Our vision

We are two people in Cologne who want to spend the rest of our lives restoring a piece of land and living on it. One of us builds websites; the other is a biologist at an environmental NGO. We are both vegan, and wanting to make room for other living things is the reason we are doing this at all.

The plan is easy to say and hard to do. Find a few hectares of worn-out farmland somewhere with a good view, build a house, move in, and bring the land back to life. Not a tidy garden, but a working ecosystem: mixed native trees and shrubs, soil that holds water and feeds fungi, room for the insects, birds, and animals that are running out of places to live. We want to use perma-forestry and the kinds of methods land-keepers have relied on for a long time, which restore land rather than wear it down.

We do not expect to see the end of it. A forest outlasts the people who plant it, so our job is to start it well, look after it, and hand it to whoever comes next in better shape than we found it. The legal form that protects the handoff matters, but it is secondary. The trees are the point.

There is a second reason to do this carefully and write it all down. If it works, the how-to is worth nearly as much as the place itself. We want the next person to have an easier time of it, and the one after that.

We will know we are on track when three things are true: other people find this useful enough to copy, we can convince others to help pay for the real work, and the land itself shows progress when we measure it honestly, failures and all.