Edible Forest Garden 1: Intro

When we moved here to Terribly Happy, the north side of the house was an expanse of lawn with scattered trees.

No matter how pseudo-pastoral (or whatever one thinks of it), I had plans for it from the first day we toured the property: an Edible Forest Garden (EFG). An EFG, or “food forest,” is a permacultural term for a forest that (a) humans design, plant, and cultivate, (b) more or less sustains itself after a number of years because of the humans’ wise (!) planting choices, and (c) provides its human caretakers with nuts, fruits, greens, and possibly medicinals, as well as a beautiful forest environment.

EFGs aren’t very common (yet). Because of that, and because they’re a long-term undertaking, I think of this as an open-ended experiment guided by some basic principles but not by specific how-to steps. Great! Stimulating stuff for my nerdy brain.

OK. So we want a bountiful woodland or forest with a thick forest-floor humus layer yada yada yada. What we BOUGHT was a lawn. Grass makes crappy, dense soil with little organic matter and few worms or other desirable critters. So I set two immediate goals for the EFG: (1) Design it, and put in plants that will become the larger trees and shrubs. (2) Improve the soil.

I read Edible Forest Gardens by Dave Jacke & Eric Toensmeier (2005), a two-volume, 900-page compendium. In fact, I read it twice, and parts of it many times. Though all of the EFGs they describe are in the eastern half of the country, so some plant choices might not apply, it helped me get started.

Here was an early design plan:

Then I planned specific trees, and how they might look 20 or even 50 years from now:

I went through several iterations of this plan before settling on a final version. Even that one has been modified since I started planting and transforming, and no doubt I’ll be making some unanticipated changes as time goes by. For now, though, this is the “20-yr-plan.”

In 2011, only the western quarter of the area was transformed. We call this zone 1, and its progress is shown in two separate posts (EFG zone 1, Year 1 and EFG zone 1, Year 2). Work on the rest of the area—zones 2 and 3—started in November 2011 and occupied me for much of 2012. It has its own post (EFG zones 2 and 3).

For an appetizer, here are two pictures from roughly the same spot; the later one is from July 2012, just 15 months after we started the process.

Shazam!