Catchy question! Depending on the area and use-case, trees can live up to 80 years.
The most important aspect is that the wood will not get burnt at a certain point. We therefore only select partners that focus on planting trees in a context of long-term-usage, like the idea of a forest garden that sustains crops and employment for farmers in Africa.
Text by our tree partner Trees for the future.
(source: https://trees.org/post/solution)
Forest Gardens are a superior farming system with the potential to end hunger and poverty for millions of subsistence farmers struggling to survive throughout the developing world.
The Forest Garden is a locally-appropriate, multi-layered system of farm production. It combines diverse varieties of crops and trees that enable families to fulfill their subsistence needs and access new market opportunities. Forest Gardens provide farming families with sustainable sources of food, livestock fodder, fuel, and forest products to consume and sell at nearby markets. The Forest Garden engages the entrepreneurial spirit and skill of local farmers, allowing them to increase their income and revitalize their degraded lands permanently.
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The Forest Garden Approach is a methodology that guides families in planting Forest Gardens over four years. We prioritize doing projects along environmentally-degraded trade routes in order to work directly with large clusters of poor communities with access to local markets. At the onset of each project, highly-trained staff members work directly with large farmer groups to design tailored forest gardens that meet the distinct needs of the families and the market opportunities available. Through a series of workshops, farmers learn to optimize their land. They learn to select, grow and plant diverse trees and crop varieties that maximize yields while also significantly improving the quality of the land being farmed.
All Forest Garden projects are developed with an emphasis on sustainability at both the farm and landscape levels. At the farm level, the Forest Garden is environmentally sustainable because it contains many trees solely dedicated toward serving ecosystem purposes. The Forest Garden design also considers integrated pest management, using trees and vegetation to serve as barriers for pests and sources for natural pesticides. At the landscape level, Forest Gardens are essential tools for reducing pressure on forests, reducing the use of harmful chemicals, and helping to end the battle between farms and forests.