Food Forests for First Timers is a humble grassroots offering of gardening teachings from a working horticulturist.
Photo credit: by yaquina
Food Forests for Beginners is a humble and popular offering of gardening teachings from a working horticulturist. Mother Earth News blogger Joshua Burman Thayer’s easy-to-read how-to guide introduces the principles of permaculture as he acquaints readers with each layer of the food forest. Simple instructions on the best ways to design organic gardens and landscapes are invaluable to anyone looking for ways to become more self-sufficient and resilient while redesigning living spaces to provide year-round harvests.
Here is a sampling of Joshua’s insights from the book, in his own words:
Plants, like people, thrive in community. As an ecological designer working with permaculture strategies, I appreciate how nature develops its plant communities so that each member benefits from their associations with others. That is valuable knowledge to bring to the garden.
- Russel Smith’s 1950 luminary text, Tree crops: a permanent agriculture, showed how our living spaces can be designed to provide annual harvests of tree crops. When our earth is remembered as a living and responsive plant campus, we are activated along with the inherent abundance of this planet.
Permaculture is a form of design that links resources, use and harvest into a connected whole. Although it is a complex design system, permaculture is perfectly suited to community-scale production. Taking into account the conditions of the local microclimate, permaculture asks how many crops and functions can be carried out simultaneously from a parcel of land. It challenges you to shift your focus from machine-centric gardening to home and plant-centric gardening.
Image Credit: Courtesy of Joshua Burman Thayer
An illustration shared from the book shows examples of permaculture guilds.
Illustration of permaculture wet and dry guilds
An illustration shared from the book shows examples of permaculture guilds.
Credit: Courtesy of Joshua Burman Thayer
Like anything worthwhile in life, managing your food forest requires preparation and sustained effort throughout the year. As you get into the rhythm of the seasons, always thinking ahead, maintaining your tools and facilities, caring for the land under your stewardship, you will be rewarded with a bounty that will sustain you and connect you with a community of fellow plant lovers. .
If you don’t already have a garden, you can start feeding and improving the soil biology of empty plots by shaking coffee grounds anywhere. Try taking your spent grounds around the corner to deposit in a receptive neighbor’s bush or tree. If you’re working on a large project, see if your local coffee shop allows you to pick up bags of spent grounds. Stores are usually very willing to give them away for free.
I have included many excellent books and resources in the appendix section of this book. May this document spark a dialogue about local food opportunities and ways to design food options in our landscapes, for biological abundance and food resilience.
Food Forests for Beginners It is available in eBook and paperback.
Cover of the book Food Forests for Beginners
Photo courtesy of Joshua Burman Thayer
Joshua Burman Thayer is a landscaper and permaculture consultant with native sun gardens. He is the urban agriculture supervisor for the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation in San Francisco, California. Find him at Native Sun Gardens and read his other NEWS FROM MOTHER EARTH posts here.
All bloggers in the NEWS FROM MOTHER EARTH community have agreed to follow our Blog Guidelines and are responsible for the accuracy of their posts.
Posted on January 17, 2022
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