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Creating a Food Forest | Farm Dreams


3m read
·Nov 10, 2024

[Music] Oh, there's baby chicks! Yep, two weeks old. I've gotta hold them. Hi, little friend!

I sent Bob some photos and a description of Jill and Craig's seven-acre plot, hoping he can offer advice on the best way to actualize their vision.

Okay, this looks amazing! So, this is their seven-acre property. There are these terraces that are already established. I put this other layer of the topography or the contours over this site. I kind of came up with this concept of dividing the land based upon the soil conditions and based upon the topography. I separated this into two categories: restoration through reforestation and restoration through cultivation.

Craig can manage this, yeah. Joe can manage this. I love this his and hers farm! Yeah, the goal is you want to divide the land up into smaller parcels so that it's more manageable. Yeah, and it's also easier to conceptualize, I think, for them too. Right now, it feels really overwhelming.

Yeah, no, for sure. What can they actually begin planting here? You need to be putting in the long-term trees. Okay, even though it's still early in the season.

Bob wants to show me his food forest before everything is in bloom so I can have a better idea of what Craig and Jill's farm might look like in the future. Some on three acres, and before I moved here, this was nothing but a hayfield. It's nothing but grass!

That whole concept is to introduce as much native species as possible on the perimeter of the property, and then as we move closer to the house have more cultivated varieties and diversity of fruits and vegetables and nuts and things of that nature.

So these are willows. We have mulberry, false indigo, hazelnut, black walnut, sumac. You know the soil is good here, so we start infilling herbs and wildflowers. Oh no! And this place in the summer is just—you can't see through it because of the wildflowers and all the vegetation.

To try to fill in everything with some sort of ground cover that's beneficial to the land and beneficial to the insects and everything. And the food forest should be a mature forest with a dense canopy. A food forest canopy cover plays a unique role in building a rich and diverse edible food forest by incorporating seasonal ground covering plants and shrubs under the taller trees. The soil conditions are more likely to be optimal because of the constant regeneration.

[Music]

The way Bob filled out his food forest, it's not just a hodgepodge of trees. It's very well planned out—really beautiful! It's not just about design for him; it's about function, and everything works perfectly together in a system. So you're thinking from the top down is kind of how you want to get from the top down, and I'm thinking 30, 50 years out, moving backwards in time. Interesting!

You know, you're emulating nature here, but you're also kind of training it so that it's not just taking over. You don't need to overcomplicate things at the beginning stages; nature is going to complicate things for you. So a more simplistic approach that is easier to manage.

The thing they keep in mind is to think about the food forest in 50 years and what's that going to look like. It's helpful to see what Bob's farm looked like this time of year because it kind of gives me a reference point.

I'm excited to share Bob's plans with Craig and Jill. I hope that they like what he's come up with.

[Music]

Foreign.

[Music]

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