Sunseed

February 12, 2026

February has welcomed us with strong winds, many beautiful flowers and the smell of flourishing trees. After a long and cold winter cuddled next to warm fires in the living room, our bodies slowly start to wake up again, ready to take in the new year. Our departments have eagerly started on many exciting projects such as syntropic farming, new tree planting in our Drylands, renewing our solar batteries and rebuilding our Domo tent.

Clara, our Organic Gardens coordinator, hosted an educational activity this month about syntropic farming and agroforestry. We are now using this approach in our gardens, to listen more to what the land truly needs rather than what we as humans need.

This approach to agriculture fosters a dynamic, regenerative and healthy ecosystem that restores degraded soil biodiversity. By planting trees, shrubs, and crops together with mulch, horse manure and humanure we mimic the forest’s natural ecosystem. After purchasing new trees we have planted them in our gardens during a communal activity day giving them a new home to grow in. With the temperatures raising every summer, we want to be able to cultivate our gardens appropriately. The symbiotic interactions between plants and our human management (chopping, pruning and dropping) will regenerate our soils.

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Our ecosystems restorations team has been educating us in different activities this month about our local plants and their survival skills in semi-arid climates. We also learned a lot about companionship planting and the symbiotic relationships between every plant we brought into soil. We also looked at the different trees that were planted 40 years ago when Sunseed was started, some of them reaching high and wide after so many years of good growth.

In a communal activity we planted many new trees and supporting shrubs in our surrounding drylands. We planted olive buckthorn, Aleppo pine, carob tree and asparagus horridus around the Monkey’s head peak. Around our houses we planted different agave species, lavender, thyme, rosemary, shrubs, evergreens and flowering plants. Estrella, Beau and Djamila taught us where the best places are to plant, where and how those beings thrive and how to take care of them. We also built a chill out area with a little surrounding garden behind our main house!

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