Starting a Food Forest – Without Using Extra Water!

Feeling guilty about watering my veggie gardens and fruit trees during the worst drought of the century, I created a food forest on my property. This is called PERMACULTURE. It’s really a very simple concept – you plant veggies around your fruit trees so when you water the trees, you’re also watering your veggies! So cool!

This saves about half the amount of water you’d need to grow veggies and fruit trees (separately).

I planted 17 fruit trees about 3 years ago, and created my first food forest with daikon radishes, comfrey and other edibles to boost the nitrogen in the soil and aerate the rock solid terrain.  It worked! I didn’t need to add chemical fertilizers and the food forest kept the weeds at bay.

At first, I tried broadcasting (tossing) 10,000 strawberry seeds around the fruit trees hoping I would have a bumper crop of strawberries, but they didn’t take.  Didn’t get one strawberry plant. ARGH! Then, I figured out the problem: broadcasting seeds everywhere didn’t work because they needed to be under the drip irrigation water lines. DUH!

So, I just planted carrots, beets, onions, turnips and other root veggies by placing the seeds directly under the drip lines.  It’s amazing what happens when seeds are placed under a drip line.  I see sprouts popping up around all of the trees after only a week!

My next project is going to involve multi-level plantings.  I’ll have root veggies and leafy veggies around the fruit trees, and then climbers (string beans and cucumbers) that will climb up the fruit trees — they won’t need fancy or expensive cages!

Using the permaculture technique to grow food forests gives you a harvest of all kinds of veggies without using additional water. And best of all, the edibles grow together so you don’t have to worry about creating neat little rows and weeding every day.

Check out this article to learn more about permaculture!

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