[Lapg] Edible Forest Gardens by Dave Jacke with Eric Toensmeier

Wed May 18 21:49:33 PDT 2005

Edible Forest Gardens 	http://www.edibleforestgardens.com/
  A Delicious and Practical Ecology 	

Edible Forest Gardens.com is dedicated to offering inspiring and practical 
information on the vision, ecology, design, and stewardship of perennial 
polycultures of multipurpose plants in small-scale settings. We intend this 
website to grow into an information and networking resource for newcomers, 
amateurs, and serious practitioners and researchers alike.

This website is under construction! Please come back again soon to watch us 
evolve--and participate in our evolution. In the meantime, please read the 
Synopsis of Edible Forest Gardens below.  Thanks for visiting--we hope to 
see you again soon.
About Edible Forest Gardens: A Synopsis

            Let's explore the edible forest gardening idea in some 
detail.   This synopsis not only explains the fundamentals of forest 
gardening, but its structure parallels the contents of the forthcoming 
two-volume book Edible Forest Gardens by Dave Jacke with Eric Toensmeier, 
due out this summer from Chelsea Green Publishing.
Vision

Picture yourself in a forest where almost everything around you is 
food.   Mature and maturing fruit and nut trees form an open canopy.   If 
you look carefully, you can see fruits swelling on many branches—pears, 
apples, persimmons, pecans, and chestnuts.   Shrubs fill the gaps in the 
canopy.   They bear raspberries, blueberries, currants, hazelnuts, and 
other lesser-known fruits, flowers, and nuts at different times of the 
year.   Assorted native wildflowers, wild edibles, herbs, and perennial 
vegetables thickly cover the ground.   You use many of these plants for 
food or medicine.   Some attract beneficial insects, birds, and 
butterflies.   Others act as soil builders, or simply help keep out 
weeds.   Here and there vines climb on trees, shrubs, or arbors with fruit 
hanging through the foliage—hardy kiwis, grapes, and passionflower 
fruits.   In sunnier glades large stands of Jerusalem artichokes grow 
together with groundnut vines.   These plants support one another as they 
store energy in their roots for later harvest and winter storage.   Their 
bright yellow and deep violet flowers enjoy the radiant warmth from the 
sky.   This is an edible forest garden.
What is Edible Forest Gardening?

            Edible forest gardening is the art and science of putting 
plants together in woodlandlike patterns that forge mutually beneficial 
relationships, creating a garden ecosystem that is more than the sum of its 
parts.   You can grow fruits, nuts, vegetables, herbs, mushrooms, other 
useful plants, and animals in a way that mimics natural ecosystems.   You 
can create a beautiful, diverse, high-yield garden.   If designed with care 
and deep understanding of ecosystem function, you can also design a garden 
that is largely self-maintaining.   In many of the world's 
temperate-climate regions, your garden would soon start reverting to forest 
if you were to stop managing it.   We humans work hard to hold back 
succession—mowing, weeding, plowing, and spraying.   If the successional 
process were the wind, we would be constantly motoring against it.   Why 
not put up a sail and glide along with the land's natural tendency to grow 
trees?   By mimicking the structure and function of forest ecosystems we 
can gain a number of benefits.
Why Grow an Edible Forest Garden?

            While each forest gardener will have unique design goals, 
forest gardening in general has three primary practical intentions:

            • high yields of diverse products such as food, fuel, fiber, 
fodder, fertilizer, 'farmaceuticals' and fun;

            • a largely self-maintaining garden and;

            • a healthy ecosystem.

These three goals are mutually reinforcing.   For example, diverse crops 
make it easier to design a healthy, self-maintaining ecosystem, and a 
healthy garden ecosystem should have reduced maintenance 
requirements.   However, forest gardening also has higher aims.

            As Masanobu Fukuoka once said, “The ultimate goal of farming is 
not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human 
beings.” How we garden reflects our worldview.   The ultimate goal of 
forest gardening is not only the growing of crops, but the cultivation and 
perfection of new ways of seeing, of thinking, and of acting in the 
world.   Forest gardening gives us a visceral experience of ecology in 
action, teaching us how the planet works and changing our 
self-perceptions.   Forest gardening helps us take our rightful place as 
part of nature doing nature's work, rather than as separate entities 
intervening in and dominating the natural world.
Where Can You Grow an Edible Forest Garden?

