Creating a Forest Garden
The long-awaited definitive book on forest gardening. Martin takes you step by step through the process of designing, implementing and maintaining a forest garden. Trees, shrubs, perennials, short-lived plants and fungi can all be integrated into one system and this book tells you how to do it. Includes descriptions of many uncommon edible plants suitable for temperate climates. If you want one book on forest gardening then this is the one to get! "A seminal piece of work on truly sustainable gardening, written with great spirit and soul" - Alys Fowler.
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- Keep in mind that building an ecosystem up is sort of a lifetime-scale project, so we're mostly talking about rather un-controlled experiments running for decades. A more recent book I'm going through that I like is Martin Crawford's "Creating a Forest Garden: Working with Nature to Grow Edible Crops"
In the section on soil fertility, you can find tables quantified in terms of pees per area, depending on the breakdown of what you already have planted.
He avoids the term "Permaculture" because like "organic" or "bio" it's turned into this whole badly defined spiritual thing, instead of just being about growing as much food as possible, with as few inputs as possible, with perennial plants.
- Thanks for taking the time to reply.
I absolutely agree with you regarding regenerative agriculture and moving towards a plant based diet. We have to do that so we can stop destroying the soil and can actually produce food with adequate nutrition.
With regards to intensive grazing it appears that some farms do do it and there have been some studies that suggest it does work. For instance this study (of which I've only read the abstract) seems to support the technique - http://www.publish.csiro.au/sr/SR07220
There are quite a few more studies and supporting material on this site http://www.regenerateland.com I won't pretend to have read them all but from the few abstracts that I have read it seems to be based in science.
As a vegan I don't want to see more animals being killed and eaten, however if farmers are going to keep farming then they should do it this way (and using silvopasture we need multiple approaches!). However if ensuring the survival of the planet involves using animals to do some work then I'm definitely open to it.
Something which may be of additional interest to you are Forest Gardens which seem to be pretty good at optimising a whole system https://www.agroforestry.co.uk/about-agroforestry/forest-gar.... The book "Creating a Forest Garden" by Martin Crawford is definitely worth checking out if only for the wealth of information regarding types of plants and their use.
