Miraculous Abundance: One Quarter Acre, Two French Farmers, and Enough Food to Feed the World by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781603586429
Google: ylu5CwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1603586423
Published: 2016-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

The Forest Garden

A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it than by the woods and swamps that surround it.

—Henry David Thoreau, 18511

Perrine and I are convinced that the most innovative system we put in place in our valley is the forest garden.2 Permacultural market gardening is the evolution of a practice conducted since ancient times in our country, while the forest garden is really a new production system in our latitudes—what the English call an edible forest. A forest that is eaten, can you imagine?

The forest garden concept seems to present a set of exceptional environmental and societal benefits. Once established, the forest garden is a sustainable system, autonomous, resilient, productive without the use of fossil fuels, and without water or fertilizer needs. It stores carbon, restores landscapes, and is a cultivated and wild refuge for biodiversity. In social terms, the forest garden allows local production of fruits, nuts, berries, vegetables, herbs, plants for medicines and dyes, mushrooms, wood, and biomass, all while creating jobs. It requires only small land areas and can easily be incorporated into a garden.

The forest garden suggests a new form of agriculture that gives trees a central role.

What Is a Forest Garden?

The forest garden is a form of “wild” agroforestry born in the tropical regions of Africa and Asia, where some indigenous people live among the plants that are useful to them, especially fruit trees and berry bushes. These plants form a forest garden providing—in addition to fruit, berries, nuts, and edible leaves—lumber and heating, vegetables, aromatic and medicinal plants, and materials for crafts for use in the village or for sale in local markets. These gardens can also accommodate livestock shelters and beehives.

Here is a definition of this system adapted to our latitudes, from Patrick Whitefield: “A forest garden is a garden modeled on natural woodland. Like a natural woodland, it has three layers of vegetation: trees, shrubs and herbaceous plants. In an edible forest garden the tree layer contains fruit and nut trees, the shrub layer soft fruit and nut bushes, and the ground layer perennial vegetables and herbs. The soil is not dug, and annual vegetables are not normally included unless they can reproduce by self-seeding. It is usually a very diverse garden, containing a wide variety of edible plants.”3

The Forest Garden, a New Concept in Europe

Forest gardens, popularized in the wake of permaculture, were adapted to latitudes in England by pioneers like Robert Hart and Martin Crawford. It seems that this form of agroforestry with three or more levels of vegetation (Hart describes seven levels) had never before been practiced in Europe, where agroforestry systems were established on only two levels (as with olive groves, meadow orchards, or chestnut trees). They debuted in France only a few years ago and there are still only a few prototypes here, which are poorly understood by both specialists and the general public. They have for the most part, if not entirely, been created by amateurs, and the scientific community seems to have had little or no involvement with the conception or implementation of these prototypes.

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