A few days ago, my next-door-neighbor who loves cooking made five big rhubarb, blackberry and blackcurrant crumbles, with the last of the harvest from my garden “food forest.”
She then gave them to other folks who live close by. You just can’t beat home cooking!
And you can’t get better food than organic home-grown food, straight from the garden and prepared right away. This food forest idea is one that’s taking off big-style.
It’s an idea that’s part of the whole permaculture revolution and it’s really a wonderful idea. What you do is just plant stuff in a forest type manner, and let nature take care of it, for the most part.
It’s a move away from growing primarily annual plants to growing perennials, in a way that they would grow in a forest, but of course we plant stuff that’s edible or has other uses, like for wood, or medicine.
Click here for a great page about food forests
At the moment, I have blackcurrants, strawberries, rhubarb, sage, mint, thyme, goji berries, blackberries and a fig tree (more planned). It’s maintenance free. And free food in your back-yard or garden. The blackberry brambles were absolutely covered in all kinds of different bees when they were in flower. Compare and contrast that to the crisis we have now with bee colony collapse associated with “Big-Ag.”
It’s really terrible, the effect big scale agriculture has on wildlife; all the native bees are gone in America I heard, and the US has these big bee keeping companies that go around with their bees to pollinate almond orchards and so-on. That’s so wrong. They’re even importing bees from Australia now, crazy stuff. Not a pesticide, herbicide or fungicide has touched my garden, and it has frogs in it, that just appeared, even though there is no pond — they live in the long damp grass.
So… food forests or “forest gardening” systems show promise for the future of food, and it’s great to grow stuff to eat, that takes no maintenance at all, and attracts all kinds of great wildlife.
Let me know what you think in the comments. Cheers!
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Michael Kinnaird is the author of Happy Guide, the result of a 20 year exploration into what works for health and happiness.
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You are totally fantastic Mike!! I have long been a fan of the forest gardening method. When you think about it, that’s how mother nature has always done it! Life just grows however it can, no help needed… Trees, bushes, vines, veggies, she grows it all together harmoniously with endless diversity! Yeah compare the natural diversity of life to mono-crop agriculture. Big ag is doomed! :) Haha… You are cool and totally inspirational, man. Keep telling it like it.
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Wow thanks Dez! (if I may call you Dez :)) Yeah, I reckon we are naturally tribal-cooperative and we hunted/gathered. Nature was the larder instead of the enemy. With food forestry, we can get back to something similar but we manage the environment — plant useful stuff, leave it to grow and just harvest. Then we replace what we take and recycle nutrients. It means we need more farmers but here’s the thing… most people LOVE gardening, it feels so natural, and we love walking in the forest, exploring nature.
These modern lifestyles we have are making us sad! So yeah, that’s all part of the answers I’m looking into for http://designingparadise.com. Like free schools, housing IN the food forest (right outside the door). Catering for all (it’s so silly for each person to cook, and wasteful in time and er… waste :-)
Something hit me the other day. I was watching Gladiator and realized the human co-operation that went into it… massive. And that’s just a film. If we focused on creating paradise, it would take LESS effort to design perfect, than it would to make a movie. Then all we need to do is roll out different versions of it! Simple really.
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