Forest Garden Design Class

August 16, 2010

You might ask, "What is a forest garden?" Below is a quote from the book, "Edible Forest Gardens" by Dave Jacke and Eric Toensmeier:

"An edible forest garden is a perennial polyculture of multipurpose plants.

Most plants regrow every year: perennials.

Many species grow together: a polyculture.

Each plant contributes to the success of the whole by fulfilling many purposes: multipurpose.

In other words, a forest garden is an edible ecosystem, a consciously designed community of mutually beneficial plants and animals intended for human food production."

I just finished a week long intensive Forest Garden Design course with Dave Jacke and it was truly a life changing experience! We spent a week analyzing a piece of land and then developing a detailed design for a forest garden for that site. We worked together in groups on the site and had the opportunity to learn from Dave's expertise and experience as well as that of the members of the class. We had a diverse group that consisted of people from many walks of life including professors, an architect, a psychologist, attorneys, artists, teachers, farmers, and students or recent graduates of programs in ecology and sustainability. Several people have built or are in the process of building strawbale or cob houses, and many of us are in varying stages of developing our own forest gardens. All of us are acutely aware of the issues we are all facing related to fossil fuels, food, and resources. We were very appreciative of the community we developed throughout the week, and Dave and his teaching team led us through many experiences that brought home the connections between people and the landscape/plants/gardens we live with. I think we all came to a deep realization that the scope of what we are trying to do is much broader than putting plants together to create an edible forest - although that in itself is a fascinating endeavor. Dave talked with us about cultivating a new paradigm, and I think we all became more aware than ever that we are involved in that process in some way that is exciting and mysterious.

Saul and I consulted with Dave this morning for several hours and hope to work closely with him to design a forest garden in our back yard. I hardly have the words to describe all the things we have to think about after our discussion with him! More on that in later posts!

"The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings." Masanobu Fukuoka, The One Straw Revolution, (quote used by Dave in one of his talks)

Color

As an artist I am fascinated with the color of freshly grown food. The eggplant in this picture is from one of the local organic farms, and the rest of the squash and zucchini is from our garden. The purple color of the eggplant is so vivid - I almost hated to eat it! All the colors together create a lovely palette.

I made some cheesecake with local blackberries the other day, and the blackberry sauce was a fuchsia/magenta color! Wow - it was a visual pleasure to eat! Local, organic food not only tastes good and is nutritious, but it LOOKS good as well!

The Downside

Last night we went for a bike ride and we talked about the downside of this low energy comsumption lifestyle we are trying to carve out. It was sort of depressing, so I decided to take a picture of all the food I harvested today (beans, zucchini, cucumber, rhubarb and butternut squash - and, not pictured - a lovely yellow squash) as a reminder that we ARE making progress, however slow. Two years ago we didn't even really know what the plants or the seeds looked like for each of these vegetables and now we have a nice harvest.

We had to get our wood burning stove repaired to the tune of several hundred dollars, which stimulated the discussion that we are not really saving all that much money by using wood as a source of heat even though our utility bills are very low. Our level billing for Vectren is about $10/month. We had to pay for the wood burning stove (which we purchased new), have it installed and now it needed a repair because it was cracked. Once we got the stove we had no idea how to get wood (!), so we bought wood for awhile until we learned how to salvage it from Craig's List and other local sources. When we started salvaging it, we usually had to cut and split it, but we didn't know how to do that either and neither of us is too handy with a chainsaw, so we hired people to cut the wood. A very nice person here in town loaned us his wood splitter and Saul spent a lot of time last summer splitting the wood - so we didn't have to pay for that part of the process, but it was a LOT of labor.

Regarding the garden - we have learned a lot, but it has been very dry lately,so I have had to water quite a bit to keep the plants alive. Our water bill was high last summer and it probably will be this summer, too. We will eventually have a lot more rain barrels installed, but in the mean time I'm wondering how much money I should spend on water to produce a squash or two! I'm a little disappointed in our harvest so far, but I think it's because we planted all these perennials like raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries and it takes a few years to get them established. The rhubarb is REALLY growing, but you aren't supposed to harvest it the first year, so I just pick a few stalks here and there that are looking droopy. The asparagus didn't come up this year except for a few stragglers, so I don't know what that means, and the apple trees have some kind of weird thing going on with their leaves which could be a disease. All these issues...

In our discussion last night we realized that we are in the middle of a mega learning curve. We knew we would have one, and part of the reason we are doing this now is to learn from our mistakes when we have the luxury to make mistakes. If we don't produce a good harvest right now we can always go to the grocery store or the farmer's market, so we know we will have food on the table. If the time comes when it is necessary to produce much more of our own food we will have a much better sense of how to do it.

Perhaps the time will also come when we have saved enough on our heating bill to pay for the wood burning stove, the wood, and the back breaking effort to cut and split the wood. In the meantime, we will keep plugging away at trying to live a more simple life, consume fewer fossil fuels, eat nutritious food, and make a smaller footprint - despite the downsides and mistakes.