Plant an Edible Forest Garden
(Page 3 of 6)
August/September 2007
By Harvey Ussery
In either case, extensive planning is the key: Making changes to the layout of a vegetable or herb bed is easily done, and even most shrubs can be moved, if done so with care. But once a large tree is established, moving it is not an option.
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Another approach to creating a forest garden is to start with an existing orchard and add plantings. Imagine a typical orchard: fruit trees at their required spacing over a ground cover of grass. Unless we go back to the historical practice of grazing sheep on the grass, the only harvest from the orchard will be its fruit.
Now imagine that between the fruit trees we “shoehorn” in various shrubs that will produce fruits, berries and nuts in the shade of their taller brothers and sisters. Further, we might replace the grass cover with herbaceous plants that produce food, medicine, or other benefits, such as feeding wildlife and beneficial insects, or increasing soil fertility.
Plants that grow in the shade are an essential part of a forest garden, but there is also room for plants requiring full sun — you can simply place them along the edges of your forest garden.
It is much easier to work with your site and climate, rather than fighting them. For example, if a desirable fruit such as peaches would require a lot of spraying in your area, it might be wiser to forego the peaches and explore alternative fruits that are naturally disease-resistant in your climate. But whatever you choose to plant, the well-designed forest garden offers a much greater potential yield than that from the conventional orchard, in the same space.
PREPARE TO PLANT!
Most forest gardens will need to be started on sites with an existing ground cover. Don’t till to destroy an established cover if you can avoid it — it’s very disruptive to soil life.
A better option is to begin with a “kill mulch.” Start by laying down a smothering layer of organic matter such as newspaper or cardboard, then cover thickly with grass clippings or leaves. Under so much mulch, the existing sod dies, but rather than damaging the web of soil life, the soil is given a big boost by the rapid breakdown of the dying sod. It’s now possible to open up holes in the kill mulch and put in new plants there.
MY TWO SMALL FOREST GARDENS
From the beginning, I’ve thought of the forest garden as quite a flexible concept. If you start with any part of your homestead and turn it into a more complex, multifunctional polyculture, you have created a forest garden, however small the scale. I’ve started two of these small-scale forest gardens on my own homestead.
For two decades, I’ve managed my poultry flocks on our one acre of pasture. Then, last year, I decided to make this model a bit more interesting: I planted two mulberries and three chestnut trees on the pasture, and put in comfrey as ground cover under the trees.
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