An introduction to forest gardening

A forest garden is a managed, low-maintenance, sustainable way to produce food and useful products and designed to be beneficial to the environment while serving the needs of humans. It can be part of a permaculture design system for producing food and other useful materials, or can be grown as a separate system. Many ideas used in permaculture are used in the design of a forest garden.

Robert Hart in his forest garden, July 1997 - CC BY-SA 3.0
Quercusrobur (Graham Burnett) at en.wikipedia

 Creating a forest garden

To create a sustainable forest garden considerable a vision of the future and a willingness to work for the benefit future generations of humanity is essential. A well designed forest garden created from scratch does takes a lot of work, a large number of plants and a considerable time for those plants to become established.

When they do become established they can provide a durable and sustainable system for producing food and other materials that humans require for many generations to come. Importantly,  being largely self-sustaining with very low maintenance needs and  when viewed in the long-term forest gardens make excellent and productive investments while providing food and products for the benefit of humans in a very eco-friendly way.  Read more