Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
I so often tell others that the reason I grow food is because I love eating. But let us not lost sight of the fact that ‘food is medicine and medicine is food’. We can brings plants together and manage them in a forest garden, to provide for ourselves, our families, communities and customers.
“Action on behalf of life transforms. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.”
As many of you know, permaculture will often have you disappear down a rabbit hole, if not an entire warren. Or, in permaculture-speak, will take you off the well-beaten track to explore those infamous edges. The Hornshurst Forest Garden is one such edge. It is an acre site, deer and rabbit fenced, within a much larger 160 acre wood. I have been designing it for the wood owner, Doro Marden, for about 3 years.
Owning a garden like London Glades would certainly be an education, but it would be a gentle, life-affirming way to engage with the land and the sustainable, low-maintenance approach would allow the client to develop their stewardship of their garden. I like this soft approach to learning and have followed similar lines in my own hidden allotment front garden which uses similar plants to my neighbours’ gardens and appears to follow traditional ornamental design, but incorporates many edibles which forest gardener Stephen Barstow would call edimentals.
•Food Sovereignty: A Breviary
•Transforming a conventional orchard into a fruit forest
•Journal withdraws controversial French Monsanto GM study
•Dust to Dust: a man-made Malthusian crisis
•Fighting hunger through sustainable farming
•Peak soil: act now or the very ground beneath us will die
•The National Soil Project
•Hungry Americans Less Productive as Budget Cuts Deepen: Economy
•Soil tasting session coming to Bristol: "Mmmm… I’m getting earthy notes and just a hint of grass"
•Now This Is Natural Food
