Starting Your Own Food Forest
As a second part to the blog “Food Forests – A Resilient Solution for People and Wildlife”, Daniel Holm has written a step by step guide on how to start your own. The sustainable benefits of creating a forest garden will help as we face the uncertainties of the climate and biodiversity crisis, and with spring in full swing, this is the perfect time to create a resilient and biodiverse food source that will benefit yourself and nature.
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Forest gardens are suitable for both small back garden situations and whole field situations up to several hectares. They are particularly suitable to small areas since the structure maximizes the diversity of crops that can be produced from it.
There are many ways to go about starting your own forest garden depending on your own site conditions. If you have time it is a very valuable exercise to spend a whole year observing the conditions of your site throughout the seasons before beginning planting. Taking note of wet/dry areas, shady or full sun areas, exposure to wind and how all these change over the year. Make maps of these conditions on your site for each season. This will allow you to make the best decisions of what to plant and where.
There are some great resources out there, which I will list at the end, which cover all of these techniques involved in the establishment of a forest garden. It is beyond the scope of this blog to go through them all, so I will just stick with what I have done and what has and has not worked for me, here in the Highlands.
The structure of a forest garden should aim to emulate a mid-stage of forest succession with a mixture of large and small trees, scrub, ground cover and herbs rather than a mature forest with a closed canopy. This allows for a much more diverse array of foods to be grown. With a closed canopy forest all that can be grown are large tree crops and shade tolerant crops. A younger forest structure provides many more niches for plants of all sorts of needs and thus more diversity of food.
Image: Graham Burnett, Wikimedia Commons
Having observed the area you wish to plant up as a forest garden and with your map you can begin to plan how you are going to plant up your garden. One of the first things you want to consider is sun exposure since this is essential for photosynthesis. You want to arrange your planting to maximize use of your hours of sunlight. So here in the northern hemisphere it is advisable to plant taller trees to the northern edge of the area you are planting, grading down through shorter trees to shrubs and herbs on the southern edge of your planting area. This maximizes your solar gain since nothing is being excessively shaded. This can also be applied on a smaller scale. When planting a large fruiting tree, the shorter plants being planted next to it should be planted on its southern side.
From your initial observations you will have an idea of the prevailing winds and their strength and so the position of any windbreak needed. This should take the form of a hedge and should be one of the first things planted if it is needed. Protection from the wind can greatly increase the success of your plantings. Many plants suitable for hedging can also provide you with a crop – hazels, brambles, Japanese yew, fejoa, hawthorn, blackthorn etc. A hedge can also provide an important habitat and corridor for wildlife to get into your garden. Helping with pollination, pest control and boosting local biodiversity.
Ground Preparation & Planting:
My site was previously grazed by goats and was dominated by grasses, docks, bracken and gorse.
A method I have found to be effective and cheap for preparing ground for planting of my forest garden is sheet mulching with thick brown cardboard covered by wood chips. Although it is fairly labor intensive, it is much less so than digging out all the existing weeds and grasses before planting. It is also much less disruptive to the soil structure and fauna, and also kick starts a fungally dominated soil ecosystem (typical of a forest) as opposed to a bacterially dominated one (typical of grassland).
Both cardboard and wood chip can be found for free or very cheap, the later can often be obtained from a local arborist company. Sheet mulching effectively kills off most weeds and grasses (which greatly inhibit tree establishment) by smothering them so giving a weed free area to begin planting into. The weeds are also composted in situ further increasing the soil fertility. Some more persistent weeds such as docks may survive and push through the mulch, but they will be weak and easily pulled out.
To sheet mulch an area, lay down sheets of carboard overlapping each other by approximately 20 cm and cover with a thick layer of wood chip, about 30 cm. The carboard will be broken down within a matter of months and the wood chip over several years. You can also use any other organic material you might have to hand on your site in place of wood chips. I have used a lot of dead braken fronds gathered from my attempts to reclaim some land from its clutches. Also grass cuttings and leaves or straw. As long as it is a thick enough layer to smother the weeds for long enough to kill them of.
