Oasis in Beauvechain

When going from an apartment, to a house with a garden, it was quite attractive to have a garden to enjoy (especially in the summer) without normally someone able to bother me (pretty individualistic view, now if I don’t have this view, I could go to a park and don’t need the garden, didn’t I?). It’s a safe place for kids to play without me having to bother too much. So it has to be beautiful, nice to play in and without too much work to keep it that way.

Till 2014 my garden was grass (to play sports), bamboos (to have a little bit of privacy) and some raspberry plants that required nothing from me, apart eating them. My garden was not at all linked to food in my mind, besides occasionally the raspberries. I was not at all busy with buying good food, so how would I be busy with making good food...clearly I won't. Way too busy with other stuff.

Then in 2014 when understanding the reason behind what I find good food, I realized quite fast, that in the world I live today, that if I want to have good allergen free food, I better create it myself or buy it from people that I know very well and are not influenced by money. Wasn’t and isn’t an easy journey. So I slowly started a little vegetable garden, really like 1 square meter.

When my first seeds that I planted, became plants and things I could actually eat, it felt amazing (even for a 35 year adult). I started talking about it with people that were active in the domain, and I found it really an excellent activity on which a lot of people want to openly share their experience.

A new little passion was born. I learned that some things like tomatoes, spinach, pumpkins, parsley… grow pretty easily in the garden, without having to do too much for them.

The 1 square meter, became a few square meters. I planted a natural hedge in the back of the garden to protect against pesticides. I heard that trees and plants are amongst nature’s best air filters. Since I eat a lot of fruits, I also started to plant several fruit trees. The surface of the vegetable garden has grown pretty significantly since.

What I did realize is that the quite reasonable sized vegetable garden, is not so easy to fill up always completely, with plants out of just seeds. The success is not always guaranteed. In fact, my success goes up, if I can help the seeds to be little plants, before getting them into the garden, so I invested in a greenhouse very recently.

Now during these 4 years, I managed for the first time last year to eat tomatoes, pumpkins and parsley completely out of our garden which is in the meantime +- 35 sqm.

I would love to eat out of my garden every day. It can probably be seen as one of my long term goals or objectives. In the meantime, I try to buy my fruits and vegetables from very local movements and with whom I’ve a human contact.

I believe in a better world, I believe in being the change I want to see, I believe in leading by example, and that is why I created my own Oasis.

I’ve a dream that one day, the Oasis will be the standard and not all kinds of industrial inventions like it is more and more the case in this new modern world.

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