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Tag: Perennial plant
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Create a Food Forest for Low-Maintenance, Edible Rewards
A food forest, or edible forest garden, is a food production strategy that mimics a woodland ecosystem. Find out how to create a low-maintenance, perennial, permaculture garden with edible rewards!
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What is a Food Forest?
A food forest mimics a forest edge, planted with edible plants. Picture all of the vertical layers of a forest growing together: Tall trees, small trees, shrubs, herbs, and ground covers. Tall, canopy trees grow inward from the edge, with smaller trees peeking out from underneath the tall trees to catch some of the sun’s rays. Stepping farther out into the sunshine are shrubs, with herbs, flowers, and ground covers blanketing the sunniest edge.
A typical forest edge can look a little busy, sometimes with vines growing up the trees and even mushrooms growing under the tallest trees in the shade. All of these layers of the forest are stacked together, each situated for sufficient sun exposure, and intertwined to produce a vibrant, productive, low-maintenance, and relatively self-maintaining ecosystem.
In a healthy forest setting, humans aren’t needed for weeding or fertilizing.
An example food forest might include chestnut trees as a tall canopy tree layer, with apple trees below them as an understory tree layer, followed by currant bushes, a host of edible herbs and mushrooms grown underneath, and perhaps even grapevines that use the apple trees as trellises.
Swap out my selections above for your favorite nut trees, fruit trees, berry bushes, and herbs to make your own system!
Photo Credit: ideath Flickr
History of the Food Forest
Managing forests for their edible benefits to humans is an ancient practice, with evidence and existing food forests having been found in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. As the New World was colonized, many of the first colonists and anthropologists didn’t know that they were looking at managed systems. To them, the forests in front of them looked like untouched forest.
What we realize now, of course, is that these early, native hunter-gatherer societies didn’t wander around aimlessly in search of food. They knew which areas produced which desirable foods (or medicines) and at which time of year, and it informed their movement. As they moved through forest and prairies areas, they would encourage edible plant species by cutting back the growth around them and giving them the space to grow abundantly and reproduce.
It was an early form of forest gardening.
They wouldn’t have spent a ton of time or effort, and it wouldn’t look pristinely weeded, but the desired plants would certainly be given an advantage over other plants.
Geoff Lawton found a 2,000 year old food forest in Morrocco. 800 people farm the desert oasis that includes, among other edible plants, date palms, bananas, olives, figs, pomegranate, guava, citrus, and mulberry. He also found a 300 year old food forest in Vietnam that has been cultivated by the same family for 28 generations.
With these ancient stories in mind, we can create vibrantly abundant and healthy edible perennial gardens that require a lot less maintenance and that can become a legacy into the future. This is the inspiration behind the modern food production strategy called a food forest.
Would you like to learn more about using permaculture techniques to improve the biodiversity of your garden, reduce maintenance, and increase yield?
You’ll find loads of information just like this in my book, The Suburban Micro-Farm.
The Benefits of an Edible Perennial Forest Garden
Perennial gardens don’t disturb the soil regularly like annual gardens do, but rather, they continually enrich soil with organic matter as leaves fall and plants die back for the winter. The food forest model can help to restore land, biodiversity, and habitat while creating an edible yield.
A forest is one of earth’s most stable ecosystems, and if we can mimic this ecosystem as a food production strategy, we get all of the ecological benefits of a forest PLUS food.
Food Forests vs. Orchards
Imagine planting a 0.10-acre site with about 30 apple trees to create a mini orchard. For the home gardener, this would obviously yield a lot of apples! But a single-species orchard can be a tough space to manage, as it is a monoculture of sorts and could attract pests and diseases that discover the smorgasbord of their favorite food. This would require you to spend time and money on pest/disease treatment.
The standard apple orchard arrangement also doesn’t take advantage of the vertical space above and below the trees. There is a single harvest opportunity of apples, and if it’s wiped out by disease or pest, there would be no reward for your efforts.
The single species—all needing the same nutrients in the soil—would, over time, deplete the soil and need imported fertilizer.
If we take the same site of the apple orchard and plant it with a food forest, we might be able to triple the yield in the same amount of space.
How would that work?
Imagine the northern edge (if you’re in the northern hemisphere) of the orchard being planted with a row of tall nut trees. Instead of rows of all apple trees, we could alternate apple trees with plum trees and cherry trees, for example, or whichever fruit trees would be appropriate to the climate. If it were a commercial area, we would also choose fruit crops that have high economic value. In the rows with the fruit trees, we could plant some nut- or berry-yielding bushes.
