"Just had a beautiful time in the garden" I said. "Yeah, you look pretty Zenned out" replied my friend Brenna.

It all clicked for me today, as I gathered the seed of White Tophrosia, and spread it between the adolescent feijoa and citrus trees: I believe in Food Forests. They've copped a lot of flack over the years, and not without reason. After almost 30 years, there are few productive, functioning examples around. Hence the words 'believe in', suggesting a subject of fantasy to the reader. However, if we look at what we are aiming for in the creation of an edible forest, we are talking about attempting to emulate nature, replacing her ultimate clothing, her climax creation, with plants we deem useful to man. Read that again; 'emulate nature'. In my opinion, it would be unfair for anyone to base their judgement on the expectation of immediate success in such a pursuit.

Although infinitely complex, to me, a food forest is simple: it's a guild. It involves clever design through both time and space, and relies on cleverly timed management intervention, if we are to reach our desired outcome. It is the neglect and misunderstanding of the latter point, our role as intervenors and assistants in the evolving system, which I believe has lead to the lack of production in many of the early creations, and rejection of the idea in some circles. It is a shame that the enthusiastic words of a brilliant man and storyteller, attempting to gain the attention and support of the masses with an answer he truly believed in, have been used as reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

In my limited experience and observation it has become obvious that one thing you cannot do is just "plant it and walk away". This clichéd quote, taken literally by many, lead to unfair expectations on the performance of the food forest, whilst its design, experimentation and implementation was still in its infancy. This has injured its reputation greatly.

Management is essential. When a banana stand is left unmanaged it continues to produce wonderful looking plants at the expense of the fruit we desire. I would presume that large fruit trees, spaced unreasonably close, will also have a reduced yield compared to that which we expect. Similarly, the wonderful pioneering qualities of the legume, which can be so beneficial if managed properly, can become a hindrance and competitor if management does not occur, also resulting in reduced yield. This reduced yield is not necessarily proof of a failure of our idea of an edible forest, but rather, it’s a failure on our part to adequately design our continued interaction and management with our creation through time.

Close spacing of trees also results in a relatively flat canopy on the ‘forest’. As the majority of fruit production often occurs on that area of the tree exposed to sunlight, a flat canopy may not provide the maximum return from a specified area. Instead, spacing which allows each tree the formation of a natural curved canopy, just touching each other, will increase the canopy edge, therefore increasing the edible yield. Reducing the number of trees as a ratio of total canopy cover means a reduced energy demand on the forest for trunk and stem formation also, allowing this energy to be directed towards fruit or nut production instead.

(The picture I tried to put in here didn't work. Definetely better in the soil than I am on a computer! So you'll just have to use your imagination. There were 2 pictures of examples of tree spacing. Example 1: Eight trees placed quite closely together in a given space,  hence the canopy formed a relatively flat top. Example 2: Four trees placed in the same given area, their canopies curved and just touching at the edges. Below are the measurements of the canopy edge.)

Example 1: Approx 1.8 cm per canopy x 7 + 5.8 x 1 = 18.4 cm

Example 2: Approx 5.8 cm per canopy x 4 = 23.2 cm (38% Canopy edge increase; 50% reduction of trunk biomass)

What is the end result we are looking for in a food forest? Ultimately, it is a canopy of productive fruit, nut and other useful trees. Ideally, this is planned in such a way that each tree has sufficient room to grow to its full potential, maximising the efficiency of the space the forest is allocated for a return of products which provide for human needs. An important decision we make as designers is to define how we manage these trees, the land on which they grow and the space in which they are contained from the time they are planted to the point of maturity.

Although not fitting the permaculture principle of diversity, the result desired above could be applied to the planting of a monoculture macadamia farm. I use this example because it is an image that anyone who has spent time in the Northern Rivers can instantly picture. Looking at the design of a system such as this through time and through space, it is extremely simplified. Viewed in its infancy, its seedlings are mere dots on the landscape, and the paddock of mowed grass surrounding with its browned herbicide strips give a snapshot of the management it will receive throughout its life, aside from the chemical fertilizer and pesticides sprayed regularly to keep the trees 'healthy'. The end result: trees growing hydroponically in subsoil, requiring a huge input of fossil fuels throughout their lifetime to keep the operation going. Red soil is subsoil by the way. It turns a dark, dark brown if life and organic matter are present.

A slightly better system may be to grow an orchard organically. In this case quite often manures are added, conveniently packaged in pellets, straight from the battery hen shed in the next state perhaps. Soils are alive at least, but the grass still requires mowing and the battle continues between the shallow feeder roots of the fruit trees and the pasture grasses. Mulching may be attempted, but if subtropical, it quickly becomes clear that soft mulches require re-application regularly, and a lot of labour and fuel to do so. Added to this, these mulches are encouraging the proliferation of a bacterial based soil, perfect for growing the fruit tree's competitor grass, but lacking the woody, cellulose material necessary for the increase of beneficial fungi, which the fruit trees require. Pesticides are limited to those that come from natural sources.

