FOREST GARDENS - FOOD FOR THE FUTURE!

If there's one idea that will help people everywhere to ride out whatever environmental, social, health and financial storms are gathering, it's Forest Gardening - why? because it's...

• a way of growing food, AND medicinals, materials in patterns that mimic Nature and support the environment
• Forest Gardens are drought, flood, pest and disease resistant
• they produce a wide range of food with a minimum of energy input
• they produce a succession of varied yields
• they're friendly to the environment, bees, birds and build healthy, dynamic soil
• the principles work whether you have a tiny town garden, an allotment or a hillside
• they're four dimensional, rather than two dimensional

  

  The layers of the forest, and what's going on underground

The illustration is from the main reference work for Forest Gardening, "Edible Forest Gardens", by Dave Jacke and Eric Toensmeier, and it shows the basic idea beautifully. The trees and plants copy the layers you would find in woodland that had generated all on its own: tall trees, smaller trees, shrubs, bushes, herbs, a ground layer, roots, mycelium and maybe some climbing plants and an emergent layer.
THE REALLY IMPORTANT STUFF IS GOING ON UNDERGROUND
People are often surprised to find out that fruit trees aren't all that deep rooted. The roots of the pear tree in the illustration are mainly shallow for feeding and sharing with other plants with a few deeper tap roots. Compare that with horseradish roots which can go sixteen foot down into the ground. This is really crucial to the forest system, those deep roots bring up nutrients that would otherwise be unavailable. We can chop up the foliage of horseradish and other similar plants like comfrey and use them to feed and mulch other plants wherever they need it, being perennial, it just grows back.

The unremarkable foliage of horseradish and its very remarkable, sixteen foot deep roots

FOREST: NO WASTE, NO ENERGY REQUIREMENT
If you have a look at some natural woodland, (we're very lucky here in Perth, Scotland to have Kinnoull Hill on our doorstep) you won't find a skip full of stuff that the forest didn't need, or plastic packaging left from stuff it bought. Everything is generated on the spot, and regenerated using dead and decaying plants. There's no electricity cable, the energy requirement comes from the Sun, wind, rain, and animals passing through. Compare this with industrial agriculture:

...it takes a tremendous amount of energy to produce a crop of just one plant, because that's not what Nature wants to do. It uses fossil fuel in each and every process, from the manufacture of those enormous machines through to harvest,  and tons of packaging too. Not only that, annual ploughing destroys soil fertility.
MORE SOON! It's a huge topic but it's relevant to all my gardening clients and friends and I wanted to get started on spreading the word.