Plant an Edible Forest Garden
(Page 4 of 6)
August/September 2007
By Harvey Ussery
Even this small step toward making a forest garden provides some remarkable benefits. First, we’ll have the mulberries and the chestnuts from the trees. Also, as the trees grow, they’ll provide shade for my chickens, ducks and geese, who also will eat the comfrey and the dropped fruit from the mulberries. One of the biggest challenges to growing chestnuts is dealing with chestnut weevils, but my sharp-eyed birds will help me keep their numbers down. And the comfrey not only feeds the poultry, it also makes the soil more fertile.
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I’m also experimenting with opening up an existing bit of woodland to forest garden by planting nine nut trees, which arrived as I write this! They consist of two black walnuts, a shagbark and a shellbark hickory, two pecans, a hican (hybrid between hickory and pecan), a heartnut and a Carpathian walnut. Many of the nut trees are quite large, so to make room for them I’ll have to cut some swaths into my woods’ edges. Because there are already established wild hickories and black walnuts in my woods, I am confident that grafted cultivars of these related species should do well here.
One part of our woods tends to stay moist. Last year I transplanted ramps (wild leeks) into this space, and this spring made it obvious they like their new environs. Despite an earlier failure with ginseng and goldenseal elsewhere on our property, I’ll try planting them again this year in this new location. Along the edges of this forest area we have planted many brambles — including wineberries and black cap raspberries.
I’m excited about the potential for using mushroom species in the forest garden for both edible and medicinal varieties, and to speed the decomposition of thinned trees. I inoculate the occasional hardwood tree I cut down with spawn for shiitake mushrooms, a fine edible species. This year I have “plugged” hardwood logs and stumps with reishi spawn (Ganoderma lucidum, highly prized in Asia as a medicinal), turkey tail (Trametes versicolor, medicinal) and lion’s mane (Hericium erinaceus, edible).
I’m also experimenting with two other edible mushroom species to speed decomposition of wood debris in the edges of our woods: blewitts (Lepista nuda) and king stropharia (Stropharia rugoso annulata, also known as wine cap stropharia). For more on the exciting uses of mushrooms as decomposers, edibles, medicinals and for bioremediation, I highly recommend Mycelium Running, the latest book by Paul Stamets (Ten Speed Press, 2005).
A LARGER PROJECT: CONVERTING AN ORCHARD
My main forest gardening project is to convert our existing orchard to forest garden. At the beginning, I had 20 trees: apples, plums, pears, kaki persimmons, paw paws, cherries, juneberries and mulberries.
At the start of the growing season last year, I put heavy kill mulches over as much of the orchard as I could manage. Then, in the spaces between the existing fruit trees, I planted another 20 trees and shrubs, including cherry, elderberry, Asian pears and hazelnut trees, as well as jujubes, gooseberries, currants, two bush cherries, two Nanking cherries and one che (melon tree).
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