Alan Carter - A Food Forest in Your Garden: Plan It, Grow It, Cook It

Hop shoot emerging

Forest gardens are not new. They have been grown in the tropics for centuries, if not millennia. In Indonesia they are called home gardens or pekarangan . Like a forest, a home garden contains a great variety of plants in many layers, from the tall trees of the canopy to shrubs and shade-loving plants on the forest floor. The difference is that in the home garden all the plants have been chosen for their use, which might be as food, building materials, fibres or medicines. The canopy might include coconut, durian, jackfruit and timber trees, with bananas, papaya and coffee lower down, and vegetables and starchy crops such as aubergines, chillies, cassava, sweet potatoes and taro in the lowest layers. Animals including fish in ponds are also usually part of the system. Researchers call the cultivation of such edible ecosystems agro-ecology.

The name home garden is not accidental. In contrast to rice fields and shifting cultivation out in the forest, a pekarangan is always around the house. The garden is an important part of the household and the familys activities are an important part of the garden. As well as material production, a home garden is the venue for social, cultural and religious activity to the extent that some researchers have suggested that the term should be extended into agro-socio-ecology.

My own introduction to the idea came when I was studying forestry at the University of Aberdeen in the early 1990s. I saw a poster advertising a talk on Indonesian home gardens: sustainable development without aid? and went along. The speaker was Mike Daw, a UN Food and Agriculture Organisation advisor who travelled around the world studying and giving advice on agricultural systems. One of his trips had taken him to Indonesia. The gist of his talk was that he had found almost nothing that he could say to improve home gardens: they were already a perfect system.

Naturally this stuck with me, since I am both a forester and a keen gardener, but the chances of growing coconuts and bananas in Aberdeen are limited. It was only later that I discovered that attempts were under way to adapt the system to temperate climates. The pioneer in the UK is generally acknowledged to be Robert Hart, who planted a temperate home garden on his smallholding in Wenlock Edge in Shropshire after the Second World War. Hart adopted the term forest garden, by which home gardens are usually known in Britain. His garden and his writings inspired a new generation of forest gardeners such as Ken and Addie Fern of Plants For A Future, Martin Crawford, who runs the Agroforestry Research Trust in Devon, and Graham Bell and Nancy Woodhead in the Scottish Borders.

As soon as I got my own garden, I also started to experiment with the perennial vegetables and fruits that grow in a forest garden. I soon found that what grows in a favourable microclimate in the southwest of England, where most of the research in the UK has been done, doesnt necessarily do so well in the yet cooler climate of the north of Scotland. I also discovered that there is a difference between edible in the sense of you can eat this plant without dying and edible in the sense that you would want to. Since then I have been working out what will grow in my garden and what I want to bring into my diet and my daily life. My style of forest gardening is also influenced by the relatively small space I have for it: my main growing space is a standard council allotment of around 200 square metres.

One thing I have discovered is that the adaptations I have had to make to a cooler climate and to a smaller garden are similar. As you go north (or higher) in Britain, it is not just that the species change. Forest structure also changes, becoming simpler and less layered. Both these things bring the focus of a productive forest garden down from the trees to the shrubs and ground layer and change the ecological model from closed high forest to the more open forest edge.

My reward for these experiments has been a cool-temperate home garden that feeds both my belly and my heart.