Food Forests: Do they really work?

What are Food Forests, how do they work and do they deliver on their promise of low-maintenance abundance? Those were the questions behind this test case that ignited our passion for this ancient way of gardening.

In 2012, fresh from a Permaculture design course run by Bill Mollison and Geoff Lawton – the last course Bill gave before he died – we were excited to try out the latest ideas on building a Food Forest.

Thought to be the oldest form of gardening – what today might be loosely related to modern Agroforestry – Mollison had been writing about these small intensive perennial food production systems since the ’70s. After reading one of his early books as a young teenager we put one in the family backyard. Mollison wasn’t the only one excited about traditional approaches to food production: in England Robert Hart was exploring the area and his ideas became a big influence on Mollison, while in Japan microbiologist Masanobu Fukuoka was exploring how to increase orchard and crop yields using traditional Japanese organic farming methods.

Hart and Mollison added ideas to traditional Food Forest design by drawing on ideas from ecology and forestry about how forest layers work to create resilient, stable, self-sustaining ecosystems but continued to use the traditional domestic scale – Food Forests are not a broad-scale agriculture model, although exploration of the scale, performance and design of Food Forests is ongoing around the world.

In Australia’s tropical northern NSW region, Geoff Lawton created Food Forests on his farm and used them in sustainable aid programs all over the world, including in Jordan’s Dead Sea Valley in his extraordinary ‘Greening the Desert’ project where a lush Food Forest oasis was created using giant swales to capture every drop of rain that fell only three times a year on the parched salinated desert soil in 50C temperatures (see here). With examples like these we knew Food Forests could thrive in the hot wet monsoon conditions of Southern India and Asia, and in the hot dry climate of Morocco and Jordan. Creating a perennial Food Forest that gave a constant supply of food in colder climates was another thing altogether.

Down the road, Melbourne permaculturalist Angelo Eliades had emerged from the same course we did just a few years earlier with the same question: how can I know if these perennial food systems will work in my climate and soil if there are no local demonstration Food Forests to inspect? Like us, he built one from the ground up, put it through its paces and gave it a good test run in order to understand how they worked and how to make them work better.

The result, we are happy to report, is that after eight years of creating Food Forests in all types of soil in Melbourne and country Victoria, all our Food Forests continue to perform well and deliver on their promise of supplying a continual stream of harvest while forming low-maintenance, stable, resilient ecosystems resilient to attacks by unwanted pests by nurturing beneficial insects and wildlife.

This is perhaps the easiest gardening there is: no digging, no weeding and low maintenance. Some fruit trees need to be pruned in winter and summer – though you can choose fruit trees that don’t need pruning – with a continual stream of harvest including salad greens, vegetables, culinary and medicinal herbs, and fruit.

If there’s any trick to this it’s this: The plants are all perennial so there’s no annual food plants like lettuces where the entire plant has to be harvested and resown come springtime. The plants used here are all permanent and arranged in seven layers: trees, small trees, shrubs, herbaceous plants, ground covers, root crops and climbers. All the plants used must be matched to the local climate, microclimate, soil and irrigation conditions as well as sun and shade tolerance. Plants are oriented toward the sun like any good vineyard and, like our old school photos, graduate from the tallest at the rear to the smallest at the front in order to increase the “edge” of the Food Forest so that all the layers have access to sunlight. In a natural forest the deeper you go into the interior the more plants are competing for sunlight unless they are adapted to low light conditions, which is often the case with rainforest ground covers. The modern Food Forest is more akin to a forest edge where plants do not have to compete with each other for sunlight.

In broad brush terms, that is the essence of a Food Forest although the devil is in the detail with the more benefits each plant can provide to the whole system, the better. And the better the design, the better the performance of the Food Forest. As an example of smart design, in rural areas we use windbreaks to screen the prevailing winds that also include Tagasaste to provide fodder for grazing animals that also improve the soil by fixing Nitrogen. If that plant was tall and scented – like a Chinese Mugwort – and planted in the direction of the prevailing wind, the plant’s scent would be blown across a garden to confuse pests that rely on scent. A traditional American First Nations technique for planting the ‘three sisters’ – the annuals corn, climbing beans and squash – also illustrates smart design: the tall sturdy corn plants provide upright supports for the climbing beans while the sprawling squash forms a groundcover to suppress weeds with its large shady leaves helping the soil retain moisture. It’s this kind of clever symbiosis that Food Forests seek to replicate in multiple small interactions throughout each garden.

