Description
Discover how to create a resilient forest garden ecosystem, including:
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- Using permaculture principles
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- Observing and mapping your space
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- Building planting beds, including hügelkultur mounds
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- Coping with saturated soil
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- Matching perennial edible plants to the right growing conditions
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- Grouping plants in diverse layers that attract and shelter beneficial insects and birds
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- Creating microclimates to increase the range of plants you can grow
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- Pruning, propagating, managing pests, and more
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- Expending less energy for greater reward
The Home-Scale Forest Garden is complete with descriptions of over 100 food-bearing and multifunctional plants for every layer of a forest garden: overstory and understory trees, shrubs, herbaceous plants, groundcovers, vines, and mushrooms, too.
The book includes over 200 photographs taken over 10 years of forest development, along with illustrations of a garden layout and special plant groupings for a range of conditions, including hot, dry sites and shady, moist sites.
Throughout, Baker candidly shares both her mistakes and her successes to help readers better understand the dynamics of a forest garden as it grows and changes over time. From her Asian Pear Adventure and Tamarack Travesty to her discoveries of unique ways to rescue and transplant tree seedlings, readers will appreciate the practical advice as she recounts lessons learned from her grand edible gardening experiment.
This is the perfect guide for gardeners of all experience levels who want to work with nature’s model and expand the range of food crops they grow as they embark on their own forest garden adventure.
Praise for The Home-Scale Forest Garden:
“A thoroughly enjoyable read…This book should be of great use to anybody making a forest garden on any scale.” – Martin Crawford, author of Creating a Forest Garden; founder, Agroforestry Research Trust
“Dani Baker enriches cold-climate forest gardening with candid details of successes and (importantly) failures in her decade-old forest garden.” – Eric Toensmeier, author of Perennial Vegetable; co-author of Edible Forest Gardens.
Product details
Published 2022
Chelsea Green Publishing
Softcover, colour photographs throughout, 326 pages.
ISBN: 9781645020981
About the Author
Dani Baker is a retired clinical psychologist and a self-taught gardener and photographer who learned her craft by immersing herself in reading, poring over nursery catalogs, attending workshops on permaculture and gardening, and enthusiastic trial-and-error experimentation. Her Enchanted Edible Forest garden is located at Cross Island Farms on Wellesley Island in the St Lawrence River between New York and Canada. There, she and her partner, David Belding, grow certified organic produce and raise grass-fed beef and goats. Dani conducts workshops and tours in her edible forest garden as well as giving presentations at organic farming conferences and other venues. She takes particular pleasure in inspiring others to try their hand at incorporating permaculture principles in their edible gardens.
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