Food Forests Across America!
on Visionary Culture Radio!
Monday April 6th, 8:00 pm PST
Call In :: 646-649-1957
Greetings friends and permaculture enthusiasts -
Join the campaign for local food security and learn how you can help to transform gardens, lawns, parks, and empty spaces into thriving edible landscapes that are beautiful, regenerative, and produce an abundance of delicious, locally grown food! We can create intentional systems that provide for our needs and the needs of the earth by mirroring natural ecologies in our designs.
What is a Food Forest Garden?
A Food Forest describes an intentionally cultivated forest that mimics the native ecosystem. In designing a food forest, we observe the community of plants in the forest. The home Food Forest reflects these observations by applying plants that function similar to the native plants but have a higher yield, are more palatable, or useful in some way to the designer. Food Forests can offer an incredible abundance while stewarding the landscape in a good way.
Imagine a forest where every single tree is dripping with fresh fruits and ripening nuts. Every shrub is packed with delicious berries, and every other plant is a medicinal herb, culinary spice, or beautiful edible flower. Tubers and root crops are abundant underfoot, gourmet mushroom logs sprout in the shade, and hardy kiwi vines climb back up through the layers of this multi-functional forest of food.
Food forests are diverse gardens modeled after natural ecosystems designed to mimic the way a forest thrives and regenerates. A forest continuously nourishing all elements in the system and produce a vast diversity of outputs, but requires little or no inputs to sustain itself. By recognizing the self-supporting, mutually beneficial relationships of the elements in a forest - from tall trees, smaller trees, shrubs, herbs, ground covers, vines, nitrogen fixers, insectaries, fungi, animals, and more, the food forest garden designs a similar system but replaces the components that are in a common forest with species that are preferred edibles and more useful for humans. The forest then becomes a Garden of Eden, in which edible or useful plants are found from head to toe, where something in season is always ready to eat, and the system requires little or no maintenance to sustain and regenerate. As a food forest mimics the ecology found in native forests, they are fantastic examples of good soil and land stewardship.
Food Forests Across America!\
on Visionary Culture Radio!
Monday April 6th, 8:00 pm PST
Call In :: 646-649-1957
Tune into Visionary Culture Radio with Laura Fox on Monday for a show on Food Forests Across America with special guest permaculture teachers from the east to west coasts of the U.S.
Special Guests Include:
Jay Ma - Co-Founder, Director of Programs & Development - Living Mandala John Valenzuela - Veteran Permaculture Designer, Educator & Consultant
Where Can I Learn About Forest Gardens?
We recommend the books-
Forest Gardening by Robert Hart
How to Make a Forest Garden by Patrick Whitefield
Designing and Maintaining Your Edible Landscape Naturally by Robert Kourik
Roots Demystified by Robert Kourik
- Garden of Eden: Permaculture Revolution published in Greenlifestyles by Jay Ma
as well as Permaculture resources, practices, and philosophies.
The best way is to learn how to design and install a Food Forest Garden is by taking a hands-on course.
or catalyse a Food Forest workshop in your own bioregion!
In the local Olympia area, Terra Commons has many opportunities to learn about and work in forest gardens, check out: http://www.oly-wa.us/Terra/
All are invite to join in the Food Forest at the Wild Thyme Farm. Please contact Marisha Auerbach to schedule: queenbee@herbnwisdom.com or (360) 273-7117 --
Herb'n Wisdom
Queen Bee Flower Essences
www.herbnwisdom.comwww.wildthymefarm.com"...the greatest change we need to make is from consumption to
production, even if on a small scale, in our own gardens. If only 10% of
us do this, there is enough for everyone.
Hence the futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on
the very system they attack, and who produce words and bullets, not food
and shelter." - Bill Mollison