Other techniques from Forestry, Agriculture and Organic Farming such as chop and drop mulching (where garden waste is chopped into small lengths and used as mulch to replicate the forest floor leaving the ‘stubble’ with roots in the ground), planting Green Manure to fix Nitrogen in the soil and employing a ‘no dig’ technique, where soil is left undisturbed and continually fed from the top like the forest floor, have all added to the initial model as it continues to evolve. Integrated Pest Management is encouraged by using plants that provide a food source and shelter beneficial insects – particularly over the cold winters – especially those from the Apiaceae (Parsley) and Astoraceae (Daisy) families.

In our case we wanted to create a public demonstration Food Forest and had the opportunity to use a 20m2 plot in a community garden in Collingwood. In the past the small plot had been used by a community needle exchange program but by the time we got there the parched soil – without any vegetation or organic matter – had lost its biota, structure and had literally turned to dust.

We set about making a few Hot Compost piles to kickstart life back into the plot (read here) and then planted Green Manure seeds, using the opportunity to trial six different varieties (read here). The Green Manure plants were left to grow, structure the soil and fix Nitrogen with their roots, and were given a chop and drop treatment when they were about to seed (see the12th image in the gallery below, taken during a Hot Compost workshop) leaving the root ‘stubble’ intact.

We then put down drip irrigation, installed steel arches and tensioned wires for vines/climbers and laid brick stepping stones to keep feet away the soil. The irrigation was attached to a 1000L rain tank, piped to a nearby roof to collect rainwater and set on a timer.

Planting was carried out according to a design and mulched with lucerne hay that, along with the dense planting, eliminated weeds. Dense ground covers formed by the native Spinach and Wild Strawberries protected the soil from erosion by rain and damage to soil biota by the sun. Ongoing maintenance needs were low and included occasional tying up of vines and cutting back unwanted growth as none of the fruit trees needed annual pruning.

Trees included a rare Mulberry heirloom variety from Cyprus that fruited twice a year, Pomegranate, Babaco and a tall existing hedge of Bay tree.

Shrubs included Chinese Mugwort, Red Currant, Black Currant and Jostaberry. An existing border hedge of Wormwood and Rosemary shielded the Food Forest from the hot western sun.

Herbaceous plants included French Sorrel, English Sorrel, Perennial Spinach, Lemongrass, several varieties of Chicory, Rhubarb, Asparagus, Bunching Onions and Egyptian Walking Onions.

Herbs included Lemon Balm, Oregano, Marjoram, Thyme, Lemon Thyme, several varieties of Savoury including Winter/Prostrate and Cretan Savoury, Sage, Perennial Basil, Bronze Fennel, many varieties of mint including Native/Moroccan/Peppermint and Spearmint, Strawberries, Chives and Garlic Chives,

Wild plants included Botany Bay Spinach, Nettle, Bloody Dock, Yellow Dock and Wild Strawberries.

Vines/climbers included Tayberry and Boysenberry, which were trained on steel arches, and raspberries and Pepino melon, which were trained to grow on waist-height tensioned wires that ran alongside the herb hedges bordering the plot (see images below).

Root crops included Oca, Yacon and Jerusalem Artichoke. The only annuals used were Italian Parsley and Swiss Chard due to their prolific self-seeding nature.

The community garden was closed by its Salvation Army owners in 2017. At the time of writing (April 2019) it continues to lie abandoned. Caretaker Rod Prohasky, a former community gardener, continues to use a small area of the garden to explore his passion for wild and heirloom plants.

Once all gardening ceased, the plots of annual food plants quickly became covered in weeds with any unprotected soil drying up, losing structure and turning into dust. Meanwhile, the Food Forest grew unchecked, suppressing weeds and continuing to produce a steady harvest of herbs, vegetables and fruit including steady crops of pomegranate, mulberries, raspberries, tayberries, boysenberries, melons and babacos. Its performance over the past 2.5 years of complete neglect and absence of watering bolsters our confidence in the stability and resilience of this remarkable food production system.

This experiment ignited our passion for this ancient way of edible gardening; after eight years of putting them through their paces, we are happy to report that a well-designed Food Forest more than delivers on all the promises.

RESOURCES

Martin Crawford, 2010, Creating a Forest Garden, Green Books.

National Geographic short film on Martin Crawford and his UK Food Forest (see here).

Angelo Eliades - This Melbourne permaculturalist has been documenting the astonishing yield from his backyard Food Forest since its 2009 inception. Check his website for Open Days (see here).

Masanobu Fukuoka, 2009, The One-Straw Revolution, NYRB.

Robert Hart,1996, Forest Gardening: Cultivating an edible landscape, Chelsea Green.

Geoff Lawton, 2008, Establishing a Food Forest documentary, Permaculture Research Institute.

Forests of the future? 6 Dec 2007, newspaper article, The Guardian (see here).