Food Forests

I received an email today about forest gardening, and it reminded me of a bumper sticker I've seen: If you eat, you're involved in agriculture. This doesn't have to be so! An alternative to agriculture is permaculture- an ecological design system for sustainability and regeneration which is applied to, among other things, how we grow our food.
Agriculture is designed to grow a lot of food for a lot of people. It is not designed in a way that is beneficial to the earth, to the microorganisms and insects and fungi that comprise healthy soil. It is not designed in a way that brings optimum nourishment to the plants growing and in return optimum nutrients for our bodies. The food is then shipped thousands of miles, decreasing the freshness and nutrition content by the hour.

Food Forests=Forest Gardens=Biodiversity=Sustained Productivity=Food Security

I recently received the following in an email:

What is a Food Forest Garden?

Imagine a forest where every single tree is dripping with fresh fruits and ripening nuts. Every shrub is packed with delicious berries, and every other plant is a medicinal herb, culinary spice, or beautiful edible flower. Tubers and root crops are abundant underfoot, gourmet mushroom logs sprout in the shade, and hardy kiwi vines climb back up through the layers of this multi-functional forest of food.

Food forests are diverse gardens modeled after natural ecosystems designed to mimic the way a forest thrives and regenerates. A forest continuously nourishing all elements in the system and produce a vast diversity of outputs, but requires little or no inputs to sustain itself. By recognizing the self-supporting, mutually beneficial relationships of the elements in a forest - from tall trees, smaller trees, shrubs, herbs, ground covers, vines, nitrogen fixers, insectaries, fungi, animals, and more, the food forest garden designs a similar system but replaces the components that are in a common forest with species that are preferred edibles and more useful for humans. The forest then becomes a Garden of Eden, in which edible or useful plants are found from head to toe, where something in season is always ready to eat, and the system requires little or no maintenance to sustain and regenerate.

Join the campaign for local food security and learn how you can help to transform gardens, lawns, parks, and empty spaces into thriving edible landscapes that are beautiful, regenerative, and produce an abundance of delicious, locally grown food!

Upcoming Forest Garden Courses:

Forest Garden Immersion Course in High Falls, New York - April 23-26, 2009

Food Forest & Agroforestry Workshop in Maui April 14-18


Here are some links for further reading on forest gardens

http://www.edibleforestgardens.com/
http://www.rootstofruits.co.uk/?p=29
more links coming!