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
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| 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.
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| 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.
