7320_IntegratedForestGardening

CON T E N T S • • • Chapter One: What Is Integrated Forest Gardening?

1

The Permaculture Design System The Design Process Essential Templates of Good Design • What Is Forest Gardening? • Perennials and Polycultures • Climate and Scale • Climate Change and the Importance of Integrated Crop Production • Capturing, Storing, Cycling, and the Sustainable Homestead • A Word About Compost: Extending the Life of a Resource • Water and Earthworks • What Is a Plant Guild? • The Scientific Basis for Plant Guilds • The Importance of Plant Diversity • Applications of Plant Guilds in Permaculture and Forest Gardening • How Guilds Work • Designing for the Niche • Studying Guilds in Their Natural State •

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Chapter Two: The Structure of a Plant Guild

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Perennial Polycultures • Defining Your Niche • Nutrient Cycling • Carrying Capacity • Understanding the Context of Your Site • Start from Scratch or Follow Nature’s Lead? • The Integrated Living System • Niche Dynamics • Designing for Cooperative Competition • The Importance of Sunlight • The Position of Plants • Determining the Quality of Your Soil • Building for Nutrient Cycling • Needs of a Forest Garden • Five Considerations for Sustainable Design • Permaculture Principles to Apply to Guild Design • Yeomans’s Scale of Relative Permanence • Constructing the Plant Guild • Questions You May Be Asking

C hapter Three: Selecting Plants for Guild Design

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Understanding the Biome • Functions of Plant Guilds and Polycultures • Covering the Soil with a Blanket of Vegetation • The Soil Regime • Soils and Salt Tolerance • Catastrophic Occurrences • Agricultural Toxins • When the Wind Doth Blow • Terra Preta: The Dark Earth • Growing Zones • Selecting Plants for Resilience • Understanding Sun Exposure • Determine Your Soil Types • Understanding a Plant’s Tolerances • Guild Design Basics • Roots: Anchors and So Much More • The Fabulous Fungi • Nitrogen-Fixing Plants • Seasonal Considerations • Bloom Times • Fruit Set • Patterns of Growth • Populating the Guild • The Natural Range of Plants • The Importance of Diversity

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Integrated F orest Gardening

GENER AL SECT O R ANA LY S IS F O R S UN A ND WIND AT 4 4 ° L AT IT U D E

N W

SUNRISE JUNE 20 4 E IS O

3

N

35°N

R TE I N n.

Ja

5

DS h I N Ma rc

No C O L v.

D

W

SUNSET JUNE 20

35°N

2

1

W

E

SCENIC VIEW

Sept. and March 20

Sept. and March 20

33°S

33°S

SUNSET DEC. 20

O

H

Au

gu

st

T

SU

June 20 68° Declination: Noon

M

M

ER

WI

SUNRISE DEC. 20 NDS

S

July

Dec. 20 21°

General sector analysis for sun and wind at 44° latitude.

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What Is Integrated F orest Gardening?

Poplar Grove

Black Locust Residence

Silvopasture

2

3

4

Upper Woodland Orchard

Field Crops Animals

4 Ponds 2 Orchard and Screens Polyculture Zone 1 Residence

KEY Culvert Swale Road Property Line UG Pipe Spillway Path Power Lines

N 5

Turf

pH 5.0 pH 5.3

Utility Easement

Fence Annual and Medicinal Gardens

Windbreak Nut Trees 4

Lower 2 Orchard and Nut Trees

pH 6.3 Picnic Garden Organic Material

Managed Woodland and Habitat 4

<1.54% 1.54–1.73% 1.73–5.65%

5 Wetland Habitat 5 1068

Functional spaces and zones of use.

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What Is Integrated F orest Gardening?

Bur oak, a woodland tree.

Lush planted berms.

persist throughout the yearly cycle. In temperate regions you’ll find perennial kale and broccoli, asparagus, bamboo shoots, bunching onion, garlic, horseradish, radicchio, rhubarb, Good King Henry, perilla, seakale, skirret, sorrel, land cress, groundnut, garlic chives, stinging nettle, and Jerusalem artichoke, to name just a few.

As we design and plan for perennial food systems, we plan for diversity of species in a balanced matrix. By establishing redundancy in the system, by including several species in the mix, should we lose ten species to a hard frost in early spring (for example) we may have another ten, twenty, or more species that survive and produce a yield for us as the year advances. Diversity and redundancy create resilience.

Polyculture means many, diverse plants. A polyculture is simply the cultivation of multiple crops or animals. It arises from two Latin roots: poly, which means “much” or “many,” and culture, which means

“to tend, guard, cultivate, till.” How did the idea of “many plants” evolve from these two root words?

It may be based on the word agriculture, from the Latin ager, field. By substituting poly for agri we come up with the idea that many agricultures means many plants, so to speak.

In essence, an integrated forest garden is one that is predominantly perennial, diverse, and polycultural in design. The word integrated is synonymous with merged, fused, mingled, unified.

These words depict exactly what the Latin root of the word integrate describes: integrare, to make whole. As gardeners and farmers we strive to develop and implement perennial cultures that subsist through many generations by combining a diverse array of plant species that support one another; all these plants’ needs are met by the plants, animals, and humans that are part of an integrated system. This is whole-systems thinking and designing par excellence.

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Integrated F orest Gardening

Water lens: elevation cutaway. Illustration by Daniel Halsey and Kellen Kirchberg

In Ken and P. A. Yeomansâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s book Water for Every Farm,1 keyline water-harvesting techniques are used in large pastures and properties. Beginning in the 1950s Yeomans resuscitated thousands of acres of land in his native Australia, the driest continent on the planet, by carving channels with a subsoiler or keyline plow shanks, six to eighteen inches deep, through the soil, more or less on contour. These channels readily absorb any water that falls on a property, percolating this rainwater to deeper levels of the soil profile where plants easily take it in through roots that move more freely through the soil profile because of the channels. After many years it is possible that springs will form at the

base of large hills and in the valleys. Yeomans also designed water catchments high in the landscape and moved the water from these high catchments to several more catchments at lower spots on slopes, all of this water being utilized for gravity-fed irrigation. In all cases the water is caught, stored, diverted, and given many uses, for plants and animals, before it exits the property.

What Is a Plant Guild?

We frequently hear questions from Permaculture students and practitioners about plant guilds: how

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