Tuesday, June 24, 2008


A weekend course with Brighton Permaculture Trust - June 2008. Another excellent BPT course taught by the tireless and ever-inspiring Bryn Thomas.

So what's Forest Gardening?
It's amazing! It's been around for thousands of years and the time is right for it to be much better known. The principles of Forest Gardening could be helping us to grow lots of food and other useful stuff in cities and the countryside, our own gardens, allotments, inner cities, suburbs, at schools and hospitals as well as out in the green deserts of insane agribusiness-monoculture and they can be applied in a space just a few metres square or in a whole field:

- with minimum of fossil fuel input from fuel and chemicals
- with a minimum of personal effort - eg much less digging and general maintenance
- giving people direct access to some fresh, nutritious food - all year round

- building up healthy soil alive with earthworms, bacteria and fungal activity (if you dig up or plough soil regularly you don't give these systems a chance to develop)
- giving highly productive gardens that are drought-tolerant and resistant to pests and diseases
...and who knows just how important all that will become in this present chapter of human life...
How does Forest Gardening Work?
Robert Hart, who first coined the term, refers to the seven distinct layers found in a natural woodland which Forest Gardening mimics:

1: the canopy formed by the tops of the higher trees

2: low-growing trees such as dwarf fruits

3: the shrub layer - bush fruits

4: the herbaceous layer of herbs and vegetables

5: the ground layer of plants which spread horizontally rather than vertically

6: the vertical layer occupied by climbing berries and vines

7: the 'rhizosphere', shade-tolerant root-plants.

Hopefully these photos show some of these features, they're from a garden that Bryn has developed for a client in Seaford over the last fifteen years. It's very jungley and appeals to my need for more wild nature in my life - and you can eat a lot of it, which appeals to me too, including the delicious petals of these flowers:
The ground is really soft, open textured and moist - just like in the forests and woods I played around in as a kid.
These principles, under the name of Agriforestry, are making a big difference at the moment to lives in countries such as Ethiopia and Nepal. There was an inspiring feature on Radio 4's Food Programme recently:

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