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.

Rain Barrel

We installed our first rain barrel a few weeks ago and we watered with it for the first time this week. We bought it used from someone here in town and she had all the hardware to go with it. Then we had to figure out how to attach it to our downspout. We thought it was going to be really complicated because we had to cut into the downspout, but it was remarkably easy! We thought we were doing pretty well for a couple of suburban intellectuals!

It is a good feeling to water the garden knowing that you are using rain water you have collected yourself. This summer has presented us with days of practically torrential rain and then long, hot, dry periods during which the plants really start to wither. Before we installed the rain barrel I watched the rain run out of the downspouts basically going to waste because it was only watering the grass. Green grass makes for a nice lawn, but you have to keep mowing it and you can't eat it!! I kept thinking about how nice it would be to collect all that rain for the garden, and now we have started doing that! We are planning to attach several more barrels to this one and also to utilize our other downspouts in the same way. There are larger rainwater catchment systems that are possibilities in the future, but we've started with one rain barrel and that's an accomplishment for us!

End of July - Pictures of the Garden

Harvesting

We harvested a lot of green beans this week and it's so nice to be eating from the garden. We realize that we have a long way to go before we could actually survive on the food we are growing ourselves, but it is still nice to eat food that we've planted and harvested with our own hands. We want to learn how to preserve the food, too, through canning, drying, fermenting, and pickling - but one step at a time. We eventually want to have both a greenhouse and a root cellar, also. Big plans!

I try to get to the farmer's market on Saturday mornings so I can supplement what we aren't growing ourselves with food grown by local farmers. That way we are still eating a lot of locally grown food. I am finding that I sometimes overestimate what we can eat, so now we have a LOT of fresh food in the fridge. Today I made some vegan cheesecake with blackberries because I had to use up the blackberries I got at the market before they spoiled. The eggplant at the farmer's market was so many beautiful colors of purple - I wanted to buy all of it so I could paint a picture of it! Instead I just bought the ones that were the prettiest color! They are so much more beautiful than the ones you buy in the store. Next time I'm going to take my camera!

Yesterday I found 4 cucumbers in the garden and I was so excited. It's amazing the things that excite you...

Gardeners Potluck

In the Yellow Springs area we have a gardeners potluck that meets monthly and we have a chance to see various gardens and organic farms, and swap ideas. I've just started attending and wanted to share some of the things I saw at the last meeting.

Our friends Jenny Haack and Rob Content moved here a few years and ago and bought a small (approximately 6 acres) farm property just outside Yellow Springs. Jenny has been trained in permaculture so they started a garden that utilized the garden spaces that were already on the property. Then they worked with Andrew Maneri, a local organic farmer, to develop part of the property as a working CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) farm.

Rob and Jenny have been through many twists and turns in their experience with this project and I think that is as important to their story as the food and the farm are. Rob has to work long distance in Washington D.C. in order to pay the bills, so Jenny does most of the work on the farm right now with Rob helping when he can. They wanted Andrew and his wife to be able to live on the farm with them, so they built a yert with a lot of help with people in the community. However, the zoning laws make it difficult for someone to live in the yert year around, so it can't be a permanent residence. Of course they didn't know that until the yert was built, so - what a learning process! This year, because of so many changes in their lives Jenny hasn't done a lot with the garden, but she hosted our potluck a few weeks ago and she is hosting a permaculture workshop in a few weeks (which I'm planning to attend!).

I think it's important to note that we may set out on a path that we think is very important and that we are committed to - eating local food, starting a garden, living a more energy efficient lifestyle - but there are sometimes obstacles, illnesses, job losses, aging and other problems along the way that make the path different from what we thought it would be. It seems important to take note of those things because they are really a part of the path and not something separate from it. I think we have to embrace those things along the way. The yert is a beautiful structure that can be used in many ways and Jenny's gardens are productive with berries, apples, and many edible perennials even if they aren't pristine annual vegetable beds right now.

There is a woman who is keeping bees on the farm, so we had a chance to get up close to the bees. It's amazing to watch them. We buy honey in 50 lb. buckets from a local farm just outside Yellow Springs and apparently their bees aren't producing very much honey this year. I just picked up a 63 lb. bucket this morning at the farmer's market this morning,so that should last for awhile, although it's amazing how quickly we go through it.

We also had a chance to see the "no-till" style of farming that Andrew practices. He puts in beds the same way we do by laying out newspaper or cardboard and piling manure on top of it. Then he plants his vegetables, but doesn't till all around them, so you will see in the photo that there is squash growing in the midst of a lot of clover in the field. He farms this way because it doesn't disturb the ecosystem as much, it preserves the soil and the root structures of the native plants, and the native plants are good companions for his annual vegetables. At least the way I understand it!

One of the things that has come out of this gardener's network is a series of community gardens in which various parks throughout the village are being used for gardening. People can sign up for a plot and share the garden space with others in their neighborhood. One of the community gardens is right across the street from us so we see many people working throughout the week in their gardens. Also our neighbors on both sides have gardens so we talk to them mostly when we are all in the backyard weeding, watering, harvesting, and mulching. I think there is a huge network of people everywhere who are starting to tune into food production and who are learning all over again how to grow, harvest and preserve food. Tomorrow we are going to meet at the home of an older couple who move to Yellow Springs recently and built an energy efficient house with solar and geothermal. It should be an interesting gathering!

Community Garden across the street