“Martin Crawford, a forest gardening pioneer, based in the UK, explains in a short film by Thomas Regnault, ’What we think of as normal, in terms of food production is actually not normal at all. Annual plants are very rare in nature, yet most of our agricultural fields are filled with annual plants. It’s not normal. What’s normal is a more forested or semi-forested system.’
Forest gardens mimic natural ecosystems by using perennial plants and trees, which live for a long time and/or reseed themselves. The garden would have various vertical levels of growth such as tall canopy trees, shorter trees, shrubs and bushes, vines, consists of various vertical levels of growth, from canopy trees to shorter trees, to shrubs and bushes, vines, herbs, ground cover and roots. The levels work together, offering shade, wind protection, support and nutrition. Starting a forest garden from scratch will take time, work and money but once done, it will basically take care of itself for years with very little maintenance but plenty to harvest.”
This reminds me a lot of this video
I think we’re really ready to enter a new age for gardening and agriculture
I’ve just finished reading ‘Rewilding’ by Isabella Tree, which is the story of the project at Knepp. There, they are only focussing on trying to improve exhausted farm land into a state of maximum biodiversity. They’re not trying to grow food, but they’re finding that using animals to control scrub and increase biodiversity has automatically lead to them having high-quality pasture-fed meat to sell. So that’s more of a by-product of a nature-reserve rather than a serious attempt to produce food.
As far as food goes, though, I am currently reading ‘Restoration Agriculture’ by Mark Shepard who is working on permanent agriculture in Wisconsin, similar to what Martin Crawford is doing up there but on a farm-size scale and focussed on growing staple food crops in a perennial, sustainable way by creating edible eco-systems.
And yeah, the take-away is that nature is perfectly capable of recovering its complexity and diversity AND feeding us, and it will be capable of doing it without fossil fuel inputs, but we will have to start growing our food crops in a very different way.