Wild and Edible

06/10/2021

I'm part way through a design. The owners want a low maintenance garden for fruit, flowers, a little veg, chickens and wildlife value with lawn and space for a firepit and socialising. There are some beautiful specimin trees including an enormous Ginko Biloba and unusual American varieties of oak and beech so there is lots of dry shade with some sunny spots.

I use tracing paper to map layers - in this case the ground cover/shrub layer and the canopy layer. I'm then creating pieces in card to represent the various elements they want so that I can play around with the positioning. A million possible permutations, lots of head scratching, and always something new to research and learn!

04/10/2021

Today I have been mostly....digging up the lawn!

I'm creating a pond and small area of wildflower meadow for a client who wants to attract more wildlife to her small garden.
I've got mixed feelings about lawns. On the one hand they are fun if you want to run around and play - but mainly I see them as a waste of space. I read that they are a throwback to colonial times when they were first created by wealthy people to show that they could afford not to cultivate their land. Why grow a monoculture of grass when it can be full of flowers, insects and wildlife?

12/09/2021

Autumn forest garden bliss this weekend. You don't get quick results like an annual vegetable garden but it is worth the wait - and the birds and insects are loving it too. This year the raspberries have lots of shield bugs - they don't seem to eat the fruit but for some reason enjoy hanging out on them. I've enjoyed watching how through the summer and autumn the different types of butterflies vary over time. I'd love to sit and watch all day - but there is loads of fruit to pick right now (oh and nettles to w**d).

10/08/2021

We rather liked this little article about how it feels to have a forest garden...

10 ways that you know you have made it with your food forest:

1. You can’t see the wood for the trees!

There is so much growth that you can lose yourself (and miscellaneous others) in the food forest. When you get home and think, now where did I leave that husband / child / dog / etc…

2. What food forest?

You haven’t done any work in the food forest for a few months and it still looks fine. Ok, you may have to fight your way through the undergrowth, but hey, that is a very foresty vibe!!

3. Friends get it

You suddenly realize that you have shown a friend around the food forest, and 2 things have happened: One, there is no uncomfortable silence when they are secretly thinking “what is she on”; and two, you don’t have to spend 2 hours going through the “what is a food forest” talk. You may even get a “wow” from them. The food forest has reached a stage where no words are necessary- people can see what it is all about- and even if they don’t, they still get the joy of being in a forest!

4. The birds get annoyed

You’ve got this beautiful, vibrant, healthy ecosystem created in your food forest, with food and shelter for all the human and non-human inhabitants of the food forest. And when you do venture into the food forest you get a distinct feeling from the birds about “what are you doing in my space”. It’s like you are tolerated (just) by them. That’s when you know you’ve done good. Food and shelter for all.

5. Dinner time- every time

You can wander into your food forest and there will always be something to eat! Ok, maybe not a 3-course meal every day, but leafy greens all round! Seriously, there will be fruit, nuts, berries, leafy greens, and root veggies available (in season of course!). And you know that you can eat anything with no worries of sprays or other nasties.

6. Who let the cows out

A herd of cows (or kids!) can rampage through your precious food forest, and 2 days later you can’t even tell where they have been. The forest has become a robust self-sustaining system that can take quite a bit of abuse and neglect and bounce back beautifully!

7. You run out of space

You spend years obsessing about plants! Plants! Plants! Plants! Growing them. Germinating them. Taking cuttings from them. Looking out for anything different. And then you reach the point where you think- I can’t get another tree / bush / climber / herb in. The neighbor's lawn starts to look like an attractive spare space that needs you to add plants to. To be honest, I’m not sure about this point- can you reeaallly not have any more space for plants?? Guerilla gardening anyone?

8. Anywhere else is not a food forest

You leave your food forest and venture out to other places (only when you have to of course!), and see other people’s gardens, public parks, and even farmland- and think – yes – but it’s not a food forest. At its most extreme form, this may come out, unfortunately, as a sneer. Most often though it’s more of a “well this is nice, but where are edible plants?” or “how much spray do they put on this place” or “if I eat this flower, will they think I’m weird?”.
Having a food forest definitely and irretrievably changes the way you look at “gardens” and other growing places.

9. Seasoning anyone?

You can’t wait for the seasons to come and go. The joy of seeing the changes in the food forest over the seasons is hard to describe! I know that every gardener feels this joy as well – but the difference between a food forest and a garden is – control. In a “normal” garden, the gardener pretty much says what happens when- plants are placed, pruned, removed at the whim of the gardener. But hey, in a food forest we have said no to that control- nature rules. Plants appear out of nowhere; wildlife moves in and creates their own homes and environments. Every season is guaranteed to be unique. Cool eh?

10. Crowning glory

Last but not least – you have a canopy! After years of walking through a knee-high food forest, you can actually walk UNDER the trees!! It is an exhilarating feeling! You’ve created your own canopy! I looked up the definition of "canopy" (thanks Google)- and one of the examples for the use of the word canopy was "woolly monkeys spend hours every day sitting high in the canopy".
Well, we may not be woolly monkeys, but tell you what, we love sitting under that canopy! And our “high” is just being in the food forest!!

https://www.lovefoodforests.com for food forest stories from around the world

31/07/2021

It was a bountiful afternoon in the forest garden. The storm had knocked loads of the cherry plums off which the wasps (and I think rodents) had been feasting on. Thankfully there were plenty left for the humans.

