A real true food forest

K+C have given the green light from Uganda – we’re establishing a food forest! All the elf in Cam is rejoicing…

An edible forest garden follows the pattern of a wild woodland, mimicking what works so well in nature, but in this case is all edible. So the canopy will be peach, apricot and plum trees, the understorey red, white and black currants and other berries, and the groundcovers a fragrant mix of culinary and medicinal herbs – o! the delight!

We’ve already planted in green manure crops to prepare and enrich the soil: 

Wheat, oats and broad beans growing amongst lots of horse poo, and a few weeks later:

.... and Cam’s staked out the spots for the trees and their support species – he’s valiantly holding himself back from blitzing the whole thing right now and waiting instead to do it as a workshop to give our students an opportunity to get their hands dirty beginning a real true food forest themselves. Then they can go home and plant their own… Oooo, imagine – ripe and delicious food forests, alight with birdsong and berries and a little bit of the wild, spreading home to home, jumping fences…

And so, to distract Cam’s attention in the meantime, we’re going to spend next week building a greenhouse attached to the chook house. Watch this space!

Meanwhile, just to mark what it looks like before becoming a food forest, viewed from the terraced vegie beds: