Food Forest Update #1

2025-04-24

"The most energy efficient thing you can do in your life is grow some of your own food. 40% of all the energy consumed by a city is the agriculturally consumed food. Growing your own food, that's an enormous action." - Geoff Lawton

Plants are really incredible organisms but the unsung hero is the soil. The fascinatingly complex amalgamation of organisms that make up healthy soil are what really make it all possible. You feed the soil and the rest is easy. Even feeding the soil can be easy once you realize how many things can be diverted from the trash can to the ground. I find it so uplifting that all it takes to turn bad soil into good is throwing things generally considered garbage onto the ground and waiting.

I've accomplished a lot in the food forest this week already and also acquired a couple new plants that have been on my list along with one new discovery. I found another nursery not too far away that sells a lot of interest edible plants and went to check it out. Lots of good stuff but I'm getting to the point that I'm pretty selective with bringing home new plants.

Plant Finds

Achira (Canna edulis) is something I've been looking for and finally found it at this nursery. Some varieties are grown to be purely ornamental but this species has adible rhizomes that you can use like you would potatoes. It has a nice looking habit similar to a banana so it's a nice combo plant that can look nice and be edible at the same time.

The other find was Ice Cream Bean. This is a tree that can get quite large but is often used in permaculture as a chop and drop support species. That is usually a plant that grows fast and easily, fixes nitrogen or is good at accumulating other nutrients many plants need. The idea is you plant these support trees/plants around your food forest and cut them back every so often and feed the trimmings to the soil around the food forest. Ice Cream Bean fulfills this function but also produces bean pods that have a fluffy edible pulp that purportedly tastes like vanilla ice cream. The beans themselves are also edible (after roasting I believe).

Bonus find was one that I hadn't heard of before called Gin Berry. It's this curious little shrub that makes little semi-translucent berries that, I kid you not, taste like Gin. I was skeptical upon hearing that description as well but they really do! The nursery owner has one planted along the fence in front of the nursery and when I asked what it was he let me pick some to taste and bring the seeds home with me. They are very small and there isn't much to them other than that little burst of flavor. They don't produce large quantities either so it's more of a novelty but it sure is a fun and interesting one. The nice thing is it's a compact and narrow plant so it should be easy to squeeze in just about anywhere without much trouble. I'll be trying to get these seeds started so I can grow my own.

Food Forest Happenings and Thoughts

I'm feeling good about the food forest this week as I've been quite active and getting a lot of stuff done. Here is a quick rundown of what I've accomplished this week:

- Planted native Coastal Ground Cherries and was able to divide them into even more plants as I took them out of the pots

- Planted a few pepper plants in the food forest and potted up several others

- Planted a Calamondin tree that I started from seed last year

- Planted some Bottle Gourd, Luffa and Nasturtium seeds in various places

- Started a bunch of native wildflower seeds and some herbs in a seed starting tray

- Potted up some Jackfruit seedlings that were starting to outgrow their potatoes

- Propogated some Mulberry trees from cuttings

- Harvested carrots, mulberries, strawberries, everglades tomatoes, purple sweet potatoes and various greens/flowers

- Planted another Chayote vine

It's hard to put an age on the food forest because saying it started at a specific date doesn't really make sense. Maybe I started it almost a year ago technically but everything has been planted one tree here, a handful of bushes there, a couple more trees there. It has taken shape sporadically over the past 9+ months bit by bit. Almost every week I'm planting something, moving something taking something out that isn't working. I don't see that changing any time soon if ever. It will always be changing and evolving. Things are going pretty well at this point and I'm quite happy with how it's coming along. I would still consider this food forest a baby. It hasn't even been a full year since the first tree went in the ground but there is already so much happening and even some things producing food! I'm quite thrilled with how well everything is doing in such a short time which makes me even more giddy about what it will be like in another year or two.

Tips

I may not be totally qualified to give advice on growing things yet but I'll give some general tips that I think have played a large part in the relative success of my food forest so far.

- Throw stuff on the ground. Grass clippings, fruit/veggie scraps, tree trimmings, weeds, any organic material. Throw it on the ground. It will make your soil much better and growing things in your soil much easier. It feeds the soil organisms making the soil healthier, hold more moisture and the layers will keep more moisture from escaping.

- Make just being in your garden a routine, preferrably a daily routine. If daily is impractical for you try for at least 2-3 days a week. Even if you aren't doing any real "work" in the garden just walking through and taking notice of how things are doing and what has changed since the last walkthrough can be extremely helpful. Seeing that something is looking stressed or that a new pest has found one of your plants within a day of it happening makes remedying the situation FAR easier than if you weren't aware of it until a week after it started. Or maybe something was ready to harvest and if you weren't out there every day or so you might have missed it.

- Always be planting and propogating something. For the past 9 months or so I've planted and or propogated something most days. Not always as much as I did this week but start a few seeds, propogate one tree that needs a pruning anyway, plant something you propogated in a empty spot somewhere. It could be just 5 minutes of work a few times a week planting or starting seeds then next thing you know after 3 months of that you've got quite the garden growing.

Some of the Many Benefits of a Food Forest

To me being in the garden is a zen activity that I really enjoy doing. I'll take the trash out to the bin and 15 minutes later I still haven't made it back inside because the draw of wandering around the food forest snacking on things and seeing how they are doing is too strong. I can't believe how much of my life I've spent not eating all these wild, interesting and deliciously unique flavors that plants can give us. Only eating food you can find at a typical grocery store is missing out on so many amazing flavors and nutrition. There are many things you can grow at home easily that you'll never see for sale merely because it doesn't keep long enough to be transported. Plus even the things that transport well are WAY better when you grow them yourself and eat them when they are actually ripe. You can literally grow a perennial bush with fruit that tastes just like peanut butter. Grow a little shrub that tastes like gin. Last year I bought a 5ft tall tree for $35 and planted it in my back yard. Less than a year later I'm about to have hundreds of little berries that taste like cotton candy! That Geoff Lawton quote at the top of the post points out what a powerful thing it can be in the climate and wasteful energy use fight.

ABP (Always Be Planting)