I was feeling grateful for the buddleia which arrived as a w**d about 6 years ago landing in a quite unproductive patch of raspberries. Having let it grow it has been home to several blackbird nests over the years. Today, after what has seemed like a poor early summer for insects, it was lovely to see it covered in butterflies - commas, red admirals and my favourite - peacocks

02/07/2021

This is my front garden - 6m by 6m. I like to grow polycultures where I mix edibles with plants that attract wildlife (hence the business name). It is probably less productive than an allotment style planting - but it provides a lot of forage for insects, birds and small mammals and the diversity makes it a healthier system.
It is certainly more colourful and most people would probably say messy - but nature doesn't do tidy.

I also like to make the most of vertical growing space to maximise productivity. It is so lovely to have the bees and sparrows visiting just outside our first floor bedroom window.

24/06/2021

This is one for local people! I'm selling some flowers and surplus plants from the forest garden.
Bunches of flowers at The Ark in Ashburton and plants at the veg stall at Cuddyford Meadow on Rew Road. These include:
Japanese Wineberries - behave like a blackberry but taste more like an intense sweet raspberry.
Bocking 14 Comfrey - fantastic bee plant, mineral accumulator for making plant feed and as a mulch (wildlife garden must-have).
Sweet Cicely - a natural sweetener that you can add to puddings and reduce the sugar content or put in salads for a aniseed kick.

15/06/2021

I've affectionately named this massive bramble 'Big Bad Barry'. For me it demonstrates part of my approach to forest gardening and how to let nature do the hard work for you...

I bought a number of expensive thornless bramble varieties about 10 years ago and tried them in various locations but none of them have given me a particularly good crop in all that time.

Barry, on the other hand, arrived of its own accord in the bottom of my forest garden, probably courtesy of some bird poo. It towers over 2 metres tall, produces huge quantities of enormous and beautifully sweet/tart fruits. The only work I ever do is pull up any tips that root and spread in directions I dont want them and every year I'm encouraging Barry to spread further along the bottom native hedgebank by directing the new shoots where I want them.

Loads of fruit and almost no work at all.

Today it was covered in bees and butterflies and I felt like a very happy forest gardener indeed.

15/05/2021

Here is today's forage of spring greens from the forest garden - all low maintenance perennials or self-seeding annuals (plus purple sprouting and a little chard from the annuals patch). There is mainly Taunton Deane kale, plus Babbingtons leeks and a small handful of mint, fennel, wild garlic, garlic mustard, cleavers and ox- eye daisy. I'm also going to add some nettles from our back garden and make a Greek Pie. The nutritional content of these greens is far in excess of something like spinach - plus they come back year after year with very little maintenance. No brainer.

13/05/2021

Here is my latest work. I have just completed a design for a couple with 3 acres who want to make their land more productive, whilst still being relatively low maintenance but with a budget to employ a gardener.

The design includes returning the hedgerows to traditional management to improve them for wildlife and to act as a better windbreak - thanks to Jeremy from Proper Edges for his input. There is a small orchard and soft fruit area with an extra layer of edible hedging for wind protection and the potential for more trees. I'm suggesting that the stony banks that have recently been created following their house build are planted up with a specific mix of drought tolerant wild flowers that are found thriving in the walls in our local area. These should form a carpet that will help keep out the unwanted w**ds and attract bees, butterflies and other insects. They wanted to retain the lower half of the field for grazing and I have suggested breaking up the top of this area with a mix of native trees to form two copses that will attract more wildlife, have some beautiful blossom and berries and provide some shade near the house. Having done some soil tests and examining the existing plants, I've written a management plan for restoring the meadow. There is an area that is currently mainly bare soil that will be seeded with local wildflower hay in late summer and the other part of the meadow will be left to regenerate naturally with a simple mowing regime. I've advised on other ways of attracting wildlife including a very suitable place for a pond, log piles and dead hedges.

These projects dont provide much instant gratification but I cant wait to see how this site develops over the years.

23/04/2021

Just picked myself some bits for dinner from the forest garden. These are all very low maintenance perennial plants except the purple sprouting which I have in a small bed for annuals. The salad is sedum spectabile, french sorrel, Turkish rocket, ox eye daisy, Serbian bellflower, primrose and sweet cicely. In the summer I'll have a small patch of annual lettuce to bulk it out. We will add the bunch of sweet cicely to the rhubarb as it acts as a natural sweetener. I feed the rhubarb once a year but dont have to w**d it as its underplanted with bugle, wild strawberry and ground ivy (see photo 2) which suppress the w**ds and keep the soil moist.

11/04/2021

As well as the rabbits, cats and children these are 4 of the animals we caught on camera in our young woodland last week - what a beautiful fox! We are very lucky to have a 300 to 400 year old oak on the edge of our land, just above a large badger sett and will be hanging out in it soon to catch some badger action and hopefully see some juveniles.