Forest garden with 500 edible plants takes a few hours of work a month

CC BY 2.0 mako Working with nature instead of against it, forest gardens promise abundance, as well as the kind of resilience a changing climate demands. When you think about it, monoculture is just weird. We cover enormous swaths of earth with single crops that deplete the soil, require all kinds of chemicals, wipe out natural habitats and carbon-capturing trees, and whose lack of diversity makes them vulnerable to disease and weather events. And then there’s the forest garden. Rather than completely working against nature, forest gardens are designed to mimic natural ecosystems – and guess what? Nature knows how to do things pretty well. As UK-based forest gardening pioneer Martin Crawford explains in a short film by Thomas Regnault, "What we think of as normal, in terms of food production is actually not normal at all. Annual plants are very rare in nature, yet most of our agricultural fields are filled wit annual plants. It’s not normal. What’s normal is a more forested or semi-forested system." We’ve written about Crawford before, but Regnault’s film offers an epiphany-inspiring illustration of just how much sense agroforestry makes. Especially when facing a future that promises extreme weather – a future that […]

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