Tag: food forest
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What is a Forest Garden? And How to Grow Amazing Food in Your Backyard
Forests in nature are resilient, diverse, self-regulating ecosystems. They provide all the nutritional needs of their residents – birds, mammals, reptiles, insects, microorganisms, etc. A forest garden, sometimes called a food forest, does the same for people, providing food, shade, wildlife, and an outdoor place to enjoy. A forest garden is a cultivated, edible, and diverse…
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5 Final Fast Growing Perennials to Quickly Grow Your Edible Landscape
Welcome back to the last installment of this fast growing plants series. These last five fast-growing plants all happen to be perennials. I’ll discuss each plant briefly, covering its benefits and uses, growing and harvesting tips, and design ideas and varieties to consider. These fast growing perennials are excellent options (depending on your climate) to…
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5 More Fast Growing Plants to Quickly Establish Your Forest Garden
Welcome back. It’s time for part two of this fast growing plants series. If you haven’t already, check out part one, Five Fantastic Fast Growing Plants to Kickstart Your Food Forest. Today we’ll cover five more fast growing plants to help your perennial garden or food forest to fill in quickly. As with part one,…
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Five Fantastic Fast-Growing Plants to Kick-Start Your Food Forest
Are you looking to create a thriving food forest or edible perennial garden? Starting with fast growing plants will provide you with some quick successes to get your garden off to a strong start. These resilient plants will rapidly establish themselves and provide you with abundant foliage or harvests in the first or second year.…
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A Practical Spring Garden Checklist for the Urban Food Forest
Spring is in full swing and if you’re like me, you have no shortage of chores in the yard and garden. It can be daunting to keep track of everything that needs doing for your garden, yard, or food forest. That’s why I’ve made this Spring Garden Checklist. I wanted a list of everything to…
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The Get Outside (in the Garden) Every Day of May Challenge
Spring can be an overwhelming time of year, with all of the yard work and gardening tasks to be done, along with our already busy schedules. Sometimes it’s hard to make the time to get out in the garden and get all the work done. And once you start getting behind, the tasks pile up…
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Comfrey Uses in the Garden: The Quintessential Permaculture Plant
Let’s talk about the many uses of comfrey in the garden. In permaculture, we give comfrey as a prime example of multi-functional plants so often that it’s now a cliche. I almost didn’t want to write about comfrey for this reason. But it’s an excellent permaculture plant, I have it growing in my food forest,…
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The Remarkable Green Globe Artichoke
The plant of the month this month is the green globe artichoke, not to be confused with the Jerusalem artichoke, which is also an excellent plant for the food forest, but quite different from globe artichokes. I have fond memories of eating artichoke “leaves” (actually bracts) dipped in butter as a child. They taste great…
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Hawthorn: “Fairy Tree” and Treasure of the Food Forest
While considering what plant to feature this month, I took a stroll through my backyard and noticed a few bright red berries on the ground—hawberries, or haws—which had fallen from one of our hawthorn trees. We were fortunate to inherit two hawthorns when we moved into our house. Even though I knew what the two…
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Sheet Mulching Made Easy: 11 Steps to Building Better Garden Beds
With so many different methods of sheet mulching out there and with each method sometimes having contradictory information, it can be confusing and hard to know how to get started. So, in this guide, my aim is to break down the sheet mulching process into simple steps with clear explanations for each step. Sheet Mulching…