Plant an Edible Forest Garden

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All of these are plants that do well in my climate. As I mentioned earlier, I think it’s wiser to forego fruits and other crop plants that do not thrive in your region without extensive spraying or other major interventions. In my case that has meant ripping out the four peach trees I had nurtured for years, while harvesting only a dozen ripe peaches for all my pains.

So far, my main effort at ground-level plantings has been to use mulch to kill the existing grass sod and make way for a more complex herbaceous cover. I’ve started to establish a few permanent plantings, including a great deal of comfrey directly under my established fruit trees. I harvest this high-protein, mineral-rich plant in large quantities to feed my poultry and the worms in my vermiculture bins, as well as for mulches and composting.

Last spring I also started skirret (Sium sisarum), a perennial with an edible root whose flavor resembles parsnip. Other edible perennials I established last year were perennial bunching onions, garlic chives, violets (both flowers and leaves are edible) and sorrel. I planted a variety of other culinary and medicinal herbs, as well as some small fruits at ground level: cranberry, lingonberry and wintergreen.

There are several plants I formerly considered “weeds” that I have also welcomed into our forest garden. Dandelion and yellow dock (Rumex crispus) are both excellent dynamic accumulators, and they also furnish nutritious greens for our poultry. (Dandelion makes excellent “people food” as well.)

I also now allow upland or field cress (Barbarea verna) to grow anywhere it volunteers — its leaves make a delicious and nutritious potherb. Burdock (Arctium lappa) furnishes edible roots and stems, and is also known to be an excellent detoxifier. Poke is a beautiful plant whose (very short, early) shoots make an excellent cooked “spring salad.” This spring, I also sowed mixed clovers (for soil fertility and insect habitat) and mixed crucifers (to enhance beneficial insect populations) in the areas of the forest garden where I killed the sod with mulches last year. This mix will be the main cover in these areas until replaced with other perennial plantings.

I’ve mentioned numerous fruit, shrub and perennial ground plants well suited to a forest garden, but believe me, we’ve barely scratched the surface of the many possibilities for crops you could plant!

To me, forest gardening is exciting not only because it promises to increase food yield, but because it offers a deeper connection to the natural world. Those of us who are gardeners usually work with such a “tame” version of nature that we forget we’re part of a much larger and more complex “garden” that we can cooperate with, but cannot control. The forest garden merges the cultivated and the wild; offering food not only for the body, but for the eye and the soul. It can be the place where the Garden of Eden meets the Sacred Grove.

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Toby Hemenway

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