Edible forest gardens: creating plant groups
Get one step closer to your dream edible forest garden by creating a plant grouping! These plant arrangements contribute to a hearty, booming food forest.
Below is an excerpt A forest garden on a home scale By Dani Baker. It has been adapted for employ on the Internet.
Plant grouping planning
Deciding which plants to group in a specific location is one of the most engaging, rewarding, and sometimes frustrating endeavors for forest gardeners – both novice and experienced.
Those of you who have cultivated perennial flower gardens will appreciate the challenge of arranging long-lived plants in a group so that they work well together over time.
In a forest garden, your goal is to completely cover the ground, as well as place plants in each layer to fully occupy the available vertical space.
Placing plants with various functions close to each other promotes sustainable development.
For example, in addition to food producers, choosing plants that attract beneficial plants, concentrate nutrients, and deter pests can create a mutually supportive group in which the needs of each plant are met by the others.
When designing an arrangement, plant characteristics are vital, such as growth habits, root type, root depth, and need for lithe and moisture.
The science of grouping
Figure 13.1. An example of herbaceous succession: Over time, the daylilies planted below the rows of vines were joined by self-seeding borages, perennial peas, anise hyssop and wild Queen Anne’s lace.
Creating groups of edible plants is an undertaking with few proven models, so when planning groupings in a forest garden, it is worth adopting an experimental approach.
Every situation is different and what works for one gardener may not work for another.
And because the plants are perennial and change in height and width over the years, it may take some time for the results to show up.
It is likely that some plants will do well (or too well) in their designated areas, while others will languish.
I hope that the successes and failures I share will inspire you to come up with artistic solutions for grouping plants in your own garden.
How to group plants
Each type of tree, shrub or herb, and even each individual species, has certain habitat preferences: soil conditions, lithe, humidity, temperature, climate and air flow that are most conducive to its hearty growth.
Figuring out where to place each plant in your forest garden to keep it as cheerful as possible can be a challenge.
When developing planting plans, the work you do to identify the microclimate on your plot will be most helpful.
What to include when grouping plants
How do you decide what to include in a specific group of plants?
It varies. Generally, it is vital to plan the topmost layers first, as the location of these plants will determine the location of the rest below.
Sometimes I start with a single fruit tree and surround it with shrubs and groundcovers.
Other times I would make a list of plants suitable for a specific habitat, such as shady and saturated or sunlit and dehydrated, and design an arrangement of plants selected from that list.
I planted a row of trees or shrubs, decorating them a year or two later with support plants. In many situations, my vision for the grouping evolves over time and I expand the bed to accommodate the plants in my expanded vision.
In all of these cases, I focus on matching individual plants to the best habitat possible, while considering how each will coordinate with the other plants in the group in terms of vertical, horizontal and temporal spacing.
All of these approaches involve a lot of trial and error, watching the group grow and adapting over time.
Intact soil: an imperative cornerstone
The basis of an edible, perennial garden is undisturbed soil, always covered with living plants.
At first, the task of covering 3,700 square meters of land in my garden with edible cover crops seemed hard, if not insurmountable.
And as it turned out, for the first few years I was busy replenishing the woody layers of my initial woodland garden, and then planning and planting the expansion of the garden.
Most of my original plans did not include edible cover crops.
Instead, I kept the soil covered with frequently added amounts of mulch until I was ready to install herbaceous plants and groundcovers.
Dealing with cover crops
There are three ways to solve the problem of the ground cover when planting in forest gardens.
If you have a miniature plot, you can plant all the layers at once, including the groundcover.
On a larger plot, you can do the same in sections: mulch sheets or otherwise prepare one tillable area at a time, plant that area completely, and then move on to the next section.
Depending on the size of the plot, it may take several weeks, months or even years to complete the entire garden plan.
Figure 13.2. Multiple layers and types of plants enhance the garden’s resilience and self-sufficiency while creating a lush and inviting landscape for people.
I chose the third approach.
The importance of ground cover
First, I planned and planted the entire top and understory layers of my forest garden.
I then added a layer of shrubs and finally a layer of herbaceous and groundcover plants.
As I write this manuscript, I’m still finishing the final step of creating flower beds around existing trees and shrubs.
By sheet mulching one or more modern sections each year and incorporating cover crops there in subsequent growing seasons, I cover the ground with an ever-increasing blanket of intended plants.
What once seemed like a Herculean task became possible by dividing the work into more manageable parts.
Grouping of plants for sustainable development
I want to emphasize again how vital it is to maximize diversity when deciding what to plant, both in terms of the types of plants and the vertical layers they occupy.
Mixing plants of different heights and types makes it more hard for pests and diseases to locate hosts and spread widely.
Greenery in all vertical layers provides beneficial animals and insects with a maximum variety of habitats to live, breed and obtain food.
Diversity also ensures a better balance in the soil ecosystem, because different plant species take up nutrients in different amounts and proportions.
Taking into account the root structure
Mixing plants with different types of root structures maximizes the presence of living roots from the topsoil down while minimizing root competition between plants.
When planning your groups, consider the root structure of the plants you want to incorporate and try to avoid grouping plants whose roots could compete for space, water or minerals in the same layer of soil.
There are several categories of plants that contribute to the diversity of your garden while providing imperative self-sustaining services, including fixing nitrogen and gathering other nutrients while attracting beneficial and repelling pests.
Although some of these plants are not human food plants, they are vital elements of an edible forest garden to include in your design.