Founder
Zeger is the one who came up with Shared Garden. During his youth, he liked playing outside and helping out in the garden. One of his fondest memories is helping with the raspberries harvest at his grandmother's place. After living in an apartment for a while, he noticed the lack of accessible gardening options, thus leading to the creation of Shared Garden. When not working on Shared Garden, Zeger loves cooking, running and listening to his CD collection!
Hey, I'm Zeger and proud parent of Shared Garden. In 2025, I was looking for ways to make gardening more accessible after looking into local gardening opportunities. I came to the conclusion that many places either don’t have local community gardens and if they had, they were often already full and not accepting new gardeners anymore.
With many more people moving to cities and living in apartments, it becomes more and more difficult to find access to green spaces to garden in. Yet, there are also many people with gardens around that are barely used. People with a lack of time or effort to fully commit to gardening themselves, but also people who would like to see their garden flourish and share the joy with others.
With gardens playing an important part in climate change and personal well-being, I believe that in an ideal world, everyone should have access to a green space to garden in. It’s for that reason I started Shared Garden, in an attempt to bring people with gardens and people looking to start gardening closer together.
Shared Garden started as a small side-project of mine, but the more I thought about it and worked on it, I came to the realization of how crucial a platform like this would be. Since then, I have invested long evenings and weekends in the development of the platform. However, I can’t do this alone, and to keep Shared Garden going and for it to be a success, more time and effort is needed. I’m giving it my all, and hope that you will join me on this journey!
First of all, gardening has many personal benefits. It’s proven to be beneficial for both physical and mental health and well-being: increasing personal fitness, improving heart health and blood pressure, reducing stress and more. Besides that, gardening is also a way to have access to healthy and locally produced food, as well as being an opportunity to strengthen local communities. However, there is also a bigger picture, in which gardens can play a critical role: climate change.
Over the last 20 years, climate change has become an increasingly larger discussion, and in many regions already an issue. Both people and climate change have changed the world drastically with a decrease in forest area, and green spaces in general, and biodiversity. In many countries, climate change is identified as a real problem and initiatives are set up to reduce its effects. Local initiatives have also start popping up, for example the Leuven 2030 initiative in our hometown, which focuses on making the city of Leuven a climate neutral city by 2030.
Furthermore, gardens have been identified to play a critical role in addressing heat and issues and loss of biodiversity. In densely populated areas, such as Flanders, gardens make out a significant portion of the region’s green space and a natural design and use of gardens is therefore important to support biodiversity and building climate resistant regions.
By being smart with garden design, water usage and planting local produce, flowers and trees, gardens can play this critical role, instead of remaining the typical green grass lawn. However, creating and maintaining a sustainable garden requires time and effort.
Enter Shared Garden! By bringing people together via the Shared Garden platform, we want to share this effort, and the harvests. If you are not convinced yet, besides the physical and mental health and well-being benefits mentioned earlier, gardening also creates meaningful and memorable experiences. With Shared Garden, we want to help you do that, and to make the world a better place - so, will you join the adventure?
We’re always open for new ideas and collaborations for the Shared Garden platform, so please don’t hesitate to get in touch!