Underneath and between all the trees and shrubs we could seed a variety of herbs and flowers that help to add nutrients to the soil (fertilizer and soil building), attract beneficial insects (pest prevention), attract pollinators (for better fruit set), and add potential harvests in the form of cut flowers and culinary or medicinal herbs.
Some of my favorite understory herbs are yarrow, calendula, chives, comfrey, and daffodils. I like to seed the whole area with clovers.
I call this an orchard on steroids!
Because we’ve created a biodiverse ecosystem instead of a monoculture, we’ve lessened the threat of pests, reduced the need for fertilizer, lowered the amount of maintenance required, and hopefully, increased and diversified the yield. This diversity encourages more stability in the system.
In the backyard, this is great news, because few households will be able to use 30 bushels of apples! It would be nice to have a diversity of edible products.
If you’re growing apples or any other fruit for commercial purposes, you’ll find excellent examples of successful food forest commercial operations by Mark Shepard of the 106-acre New Forest Farm in his book Restoration Agriculture and by Stefan Sobkowiak, who shares his experience of transforming a conventional apple orchard in the feature-length educational film Permaculture Orchard.
https://www.tenthacrefarm.com/2017/07/create-a-food-forest-for-low-maintenance-edible-rewards/
On – 28 Jul, 2017 By Amy
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Planting a food forest: Proposal for Springside Park would help connect people to the land and to food
PITTSFIELD — An edible landscape, dappled with fruit, vegetables and nuts. That’s part of a vision for a food forest in Springside Park.
A local permaculture design company has applied for a $25,000 grant to support the idea. Now through April 19, people can vote daily for that idea, one of hundreds of proposed projects, on the Seeds of Change website.
“Food isn’t just something we eat,” reads the grant application. “It’s our history, culture, family and memories. It is our medicine and fuel.”
A food forest is a gardening technique that imitates a woodland ecosystem by bringing a number of crops that can help support each other into one area. The vision for a 1-acre plot of Springside Park includes edible trees, shrubs, perennials and annuals.
Matt Lamb and Jay Allard, owners of Berkshire Earth Regenerators, applied for the grant. They have studied the park for six months and developed a food forest plan on land near the Springside House.
“My goal is to get as much diversity into the plan as possible,” Lamb said. “There’s so many different things we are trying to correct with this project.”
He said the additional plantings in the proposed food forest would improve stormwater runoff and help cut down on carbon emissions. He said the plan could be expanded to as much as 40 acres of the park.
Allard said their concept for the park could yield thousands of pounds of food, which would be distributed to area residents and community organizations.
“A lot of people in the community are having a hard time getting food at all,” he said. “This is a very local situation it keeps food from traveling far distances.”
In addition to being a source of fresh food for the community, the forest would be used as a living classroom, where people learn to garden, and it would provide some job opportunities.
“As people take interest in these plantings, they become more invested in their community,” Allard said. “We want to be able to reconnect people with that.”
Springside has become a place for education in addition to recreation.
Regular garden workshops and interpretive walks are offered from the spring through fall. There’s also a weekly membership-based learning program at the park’s greenhouse.
Joe Durwin, a longtime resident of the Morningside neighborhood, and a parks commissioner, said the proposed plan is overdue.
“A food forest at Springside Park is an extraordinary way to honor a robust heritage of agriculture at this very historic park site, while updating it for the needs and expectations of neighborhood residents and other park users in the 21st century,” he said in a written statement.
Last year, the city received a grant from the Kresge Foundation to study how growing food could help revitalize the Morningside neighborhood.
Named Morningside Up by the city and community partners, the project envisions a “community-led food system.” That means residents would be involved with food production, processing, distribution, and consumption as well as waste management, said Jessica Vecchia, director of Alchemy Initiative, which is managing the Kresge grant and working in partnership with Morningside Up.
Allard and Lamb said they are excited by the impact the food forest could have.
“This will help educate people on how we can use public space to do greater things for ourselves, our families and our community,” Lamb said.
The food forest concept is among nearly 600 ideas submitted by groups from across the country to Seeds of Change. A total of $310,000 will be awarded to groups by the California-based organic seed company.
The top 50 vote winners advance to the finals in April. And grant winners will be announced May 8, according to the website.
