Host Name: RawInspirationsRadio
Show Name: Visionary Culture Radio :: Food Forests Across America!
Date / Length: 4/6/2009 8:00 PM - 1 hr 30 min
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/rawinspirations/2009/04/07/Visionary-Culture-Radio-with-host-Laura-Fox

Description:
Monday April 6th, 8:00 pm PST Tune into Visionary Culture Radio with Laura Fox on Monday for a show on Food Forests Across America with special guest permaculture teachers from the east to west coasts of the U.S. visionary0culture-radio-logo Call In :: 646-649-1957 Or Log In or Listen :: www.visionarycultureradio.com Special Guests Include: Erik Ohlsen - Founder & Director - Permaculture Earth
Artisans Ethan Roland - Founder & Director - AppleSeed Permaculture Marisha Auerbach - Founder & Director - Herb ‘n Wisdom Max Meyers - Director - Mendocino Ecological Learning Center
Jay Ma - Co-Founder, Director of Programs & Development -

Food Forests Across America!

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See article posted on Permaculture Research Institute's site.
http://permaculture.org.au/2009/01/26/food-forests-across-america.

Join the campaign for local food security and learn how you can help to transform gardens, lawns, parks, and empty spaces into thriving edible landscapes that are beautiful, regenerative, and produce an abundance of delicious, locally grown food!  We can create intentional systems that provide for our needs and the needs of the earth by mirroring natural ecologies in our designs.  

What is a Food Forest Garden?

A Food Forest describes an intentionally cultivated forest that mimics the native ecosystem.  In designing a food forest, we observe the community of plants in the forest.  The home Food Forest reflects these observations by applying plants that function similar to the native plants but have a higher yield, are more palatable, or useful in some way to the designer.  Food Forests can offer an incredible abundance while stewarding the landscape in a good way. 

Imagine a forest where every single tree is dripping with fresh fruits and ripening nuts. Every shrub is packed with delicious berries, and every other plant is a medicinal herb, culinary spice, or beautiful edible flower. Tubers and root crops are abundant underfoot, gourmet mushroom logs sprout in the shade, and hardy kiwi vines climb back up through the layers of this multi-functional forest of food.

Food forests are diverse gardens modeled after natural ecosystems designed to mimic the way a forest thrives and regenerates. A forest continuously nourishing all elements in the system and produce a vast diversity of outputs, but requires little or no inputs to sustain itself. By recognizing the self-supporting, mutually beneficial relationships of the elements in a forest - from tall trees, smaller trees, shrubs, herbs, ground covers, vines, nitrogen fixers, insectaries, fungi, animals, and more, the food forest garden designs a similar system but replaces the components that are in a common forest with species that are preferred edibles and more useful for humans. The forest then becomes a Garden of Eden, in which edible or useful plants are found from head to toe, where something in season is always ready to eat, and the system requires little or no maintenance to sustain and regenerate. As a food forest mimics the ecology found in native forests, they are fantastic examples of good soil and land stewardship.




Santa Barbara Permaculture Network
   an educational non-profit since 2000
(805) 962-2571
P.O. Box 92156, Santa Barbara, CA 93190
margie@sbpermaculture.org
www.sbpermaculture.org

"We are like trees, we must create new leaves, in new directions, in order to grow." - Anonymous

First Annual Southern California Permaculture Convergence August 2008
http://socalifornia.permacultureconvergence.org