            Anyone with a patch of land can grow a forest garden.   They've 
been created in small urban yards and large parks, on suburban lots, and in 
small plots of rural farms. The smallest we have seen was a 30 by 50 foot 
(9 by 15 m) embankment behind an urban housing project, and smaller 
versions are definitely possible.   The largest we have seen spanned 2 
acres in a rural research garden.   Forest gardeners are doing their thing 
at 7,000 feet (2,100 m) of elevation in the Rocky Mountains, on the coastal 
plain of the mid-Atlantic, and in chilly New Hampshire and 
Vermont.   Forest gardening has a long history in the tropics, where there 
is evidence of the practice extending over 10,000 years.   While you can 
grow a forest garden in almost any climate, it is easiest if you do it in a 
regions where the native vegetation is forest, especially deciduous forest.

            Edible forest gardening is not necessarily gardening in the 
forest, it is gardening like the forest.   You don't need to have an 
existing woodland if you want to forest garden, though you can certainly 
work with one.   Forest gardeners use the forest as a design metaphor, a 
model of structure and function, while adapting the design to focus on 
meeting human needs in a small space.   While you can forest garden if you 
have a shady site, it is best if your garden site has good sun if you want 
the highest yields of fruits, nuts, berries, and most other 
products.   Edible forest gardening is about expanding the horizons of our 
food gardening across the full range of the successional sequence, from 
field to forest, and everything in between.
Ecology

            Edible forest gardens mimic the structure and function of 
forest ecosystems—this is how we create the high, diverse yields, 
self-maintenance, and healthy ecosystem we seek for our garden.   It is 
therefore critical to understand forest ecology and its implications for 
design.   Four aspects of forest ecology are key: community architecture, 
ecosystem social structure, the structures of the underground economy, and 
how the community changes through time, also known as succession. Brief 
discussions of each of these aspects and examples of their influence on 
garden design and management follow.
  Architecture

            Contrary to the prevailing wisdom on forest gardening, 
vegetation layers are only one of the architectural features important in 
forest garden design.   Soil horizon structure, vegetation patterning, 
vegetation density, and community diversity are also critical.   All five 
of these elements of community architecture influence yields, plant health, 
pest and disease dynamics, maintenance requirements, and overall community 
character.   For example, scientific research indicates that structural 
diversity in forest vegetation, what we call “lumpy texture,” appears to 
increase bird and insect population diversity and to balance insect pest 
populations—independent of plant species diversity.   Learning how and why 
plants pattern themselves in nature and about the effects of the diverse 
kinds of diversity on ecosystem function can add great richness to the tool 
box of the forest gardener.
Social Structure

            The unique inherent needs, yields, physical characteristics, 
behaviors, and adaptive strategies of an organism govern its interactions 
with its neighbors and its nonliving environment.   They also determine the 
roles each organism plays within its community.   The food web is one key 
community structure that arises from each species' 
characteristics.   Organisms also form various kinds of “guilds” that 
partition resources to minimize competition or create networks of mutual 
support.

            When we design a forest garden, we select plants and animals 
that will create a food web and guild structure, whether we know it or 
not.   It behooves us to design these structures consciously so we can 
maximize our chances of creating a healthy, self-maintaining, high-yield 
garden.   For example, the vast majority of solar energy captured by 
natural forest food webs ends up going to rot.   We can capture some of 
this energy for our own use by growing edible and medicinal mushrooms, most 
of which prefer shady conditions.   We can design resource-partitioning 
guilds by including plants with different light tolerances in different 
vegetation layers, for instance, or mixing taprooted trees such as pecans 
and other hickories with shallow-rooted species such as apples or 
pears.   We can build mutual-support guilds by ensuring that pollinators 
and insect predators have nectar sources throughout the growing 
season.  Insights into the guild structure of ecosystems provides clear 
direction for design as well as research into many aspects of agroecology.
The Underground Economy

            The workings of nature's “underground economy” are a mystery, 
but the dynamics of this ecosystem are fundamental to the workings of all 
terrestrial communities.   What is the anatomy of self-renewing soil 
fertility?   How do plant roots interact with each other and their 
environment?   What roles do microbes and other soil organisms play in our 
forest gardens, and how should we interact with them?

            Plants are critical components of the structure that creates 
self-renewing fertility in natural ecosystems.   They plug the primary 
nutrient leaks from the soil and energize a networked system of plants, 
soil organic matter, soil organisms, and soil particles that gathers, 
concentrates, and cycles nutrients conservatively.   Maintaining perennial 
plant cover greatly aids this process.   In addition “dynamic accumulator” 
plants like comfrey ( Symphytum officinale ) selectively accumulate mineral 
nutrients to high levels in their leaf tissues, adding them to the topsoil 
each fall.  As we enter the post-oil age, our understanding of the anatomy 
of self-renewing fertility will become more and more critical to our 
success in temperate climates.

