Grow Your Own Food Forest

Here at Daly's Nursery we don't just love growing edible plants, we love eating them and I'm going to show you around this highly productive food forest and this is a great way of packing a lot of edible plants into a small space because the other thing that we don't have is unlimited land Growing a food forest can be a really great way to grow a lot of different types of edible plants together. The goal of the food forest is to grow everything that you need to support the system. Edible plants are grown alongside plants that will provide nutrients, mulch, structural supports, shade and protection and just like in a forest it's layered with trees and shrubs and ground covers. Everything contributes to building up the soil and the biomass and even the weeds have got a place, they hold the soil together and they cover up any bare patches of earth. With a food forest it really helps to focus on the soil and less on growing perfect plants. By building a living soil full of organic matter the plants are going to be stronger and they're going to be more pest resistant and the fruits and produce that you're growing are going to be sweeter and they're going to taste better. There are so many plants growing in this food forest it's really hard to know where to begin in sharing them with you. There's old man's saltbush and pomegranates, there's different types of citrus and stone fruits, there's bananas and if I'm lucky I might even find a fig. The understory is rich with pumpkins and tomatoes and herbs and the fabulous bush food warugal greens. So you can see one of the main species we have here are bananas and bananas are so productive. If you bag your fruits you're going to get tons of them. They're not only highly productive but they also create a lot of biomass and biomass enriches your soil, it can be used as mulch, it can be used to create garden beds, it can be used to put into the bottom of raised beds, you can put it in your compost, you can never have enough green material in your garden. So part of your food forest is generating biomass that you're going to be using to enrich your garden. This here is a pigeon pea. Pigeon peas are grown all around the world, they are not only a fantastic edible plant but they're a legume so they're a nitrogen fixer. If you have a plant such as this in your food forest the more you cut it back the more nitrogen it's going to put into your soil and the more biomass you're going to have to use as mulch and compost. They're also hardy so you can use them to protect more sensitive plants while they establish. We've also got these beautiful cassava plants and cassava are a staple in the South Pacific. They're known for their rich nutritious starchy roots and they're also fabulous for creating biomass. You can cut them back and use them for mulch and they will just keep growing. The basil have been left to flower and they're full of bees including the native blue-banded bee and this bee is one of Australia's best pollinators. It's what they call a buzz pollinator and it uses its wing muscles to vibrate the pollen off plants. It makes it a particularly effective pollinator and it's excellent for plants such as tomatoes which are also prolific through this garden. This is the old man's saltbush. It's a lovely Australian native bush food. You can see it has this stunning silvery foliage so it complements other plants in your garden but it also has edible leaves. I love plants such as this. There's even guava trees in this food forest and the guava is a type of tree that you often smell before you see it because the fruits are so sweet and aromatic. Even the smallest suburban garden can be the perfect place to establish a miniature food forest. You can start with just one tree and build around it and the key to success is growing plants that you love. An environment such as this is such a rich and diverse environment. Children love exploring spaces such as this especially if they're able to eat things straight off the plant and that's why I love gardens such as this food forest.