Hi,
I would like to share my
project with you:
We bought a lot a few kilometers from our house in april 2016 and startet planning and planting a food forest. The property is about 750m² and there is a small wooden house not meant (or ready) to live in.
I have to keep the balance between the leisure needs of my 4 year old daughter and my wife and my plans on growing food and experimenting with managing a natural ecosystem. The food forest is planned to be between 1/4 and 1/2 of the property.
When we bought it it was very dark and looked like a clearing between conifers; 15 of them up to 15m high, some of them already dead. When I planned on getting them removed it became clear that removing big
trees on a small property was kind of an all or nothing task. That, after a lot of work, left us with 6 birches in the south to provide shadow for the leisure area and 6 black locusts in the north and a 300m² southwest facing slope that was already terraced.
Planning took me a looooong time:
Water management with swales and a
Pond, pathways, 15 trees (1 big Sweet chestnut, 4 midsize appletrees, 10 dwarf fruittrees), lots of shrubs (berrys of all kind, autumn olives, peashrubs). I had no
experience in
gardening or designing, but with a little help of P. Whitefields book, hundreds of videos on youtube (yours may have been amongst them!) and the friendly people here and in a german forum community I got it all placed and started planting trees in late november 2016.
Though it will most likely never been finished I consider the forest planted now and have a
video walkthrough filmed in January (german with english subtitles):
Before you get confused, the conifers in the west are still there in the Video but I had them removed a few weeks ago. The Pond is kind of finished now and I placed some new/replaced some shrubs. I have a whole lot of seeds of all kind (beans, squash, herbs, medicinals, green manure), have already planted 25 comfrey cuttings...the forest ist planned to fill up until june, I am just waiting for the temperature to rise.
I hope there are no obvious big mistakes in my design apart from not really zoning the whole property, I consider the whole thing to be our zone 3/4 because it is 10-20 minutes from our home.
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