The role of a food forest through time should ultimately be that of supporting the most important system elements, the desired end canopy trees, from their infancy to maturity. That support will include the same requirements as our macadamia monoculture farm: fertilizing, pest protection, and the reduction of direct competition, from grasses for example. We can choose to rely on the continued need for fossil fuel energy to supply these needs, or we can carefully design to use appropriate and beneficial plants to perform these functions instead. Many wonderful examples already exist of smaller guilds doing exactly this, the support species often surrounding just one key system element such as a single fruit tree or a vegetable garden. A food forest can
be looked at as merely a larger and more complex guild. The scale has increased, but the design principles and requirements remain the same.

Each key element will require fertilizer, mulch and the reduction of competition. A diverse range of nitrogen fixing legume plants can provide the majority of these needs, if they are designed carefully and managed appropriately through time. This range of legumes would include: annuals, biennials, short lived shrubs (3yrs), short term trees (5-7yrs), medium term trees (15-20yrs) and long term trees (up to 50yrs). When designing, a thorough understanding of the growth rates, growth habits and lifespan of these legumes, allows us to fill niches in time and space that would otherwise contain weeds. Other direct benefits of these elements include nitrogen fixation and nutrient cycling through their foliage. With the help of a machete, hand saw, loppers and secateurs, the remaining nutritional needs of the growing trees can be provided by other system elements within dropping distance: Deep rooted mineral accumulators such as Comfrey, Yarrow, Tansy, and Borage provide nutrient rich mulch and weed suppression; Low competition, nutrient rich clumping material such as arrowroot and sugarcane provide bulk mulch and weed suppression; Longer term nutrient fixers and accumulators such as banksias, grevilleas and casuarinas; and Manures from free range poultry, wild birds and animals attracted in for insect management. Following the initial application of corrective trace elements, these design elements can provide the system with all of its nutritional needs. Any minerals exported from the site as produce, can be replaced using rock dusts.

After an initial clearing, using a once off rotary hoe fossil fuel boost, or a slower spreading animal tractor system, if the system is designed and planted densely enough, we can fill all niches where weeds would otherwise proliferate. This will include a diverse range of support species (as above), with a vigorous groundcover below such as sweet potato, or Singapore sunrise (Singapore sunrise, by the way, is only dangerous to pasture grass which you can deliberately use it to slowly swallow, leaving a lovely layer of soil under its herbaceous mat as it goes, and valuable pest predator habitat on its flowers. You will never, ever see it inside the rainforest). Managed at appropriate times of year, your support species can be chopped to provide regular woody mulch during the warmer wetter periods, when bacterial and fungal activity is at its greatest, and during drier periods, where evaporation is higher than precipitation, they provide valuable shade and thus reduced moisture loss. Geoff Lawton’s Food Forests contain some very good examples of this strategy.

Other than the needs of fertilizer and competition reduction, the other need of the system is that of pest protection. The implementation of a good soil building regime is the key here. An initial application of corrective trace elements, along with the application of aerobic microbial compost teas, in association with the biomass added to the soils through the regular chop and drop of support species, has been proven in tests done by the Soil Food Web to greatly reduce the occurrence of pest attack. The system’s resilience to pest attack is enhanced by: The stability created by a diverse range of productive fruit, nut and other trees; the inclusion of pungent plants in the understorey and edge guilds, which include many culinary herbs and medicinal plants; and the inclusion of dense, prickly native shrubs for insectivorous bird habitat. These combined strategies have proven their success on many smaller guild examples, and in Rick Coleman’s Food Forest also. Once established, the inclusion of an appropriate number of varied poultry (chickens, geese, ducks and guinea fowl each fill different niches) will further reduce pest problems from building up, as Joe Pillasher has demonstrated well on Rainbow Valley Farm in New Zealand.

Once we have ensured that the needs of the major elements have been met, it should then possible to fill the remaining space with productive species through time as well. The closer these spaces are to the key elements, the shorter lived the plant of choice, as it becomes redundant when the key elements begin to shade it out.

Of course, the design of such a system and the management methods chosen will vary greatly, and are influenced by many factors, including the climate, soils, customs, energy availability, whether an income is required from the system and so on.

The management of such a system, as I mentioned earlier, is critical to its success. It seems that a lack of understanding by many of the maintenance regime required in the early implementation phase is a point that needs addressing. The formation and documentation of replicable patterns could allow clearer communication of management strategies, making successful food forests achievable for a wider range of people. The design of such a pattern is discussed in another article I will post.

Cheers, Cam Wilson, March 07