Food Forests

Reading Time: 4 minutesLet’s say you have a wooded property and want to grow food in the woods. However, you want to do it in a way that preserves as much of the forest as possible. I.e you want to minimize clearing and cutting down the trees but still be able to grow food. Is growing food in […]

The post Want to grow food in the forest? Here’s how. appeared first on Permaculture Apprentice.

Reading Time: 6 minutesLet’s say you’ve designed your fruit tree guilds, and now it’s time to plant them on the site. The question is: how should you go about it? In the ideal world, you’d plant your entire food forest in one go – trees, shrubs, ground covers, the whole things. But let’s be real. Between the cost […]

Reading Time: 3 minutesStory time… When I worked as a geologist in Australia in the 2010s, I frequently traveled across the country. On one occasion, while driving through the mountainous agricultural area of New South Wales, we unexpectedly encountered a person wearing a hazmat suit on the side of the road. At first, I thought that the whole […]

Reading Time: 3 minutesToday I want to show you how to ‘produce’ free mulch to improve the fertility of your garden or food forest, from the stuff already on your site, as a byproduct of things that you would be doing anyway. WITHOUT having to deal with dishonest landscape material suppliers or conventional farmers wanting to sell you […]

Reading Time: 5 minutesAlmost daily, I get panicky questions from people starting their food forest from scratch and having a blank slate. It’s the analysis paralysis from the information overload that makes people do nothing instead of taking this simple but essential step in the food forest’s establishment. If you do this step, and do it correctly, your […]

An orchard in your backyard – think of it!  A virtual grocery aisle, providing a ready crop of fruit and livestock to provide your family with healthy, nutritious, free food, enough to enjoy in season and put up for the cold months.  This was what our friend and guest instructor, veteran orchardist Stefan Sobkowiak had […]

In our last blog, we looked at how water and soil interact in assuring the success of your permaculture property. In this post, we’re going to take a look at how you can revive the soil ecosystem of a depleted suburban lawn as the first step toward creating your food forest. When we began creating our […]