Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

August/September 2007
Plant an Edible Forest Garden
By Harvey Ussery
http://www.motherearthnews.com/Homesteading-and-Self-Reliance/2007-08-01/Pla
nt-Edible-Forest-Garden-Permaculture.aspx

Make your garden more productive by learning how to mimic a natural forest.

Are you feeling adventurous? Do you want to delve deeper into gardening?
Even better, are you thinking of planting an orchard? If so, consider
starting a forest garden. With a little planning, you can grow a productive
forest garden, full of plants that work together in imitation of a natural
forest.

I’m convinced that imitating natural systems is fundamental to any
successful effort to raise food. The idea behind forest gardening is that
natural forests produce an abundance of food. People the world over have
harvested food from the forest, reaping where they did not sow. Forest
gardeners imitate the forest’s natural structure to take advantage of
this abundance, but they increase yields even further through careful
planning and management. The result is a productive fusion of garden,
orchard and woodland.

I’ve been exploring the idea of forest gardening for several years, and
have recently begun to try it on my own homestead. But before looking at my
forest gardening efforts, let’s consider in more detail how a forest
garden works.
A GARDEN OF PERENNIALS

One of the main differences between a forest garden and the typical food
garden is that forest gardens rely on perennials. Most vegetable gardens
include mainly annuals—such as tomatoes, lettuce or radishes.

To understand the difference this makes, consider the role of annual plants
in nature. Annuals colonize and cover disturbed ground, because theirs is a
high-energy, in-a-hurry lifestyle. In a single season, an annual sprouts
from seed, grows to maturity, ripens fruits and seeds, then dies.

Because of the speed and fecundity of the annuals’ lifestyle, they are
able to cover patches of bare ground quickly. This energy intensive
lifestyle is only possible in full sun—in shade, most annuals will not
receive sufficient power for their task. Over time, however, as the annuals
protect and build the soil of the disturbed area, they give way to
perennials, and these are the plants we want to establish in a forest
garden.

Most gardeners are used to a fair amount of disturbance and change in their
gardens, from tillage, crop rotation, and so on. In contrast, a natural
forest tends to maintain its character over time, and resists rapid change.
Changes in plant species do happen in a forest, but they usually take place
very slowly. The goal of the forest gardener is to follow these patterns
and establish a perennial polyculture from which food is harvested with
minimal disturbance.
LAYERS OF THE FOREST

Several groups of perennials form a natural forest. The biggest are the
trees, which need the full light of the sun to thrive and support their
massive growth. To get that sunlight, they grow high and wide, forming a
canopy of leaves to soak up the sun. On the other hand, shrubs have learned
how to thrive in the shade of the canopy, where there is less light.
Intermediate between these two classes of plants are the vines, growing in
the shade but reaching for the full light of the canopy.

Finally, there are the ground plants that cover the forest floor, and like
the shrubs, these plants have learned how to live in the canopy’s shade.
In a natural forest, these perennials eventually take over the annuals’
duty of keeping the ground covered, but they’re a good deal more
conservative in their lifestyle. They have a slower growth rate than the
annuals and different strategies for reproducing. For example, they may
store energy in their roots to avoid having to start anew from seed in the
spring.

Many natural forests fit this pattern, and with judicious selection, we can
design gardens that provide the same thing: a compatible, mutually
supportive community of food-bearing plants in all three layers. That is
the forest garden.
PLANTS THAT WORK TOGETHER

Some plants in a forest garden produce food in the form of nuts and fruits,
while the herbaceous plants often have edible stems, leaves or shoots. Many
of these plants also provide food and shelter to insects, amphibians and
birds. This balance of predator and prey species imitates a natural forest
community. However, not all the plants in our forest garden are intended to
produce food for us, or even for wildlife. Some might be chosen for their
ability to boost soil fertility.

Among the fertility boosting plants are dynamic accumulators—plants such
as comfrey with roots that grow deep into the subsoil, “mining”
minerals that otherwise would never be tapped, and making them available to
shallow-rooted plants.

Other fertility boosting plants are nitrogen fixers. The roots of these
plants associate with rhizobial bacteria—a partnership that benefits both
the bacteria and the host plant, and that provides a nitrogen boost for
other plants in the community as well.

Plants in all three layers of the forest garden can serve as dynamic
accumulators or nitrogen fixers. For example, a few excellent dynamic
accumulators include black locust trees, flowering dogwoods at the shrub
level, and comfrey and dandelions at ground level. Nitrogen fixers include
alder and black locust trees; in the shrub layer, bayberry and acacias; and
in the herbaceous layer, vetches and perennial clovers.
CHOOSE A STRATEGY

An established forest garden can be very low-maintenance, but it requires a
lot of planning before you get started. The best approach to begin a forest
garden depends on your individual preferences and circumstances. It’s
possible to “start from scratch”—say with a plot of grass sod—and
assemble the forest garden as an interlocking set of plantings in all three
layers. This option offers the greatest flexibility, and the widest choices
of species, design and strategies.

At the other extreme, you might start with an existing plot of woodland,
and clear strategic areas to make way for new plantings. This must be
approached with care and respect, since cutting down a tree is a serious
matter that can’t be undone.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

You can find much more of Harvey Ussery’s 21st Century Homesteading
wisdom at his Web site and in our Amazin' Archive:

    * Plan the Perfect Homestead
    * Why Grow Your Own Food?
    * Build Better Garden Soil
    * 8 Strategies for Better Garden Soil