Despite a bad drought, our forest garden is coming along nicely thanks to truck loads of compost, lots of hand irrigation and some decent rains. The garden has grown significantly since my last forest garden update.
food forest
Forest Gardens — Hedge Against Drought
We’re struggling through a fairly severe drought this year and yet our forest garden is a lush oasis in a sea of brown, abandoned rice fields. Even the weeds in the rice fields are dying after weeks of no measurable rainfall. Normally it would be raining every 1-3 days right now.
EcoOasis: How to Chop and Drop in a Food Forest
EcoOasis is one of the best forest gardens in the world. They have excellent videos on YouTube that show their farming/gardening system. Be sure to check out their site if you’re into gardening.
Transition Forest Gardens
Deforestation is actively destroying about 13 million hectares (32 million acres) of forest every year. The biggest, most valuable trees are logged for timber. Often the smaller, less valuable trees are left remaining… for a while. Then farmers come along and clear the land for field crops such as soybeans, corn and cassava, because the remaining scrub forest doesn’t have much commercial value. But what if the deforestation process stopped after the large trees were cut? You could use the smaller remaining trees to help regrow a forest more valuable than timber – a food forest that continually produces abundant food indefinitely for generations to come without need for cultivation, chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides.
Banana Circles
“Nicholas Burtner discusses how to build a banana circle, how to plant a poly culture guild around a banana circle, how to work strategy and time within a banana circle, and how to link banana circles together for true abundance in farming and growing bananas.”
Our Tropical Forest Garden: Recycled Wood Raised Beds
This is a continuation of a previous blog post: Our Tropical Forest Garden and Homestead Update.