Atmos

Meer Bomen Nu (More Trees Now) is a green part of URGENDA aimed at accelerating the greenification and cooling of the Netherlands by saving seedlings and offering them for free through their tree planner. This is done by rescuing excess or unwanted saplings, cuttings and shrubs in November to March. These plants are transplanted to sites where they can grow into mature trees. Each tree produces hundreds of saplings every year. However, most of these don’t reach maturity because they grow in the wrong place, are removed, or wither and die. By carefully scooping out these seedlings in winter and giving them away, they have another chance to grow elsewhere. The plants gathered at this event will first be going to a Tree Hub in Boerakker, where they can be heeled in until early spring and then given away.

For this event we went to municipality Westerkwartier, the municipality directly west of Groningen city. The municipality would like to greenify quickly and aims to plant a tree per inhabitant by the end of 2026. This means that their goal is to have 64,000 trees planted, so far, the count is at 23,000. Meer Bomen Nu Groningen is offering a climate neutral solution by organizing harvest events in the municipality of Westerkwartier. This season, Meer Bomen Nu is organizing 10 harvest events and will be distributing between 8,000 and 10,000 seedlings at the Tree Hub in Boerakker. Atmos joined Meer Bomen Nu at one of these harvest events.

The activity started in the morning at a soil depot in Lucaswolde, where there was a wide variety of beautiful (quantities of) seedlings. This soil deposit will be excavated in the near future, but before that happens, Meer Bomen Nu has been allowed to organise multiple harvest days there. After a few hours of harvesting, we harvested 490 seedlings here, mainly willow and poplar trees.

After this we drove to Marum where an Odin distribution center is located. Odin is a cooperative supermarket that sells sustainable groceries in their own stores throughout the Netherlands. They sell sustainable products purchased directly from farmers, gardeners, bakers and many other quality producers. At the distribution center we were treated to a vegan lunch, after which we continued harvesting.

Many young alders grew behind the distribution centre, which needed to be removed as they’re growing too close to the building, which could damage it. Instead of removing and destroying the seedlings, Odin has chosen to work with Meer Bomen Nu and make these seedlings available. That's why we started working hard again to harvest the alders and after a few hours we managed to harvest 1250 seedlings.

The species of all harvested seedlings was determined after which they bundled and labelled and then taken to the Tree Hub, after which the activity was over. Together with Meer Bomen Nu we were able to save a total of 1750 trees on this Green Friday!

A big thank you for Meer Bomen Nu for helping us in organising this event and Odin for facilitating a very nice lunch!

Members can find more photos of the event in the "photos" tab!