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.com
www.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