Forest garden with over 500 edible plants

Forest garden with over 500 edible plants requires only a few hours of work monthly
Posted on: February 4, 2020 at 10:01 am
Last updated: February 19, 2020 at 11:13 am

Have you ever wondered why some plants thrive better untended in forests than in many human-owned gardens?
forest garden

Have you ever wondered why some plants thrive better untended in forests than in many human-owned gardens?
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No one caters to the fruit trees or prunes the wild vegetable shrubs every week. No one bothers about watering them, covering them with mulch, manuring, or controlling pests. Absolutely no amount of human work goes into maintaining these wild plants, yet they flourish and bloom better than our garden plants ever could if we didn’t spend several hours each day maintaining them.

It’s simple. We may be going about modern farming the wrong way. Forest diversity provides plants with resilience against adverse climate conditions and environmental factors that affect the growth of plants [1]. It plays a major role in maintaining a productive ecosystem with natural stability. Our monoculture approach is increasingly rendering our soils unfit for agricultural practices after a few years. Flatly planting the same variety of crops in one garden will deplete the soil of certain essential nutrients and cause an excess of other compounds that may affect growth and yield.

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Mimicking natural ecosystems

In 1994, Crawford began growing his extensive forest garden with countless stems and seeds from dozens of plants and consistently added more varieties as the years wore on [4]. Today, he has over 500 edible plants thriving in a mind-blowing ecosystem in his garden.

Crawford explains that there are two categories of plants in the food forest.

The directly useful plants, which include fruit trees (common fruits and the rarer ones), all types of nuts, tuber plants, vegetables, timber and logs on which mushrooms grow.

There are also indirectly useful plants, also known as system plants which help the system function better. There are dozens of flowers to boost pollination, nitrogen-fixing plants which include several species of trees, and mineral accumulating plants.
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