Cardboard, braken and woodchip used to sheet much and establish food forest
Having used this method to prepare some or all of your ground you can now begin planting. Depending on the size of area you are planting up, this can be achieved in one year or more typically over several planting seasons. Planting up an area in one season is really only feasible on a small piece of land because of the number of plants that are needed to fill all of the ecological niches of a young forest. Planting over several seasons is how I have planted my garden and it has many advantages such as spreading the cost and the workload of initial establishment, as well as seeing how certain plants do before investing in lots of plants which may fail.
My planting began with the larger fruiting trees and shrubs scattered across my site each individually mulched around, forming small mulched islands. Each island around a larger tree also contained the plants from the other layers in the forest; a shrub, some ground cover, herbs and beneficial nutrient accumulating plants like comfrey - so each island was a tiny forest on its own.
As the years progressed I would mulch between these islands eventually joining them together at the same time as planting up the mulched areas with shrubs, herbs, trees and ground cover plants, eventually having mulched out most of the grasses and weeds.
This requires a lot of plants and while I did spend some money on new plants I have tried as much as possible to propagate my own from cuttings from bought plants, or from seed. This greatly reduces initial cost of establishment as well as giving you a deeper understanding of the needs of these plants.
Choice of plants is dictated initially by what will grow in your region, which is actually quite a bit more than what might be traditionally grown. For example where you can grow apples you could also be growing Paw Paw (Asamina triloba) the only northern hemisphere member of the custard apple family. Or you could be growing alternatives to more tropical plants we can usually only find in supermarkets. For example ginger could be replaced by the hardy Myoga ginger which tastes the same but only the young shoots and flower buds are eaten. Tropical black pepper could be replaced by Szechuan pepper which grows really well here and in my opinion tastes much better. Secondly your choice of what to grow will be dictated by what you want to eat. There is no point in growing plants if you are not going to use there produce.
Another aspect to consider when planting is incorporating as many different types of native trees and plants as you can. Some may provide you with a product such as hazel nuts or birch sap. Many will not but it is important to also provide habitat and food sources for our native wildlife as well. Many of the non-native plants can provide this for some species but others are very specific in there needs and require our native trees and plants. A bit of research will reveal a wide variety of plants that will do well here in the Highlands and produce a good crop.
Once established, a food forest should require minimal maintenance and should become more and more productive with time as plants and trees become more established and grow. This is when all of the hard work of planting and mulching for several years pays off and you can sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labor, along with the diverse and wildlife filled space that is your food forest.
Daniel Holm
Resources
Books:
Creating a Forest Garden - Martin Crawford
The Woodchip Handbook - Ben Raskin
Plants For Your Food Forest - Plants For A Future
Mycelium Running - Paul Stamets
Edible Forrest Gardens - Dave Jacke and Eric Toensmeier
Integrated Forest Gardening - Bryce Ruddock, Daniel Halsey and Wayne Weiseman
Websites:
Agroforestry Research Trust - https://www.agroforestry.co.uk/ Sells plants, researches and educates about perennial crops, great free resource here is the 2021 International Symposium on Food forests. Many videos covering the subject from experts.
Permaculture Association - https://www.permaculture.org.uk/ A wide ranging website covering many aspects of permaculture of which Forest Gardening is a part of.
https://www.foodforest.garden/forest-garden-seeds/ Scottish Forest Garden Nursery, selling seeds and running courses.
https://www.scottishfruittrees.com/ Sells Scottish Heritage variety fruit trees.
http://www.annforfungi.co.uk/shop/ Sells edible mushroom spawn suitable for and sourced in Scotland.
https://www.poyntzfieldherbs.co.uk/ Sells culinary and medicinal herbs, based in the Black Isle.
https://www.korewildfruitnursery.co.uk/ Specializes in food producing plants from around the world.