The Downtown Pittsfield Farmers Market, another of Alchemy’s programs, was awarded a $10,000 grant from Seeds of Change last year.
Reach staff writer Carrie Saldo at 413-496-6221 or @carriesaldo.
http://www.berkshireeagle.com/stories/planting-a-food-forest,503487
On – 05 Apr, 2017 By Carrie Saldo
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8 Reasons to Include Rosemary in the Garden
Growing food at home is much more than vegetables alone. Culinary herbs are not only one of the easy crops to cultivate, but they improve the flavor, as well as the nutritional content of the dishes we cook. What’s more is culinary herbs have tremendous functional quality within gardens, as well as medicinal qualities, especially preventative measures, within our bodies. Dried or fresh, if we are producing herbs in the garden, we have easy access to them for much less cost.
Rosemary is a familiar culinary herb, one that pairs particularly well with potatoes and artisanal bread. It also often works its way into holiday dishes, like stuffing or gravy, and those with rosemary plants at their disposal regularly use it as an air freshener or home decoration. Along with basil, oregano, thyme and mint, rosemary is nearly a standard in even the most rudimentary herb and spice cabinets, so it only makes sense that we include it in our home gardens.
But, there are so many more reasons…
1. Flavorful Harvest
Rosemary performs well in the kitchen, and a little bit can go along way to elevate dishes. It pairs particularly well with starches and works wonders on squashes and stews. Inventive mixologists also utilize it in drinks, like lemonade, and innovative chefs have accented with it in desserts.
2. Health Benefits
In addition to enhancing the flavor of many of our favorite dishes, rosemary also delivers a wallop of health benefits. Like most culinary herbs, rosemary is loaded with anti-oxidants and vitamins, and it contains natural compounds that are anti-inflammatory and anti-septic. It is also a notable source of minerals, such iron, potassium, manganese, copper, magnesium and potassium.
3. Perennial Plant
Perennial plants are great additions to food gardens because they can provide food but don’t require that we cultivate them year in and year out. Many culinary herbs are perennials, and rosemary is most certainly one of those. Other advantages to having perennial plants is that they help to stabilize soils and feed soil life, and they prevent gardens from looking empty when the annual crops have been removed.
4. Lovely Aroma
Larisa Blinova/ShutterstockRosemary has a very distinct and powerful aroma, one that we readily identify in cooking and often in air freshening. Within aromatherapy circles, the scent of rosemary is known for being stimulating, helping sniffers remain alert and retain memory. In direct contrast, rosemary is also known to have relaxing effects that decreases stress levels.
5. Pest Prevention
Once again, culinary herbs can be somewhat lumped together in that nearly all of them are great for pest control in the garden. Rosemary is particularly powerful because of its aroma, which distracts pests from finding the plants that they want. Essentially, the more smells we can add to our garden, the more confusing it is for pests to hone in on specific plants.
6. Pollinator Attraction
While pests are being confused by rosemary, beneficial insects and animals, such as hummingbirds and bees are attracted to rosemary when it is in bloom. Rosemary flowers in late winter/early spring, which means it provides pollen when not many other plants are. This makes it attractive to wildlife looking for an early start.
7. Drought Resistance
Rosemary is native to the Mediterranean climate, which is why we find it so often in Italian food, but as gardeners, this tells us that it is able to sustain itself in a climate without an abundance of rain. It grows very well in Southern California, but for those of us not in this climate or one’s like it, it can make a low-maintenance pot plant or easily cared for garden addition.
8. Heat and Cold Tolerant
Maren Winter/ShutterstockRosemary is more or less a desert plant, hence the drought resistance, but that also indicates that it can handle both hot and cold temperatures well. Deserts have the reputation for being hot, so rosemary’s ability to withstand sizzling conditions should be no surprise. On the other hand, deserts are also notoriously cold at night, when the sun stops baking them, so rosemary is remarkably resistant to cold weather, well below freezing, as well.
All of these benefits come without even acknowledging that rosemary is a beautiful, evergreen plant that will keep the garden looking good year-round. It comes in both upright and creeping varieties, making it available for hedges or hanging over garden walls. It’s a great addition for both aesthetic and culinary gardens. Now would be a great time to get one going.
http://www.onegreenplanet.org/lifestyle/reasons-to-include-rosemary-in-the-garden/
On – 10 Apr, 2017 By Jonathon Engels
