Giulianna Lamanna

I was wondering what plants grow well with the Jamaican cherry tree (also known as the Panama berry, strawberry tree, and Muntingia calabura)? Is there an established guild that people recommend that includes this tree? Thank you!

Thank you all for your helpful responses! This is all great.

R Ranson wrote:Please let us know when your book comes out, and perhaps you could consider being a guest author here once it's published.

Oh wow, you flatter me! I don't know how relevant the book as a whole is to permaculture; what I'm talking about in this thread is mostly background for the main characters' culture. It'll show up in the first chapter. The bulk of the story is about nuclear waste. But hey, if you'd have me as a guest author, I certainly wouldn't turn the honor down.

I actually have The Edible Food Forest, and I've flipped through it a few times. I probably should have checked that before going begging for information here, though honestly it intimidates the hell out of me. I went to a PDC some years back where Dave Jacke guest-taught for a day. I remember that day being the hardest. I don't remember exactly what he had us do - I know there was a lot of writing, which was unusual for that course - but it kind of made my head spin. It now occurs to me that everything I need to know is probably in that set of books, if I can get over the intimidation factor of actually cracking them open.

amarynth leroux wrote:Bear in mind after 30 to 50 years, there is only jungle with hardwood trees left, if the process is done correctly. Indigenous gardeners move on or they have 4 or 5 'milpa' fields in production, and rotate them over the course of years.

Thank you so much for that link. This is amazing; that article almost tells me everything I need to know. I mean, look at this:

Corn, beans, and squash fill much of the milpa the first two years or more, but after the first harvest, the farmers dig in seedlings of bananas, papayas, guavas, and other fruit trees, and interplant them with manioc, tomatoes, chiles, herbs, spices, other favorite food and fiber plants, and some native forest seedlings. Nitrogen-fixing and firewood tree seedlings (such as Gliricidia, which is both) weave a border around the plot. The three sisters and other annuals cover the remaining ground for a few more seasons, but over the next five to eight years, the fruit-tree canopy closes in, and the farmers stop planting annuals. That activity shifts to a new plot, but meanwhile, back at the milpa . . . new cycles begin. By now most anthropologists have gone home and are missing the rest of the picture.

In some spots, farmers pull out a few non-flowering trees and bring in beehives. They also coppice trees known to stump-sprout (often leguminous) and begin growing firewood or craftwood. The tree fruits attract game animals, which supply meat, skins, and feathers. Cattle, tied to large trees, forage amid the greenery. Some of the other originally spared trees become trellises for vanilla beans and other vines, which yield for 10 to 12 years. Fruit rains down.

This actually works better than my original idea. 30 to 50 years is about one human generation, so each generation sees one cycle, and in their story they describe each generation as one step in the cycle, so it's like a cycle of cycles. Very mythic. I'm ashamed to admit that I am familiar with Toby Hemenway, and probably read this exact article (I know I read about managed food forests in Charles Mann's 1491), but I didn't remember or put it together with what I was doing for this project.

Tyler Ludens wrote:Do we have to limit ourselves to edible plants from a specific region? Or is any edible plant worldwide up for grabs?

Any and all edible plants from tropical regions worldwide are definitely up for grabs. Thank you for the links; I'm totally going to check out those videos!

Casie Becker wrote:Considering the tendency (an in think it's an increasing trend) for permaculturists to selectively breed to improve the ability of plants to survive, would you be interested in including subtropical species also? I don't want to backseat write, just think it might make a wider selection of familiar crops available.

Sure! It's been 400 years; I'm sure a number of plants have managed to evolve to adapt to the new climate, with or without humanity's help.

I have a question that might seem a little odd. It's for a novel I'm writing.

Imagine that a group of people start a perennial tropical food forest. It's designed to be self-sustaining, and likely contains a mix of foods from tropical ecosystems all over the world that modern-day Americans enjoy. 400 years later, their hunter-gatherer ancestors tell the story of their people, and their ongoing duty to care for the land, using the metaphor of ecological succession. So for example, we begin with Fire Generation (industrial civilization) which destroyed everything. The first group of permaculturalist settlers who established the food forest might be (some sort of edible grass) Generation, and then shrub generations and pioneer tree generations, and so on and so forth until you start to see climax species. All of these examples have to be edible, because part of telling the story is eating a meal. It's a coming-of-age ritual that's a bit like a Passover seder.

The trouble is, I don't live in a tropical climate myself and I'm not all that familiar with the tropics. (I've never even been further south than Florida, and even those trips were restricted to Disney World and my grandmother's retirement community in Boca Raton.) But it's got to be tropical, because a basic premise of this setting is that runaway global warming has produced a world similar to the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, when basically every place up to Alaska had a tropical climate.

Anyway... I'm looking at 16 generations, divided into four stages of succession. (The four stages would likely be courses in the meal, so the foods in each group may be mixed together.) I was hoping some you might be able to help me fill this out. Do you have any ideas?

Stage One:
1. Some variety of edible grass or groundcover?
2. Some variety of nightshade?
3.
4.

Stage Two:
5. Ginger?
6. Bananas?
7.
8.

Stage Three:
9.
10.
11.
12.

Stage Four:
13.
14.
15.
16.

Thanks in advance. I should add that I'll thank you by name in the book if you can help me out!

Hi, my name's Giuli (Julie) and I'm really excited that this forum is a thing!

I've been sort of casually reading about permaculture for years now, but it was only recently that I got a little bit of actual land (a quarter of an acre in the suburbs). My husband and I want to turn our suburban grass lawn into a little forest garden. We probably won't be legally able to raise chickens or anything like that, since we're within city limits. But we're already planning a little butterfly garden in the front, and we're hoping to do something about the terrible soil (clay, acidic, waterlogged, filled with fungus gnats). I'm hoping the nice people here can give me advice on all this stuff, because honestly, I'm a little overwhelmed!

So I've been halfhazardly reading about permaculture for a while; even got a fancy diploma from a permaculture design course way back in 2008! But I don't remember much from it, and I don't have a whole lot of actual gardening experience. And now that I have an actual yard to garden, I'm completely overwhelmed. The main problem is the soil in my yard: it's clay, it has the acidity of tomato juice, it's waterlogged, it's full of fungus gnats. My husband and I decided to start our permaculture experiment a bit slow, trying to build up the nutrients in the soil by ripping up the grass and replacing it with white clover. We thought the white clover would help build it up.

Well, it's been a year, and it doesn't seem to have made any kind of a difference, but it does look pretty bad. My brother-in-law, who shares the house with us and is wary of permaculture, is getting impatient and suspects that our little experiment with the yard isn't ever going to look good or be functional. So we've got a limited amount of time to prove that we can do this before he just brings the grass back. We've been thinking about just buying a bunch of topsoil and piling it on top of the soil we already have, and planting in that. Maybe ripping out a foot of our soil and replacing it. Is that our best option, or should we continue to try to remediate?