            Understanding the dynamics of woody and herbaceous plant roots 
is critical to learning how to design and manage forest gardens.   In what 
patterns do plant roots grow, why, and when?   While the majority of tree 
roots grow in the top two to three feet of soil, it turns out that fruit 
trees that can get even a small percentage of their roots deep into the 
soil profile produce more fruit more consistently, resist pests and 
diseases more effectively, and live longer than those that have only 
shallow root systems.   Good pre-planting site preparation is therefore a 
highly worthwhile endeavor.   Root system understanding provides a solid 
foundation for plant species selection and polyculture design.

            Soil organisms perform numerous critical functions in forest 
and garden ecosystems, and we can easily disrupt these allies and their 
work with unthinking actions.   Luckily, basic forest gardening principles 
like using mulch and leaving the soil undisturbed provide just the kind of 
benign neglect our tiny friends need.   However, good soil preparation can 
make all the difference, as well.   For example, compacted or poorly 
drained soils can severely hamper the development of healthy soil food 
webs, and hence healthy forest gardens.   Understanding the soil food web 
also provides insight into how to manage for healthy mycorrhizal fungi 
populations and how to ensure that nitrogen-fixing plants actually do their 
soil-building work.
Succession

            Ecosystems are dynamic, and ever-changing.   Plant succession 
used to be thought of as the directional change of a community over time 
from “immature” stages toward a “mature” “climax” community typical of a 
given region and environment, such as a field changing to shrubland and 
then to, say, oak-hickory forest.   However, new models of succession have 
arisen in recent years that articulate the complex reality of plant 
community change over time without so blatantly projecting human cultural 
constructs upon natural phenomena.   Plant succession is nonlinear and 
occurs patch by patch within the ecosystem, and rarely do ecosystems ever 
attain a climax or equilibrium state.   Disturbances of various kinds are a 
natural part of every successional process—windstorms, fires, insect 
attacks, and human intervention.   Nonetheless, linear succession to a 
“horizon” is a valid model to use when designing forest garden successions, 
as are various other permutations that mimic garden crop rotations or 
represent an ever-changing dance responding to the forces, needs, and whims 
of the moment.

            While the practical applications of these new successional 
theories are of necessity somewhat vague, we do know that the most 
productive stages of succession are those in the middle—such as shrublands, 
oldfield mosaics, and woodlands—not necessarily full-fledged forests.   In 
addition, most of our developed tree crops are species adapted to such 
midsuccession environments.   Our highest yielding forest gardens are 
therefore most likely to contain, not the dense tree canopies of late 
succession forests, but lush mixtures of trees, shrubs, vines, and herbs 
all occupying the same space in patches of varying density and 
character.   Succession theory also teaches us many different approaches to 
directing ecological succession in our gardens.
Design

            At its simplest, forest garden design involves choosing what 
plants to place in your garden in which locations, at which 
times.   However, these seemingly simple acts must generate the forest-like 
structures and functions we seek, and they must also achieve your design 
goals.   A forest garden design process, then, must be information 
intensive if it is to achieve even moderately complex 
objectives.   Therefore, begin by articulating your goals and assessing 
your garden site.   Then you can select and apply design patterns, 
ecological principles, and plants in such a way that you integrate your 
goals and the site into a coherent whole.   The challenge is to array the 
available design elements to create a set of ecosystem dynamics that will 
in turn yield the desired conditions of high yields, maximal 
self-maintenance, and maximum ecological health as inherent by-products of 
the ecosystem.   You can use design patterns drawn from natural ecosystem 
examples or invent your own patterns that solve specific problems your 
design faces to help you do this.   Patterns also arise from the 
requirements of the goals themselves and from a deep understanding of the 
site's characteristics.   The goals guide the site analysis and assessment, 
and the site assessment discovers the design.

