Food forest gardening

Greetings fellow steemians hope we are all doing great. Today I shall be talking about a food forest garden and how it can be a striving ecosystem for biodiversity conservation in terms of plant and animal biodiversity while at the same time improving living standards of the farmer.

A food forest is a man-made, diverse ecosystem of organisms great and small that attempts to mimic the natural self-sustainability within itself. In the setting of a food forest, food forests, permaculture With core tenets of permaculture like

Care of the earth: Provision for all life systems to continue and multiply. This is the first principle because without a healthy earth, humans cannot flourish on their own.

Care of the people: Provision for people to access the resources necessary for their existence.

Return of Surplus: Reinvesting surpluses back into the system. This includes returning waste back into the system to recycle into usefulness.

By design, food forests are high diversity polycultures, multi-dimensional (space, height/depth, time), multi-functional (eg plants provide more than just the obvious harvest) and they embrace biodiversity (in the soil and above it) and this all results in increased resilience, healthy & nutrient-rich harvests, fewer pests and diseases.

Generally a food forest garden is fiercely organic and has core goals of soil health regeneration, improved self-sustainability, abundant/diverse outputs over longer periods and reducing effort and external inputs, once established. They embrace and nurture natural, biological and organic management practices.

A large food forest garden has many stacked layers while a small one might have less –

• the canopy tree layer or overstory,

• the smaller tree layer or understory,

• the shrub layer,

• the herbaceous layer,

• the root crop layer,

• the ground cover layer,

• the vine layer

• the mycelial or fungi layer.

• Aquatic (Ponds, wetlands, hydroponics)

Food forests use time and function stacking such as –

1. Growing cover crops or legumes under fruit trees to fix nitrogen in the soil, reduce soil temperature extremes, reduce evaporation and erosion, and provide a harvest while the tree is dormant to the others.

2. Intercropping - planting next-season seeds during the maturation phase of the current crop which enforces their germination rate, shades and protects the seedlings from predation.

3. Livestock is incorporated within the environment- eg: Giving chickens access to the composting area … the compost gets turned, aerated and fertilized with chicken poop which makes for more efficient composting, while the chickens enjoy natural biomass.

Plants that attract pollinators and repel pests are also included and the emphasis is on plants with multiple harvests and functions like food, fodder, fuel, fibre, medicines, flowers, aromas, nutrients “mined” from the soil and air (legumes for nitrogen-fixing), slope stabilization (Vetiver grass), firewood, poles (Bamboo).

Synthetic fossil fuels and agricultural chemicals are generally avoided in favour of natural/organic alternatives and manual contents.

The concept is sometimes labelled as a forest garden, especially when size allows for greater use of agroforestry plants and techniques (such as growing windbreaks, living fences and green walls, alley cropping and harvests of timber, fuel, aquatic facilities and silvopasture - the practice of integrating trees, forage, and grazing animals in a managed and mutually beneficial scheme.

Thanks for following up on food forest gardening.