How to Take Control of Your Future Food Supply

In general, we in the western industrialized nations don’t know much about how to grow our own food.

This is in spite of the fact that there are literally dozens of wild edible plants wherever we happen to be living of which we are also ignorant.

Our collective ignorance invites a huge risk when it comes to food security and survival.

Fortunately, there is a very effective way to insure against food insecurity, grow your own fresh and nutritious food, regenerate your communities, and re-learn what our natural intelligence tells us ought to be part of our livelihood.

It is called a Forest Garden.

I am passionate about Forest Gardens.

Some people call them food forests, but that misses the ‘garden’ part, which to me evokes images of idyllic traditional French or English gardens. And I’m not particularly religious, but the whole ‘Garden of Eden’ thing comes to mind when I think of a Forest Garden…

Forest Gardens are very attractive places to spend time, full stop.

Also, as an herbalist, I appreciate that forest gardens can store a lot of medicinal plants that are not ‘food’ per se. Along those lines, it can also hold a good number of edible survival foods. These are food plants that you wouldn’t necessarily want to eat on a regular basis — most have strong and/or peculiar tastes or require lots of processing to make them edible — BUT if the supermarket shelves were left bare after the masses stripped them clean AND you had no food in your pantry, at least you wouldn’t starve to death.

Another thing that I’ve heard no one talk about — and this is just between you and me, okay?
Since forest gardens are not typical gardens that most people would recognize, if somebody ever stole all your food from you at gun point (God forbid!), they more than likely would NOT know that you had some edible stuff “growing back in the bushes.” (Food Security 101. Done)

When you stand or sit in the middle of one of these gardens, it almost feel like you should act like some kind of aboriginal — like you should be crouching down on all fours and howling at the moon. But then there are the neighbors, so I refrain (and so might you).

I started my first forest garden in San Francisco in the fall of 1993. I was living in a house at the time with 2 other roommates, and we only had an area of about 100 square feet to garden in back yard.

Not so big.

That’s what I really want to convey about this method of gardening — it doesn’t require a lot of work or space. Sure, the word ‘forest’ conjures vast expanses of greenery, but the cool thing about these gardens is that they make tangible benefit from what Japanese garden designers call ‘borrowed scenery’. In this case, with forest gardens you will end up naturally “borrowing” desirable plant material such as seeds, fruit and other things from your neighbors’ property.

Okay, back to the fall of 1993:
On one side, my neighbors had a mature pear tree. Fortunately, it was close enough to our back garden that we got plenty of fallen, perfectly ripe pears to munch on. There is nothing quite like fresh fruit right off the tree. Our neighbors on the other side had two mature Meyer’s lemon trees. In the San Francisco Bay Area, these trees produce fruit all year long (although the best quality fruit was picked in the summer).

Although it doesn’t require a lot of time each week to create a forest garden, I guarantee you’ll find yourself drawn to spend a lot of your free time in them simply because it feels so good.

The main idea behind creating a forest garden is to use perennial plants much more than annuals (which you usually have to plant every year). This cuts down the amount of work needed since most perennials plants get stronger and/or more plentiful as the years go by.

This is leveraging Nature’s abundance to do our work.

You can also maximize the amount of edibles you grow with the concept of growing in layers.
Layers are vertical zones that certain plants grow into. There are several zones that you would want to fill up: the root zone (like yams/sweet potatoes), the fungal layer often grows on rotting wood debris (gourmet mushrooms anyone?), a zone for ground covers (like creeping thyme), a herbaceous zone (for typical herbs, perennials and some annuals), a shrub layer (i.e., Meyer lemons), a small tree layer (flower pods/flowers from the Redbud tree, for example), medium trees (Tilia species), and tall over-story trees.

For more info about suitable plants for your locale, check out: http://www.pfaf.org/

Plants for a Future has a searchable database that allows you select your local climate and soil conditions to find the ideal plants.

Some people might say that they live in an apartment and can’t grow plants. In a small percentage of cases that may be true, but having lived in densely populated big cities, I can assure you that if you want to grow your own vegetables and/or herbs there is a way:

http://www.miiu.org/wiki/PlanterPonics/

As another example, check out this creative young entrepreneur who came up with a solution for city dwellers wanting edible vegetation:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/windowfarms/learn-to-grow-and-share-...

Reply requested: how could you use this kind of technology to improve your livelihood?