            We recommend designing on paper, at least initially, so you can 
make as many mistakes as possible there, and correct them before putting 
anything into the ground.   On-site design techniques can also work well, 
especially for those who prefer to avoid the mapping process. Careful 
design of plant spacing is a critical piece of the puzzle, in any 
case.   Planting too closely together is the most frequent mistake that 
forest gardeners around the world have made.   We hope that a more robust 
and explicit design process will help us all avoid such common mistakes and 
make some newer mistakes that are more interesting so we can learn from the 
experience.
Practice

            Good site preparation is a critical precursor to planting your 
forest garden.   Your site analysis and assessment should help you 
understand your site's limitations so that you can decide whether or how to 
alter the site, or how to adapt to the conditions present.   Soil 
compaction, for example, is exceedingly common in most urban, suburban, and 
even rural sites, and it can severely restrict root growth, water movement 
in the soil, and the health of soil organism communities.   Double-digging, 
chisel plowing, radial trenching, and other techniques can help you deal 
with severe compaction, while the simple act of mulching the soil and 
planting deep-rooted perennials will eventually address slight 
compaction.   Other common site preparation challenges include poor soil 
texture, shallow soil depth, road salt, and persistent weeds.

            Proper stock selection, planting, and mulching techniques can 
also have major long-term effects on plant vigor and productivity.   Many 
woody planting specimens have been transplanted multiple times, and these 
can have kinked, circling, or damaged roots that will result in plant 
stress and even an untimely death.   Carefully examine your specimens 
before you buy to ensure a quality root system, or purchase bare root stock 
so you can see the whole root system before planting.   In fine-textured 
soils, the edges of the planting hole often become smeared to a smooth, 
impenetrable surface as a natural part of the digging process.   This can 
severely restrict root growth and cause water to pool in the planting 
hole.   Breaking up the edges of the hole with a spading fork allows roots 
and water into the surrounding soil.   This needs to become a common 
planting practice, as do proper planting depth, proper mulch depth, and 
effective sheet mulching techniques.

            Once the garden is in the ground, the longest and most 
satisfying phase of forest gardening begins: management, harvest, and 
coevolution.   Potentially the hardest part of this phase is learning to do 
less and let the system take care of itself, as well as knowing when to 
intervene and how.   These questions are, however, part of the process of 
shifting from a paradigm of command and control to one of cocreative 
participation as part of a natural system.   As we observe ourselves and 
our gardens through the dance of the seasons, we will learn the most 
effective ways of guiding the   garden ecosystem's evolution, we will 
select and breed ever more delectable crops for all the niches of the 
garden ecosystem, and we will begin to realize the full potential of forest 
gardening as a tool for cultural and personal evolution, not to mention 
cultural and personal survival in a post oil world.   Welcome to the 
adventure!

            Good information on plant, animal, and mushroom species and 
their ecological characteristics is essential for good forest garden 
design.   You'll need data on the plant's size, form, and habit, its 
rooting patterns, hardiness and other tolerances and preferences, as well 
as its native habitat, human uses and ecological functions.   Information 
that helps you design habitat for beneficial wildlife such as insects, 
frogs, toads, salamanders, and birds is also crucial.   Ideally, this 
information will come in a variety of formats and levels of detail that 
relate to different parts of the design process.   The appendices of Edible 
Forest Gardens provides this kind of information on over 600 useful plant 
species and a plethora of beneficial wildlife for your designing and 
gardening pleasure.

About the Authors

            Primary author Dave Jacke has been a student of ecology and 
design since the 1970s, and has run his own ecological design firm—now 
called Dynamics Ecological Design—since 1984.   Dave is an engaging and 
passionate teacher of ecological design and permaculture, and a meticulous 
designer.   He has consulted on, designed, built, and planted landscapes, 
homes, farms, and communities in the many parts of the United States, as 
well as overseas, but mainly in the Northeast.   A cofounder of Land Trust 
at Gap Mountain in Jaffrey, NH, he homesteaded there for a number of 
years.   Dave designed and built the first constructed wetland for 
household greywater treatment in New England in 1992.   He holds a B.A. in 
Environmental Studies from Simon's Rock College (1980) and a M.A. in 
Landscape Design from the Conway School of Landscape Design (1984).  You 
may reach Dave at dave at edibleforestgardens.com.

            Coauthor Eric Toensmeier calls himself a “socially engaged 
plant geek.” He has spent much of his adult life exploring edible and 
otherwise useful plants and how they can be used in designed 
ecosystems.   His forthcoming book Perennial Vegetables will be published 
by Chelsea Green within the next year.   Eric has worked as a small farm 
trainer at the New England Small Farm Institute (Belchertown, MA) and 
currently manages the Tierra de Oportunidades new farmer program of 
Nuestras Raíces in Holyoke, MA.   There he is designing and installing a 
permaculture landscape in concert with immigrant farmers who are starting 
farm-based enterprises in an urban context.   Eric is a graduate and former 
faculty member of the Institute for Social Ecology in Plainfield, VT.