Notes from Martin Crawford forest garden course back in the summer of 2016

Friday 19 January 2018

Traditional agricultural science can’t cope with complexity of forest garden, 100+ species of plants.

Science & complex systems (thinking of chaos theory)

Energy efficiency

Forest Garden 1:40 Arable 1: 4 Animal 1: 0.8

Yield and input

Ideas

• Berberis as windbreak, useful for easterly protection
• Bowles Hybrid willow, 1.2m wide, non-competitive roots, vestigiate
• People space where paths converge
• Batboxes in trees

Coppice

• Sweet chestnuts coppice crop 6 years for fence posts - last 10-15 years
• Hazels
• Redwoods for fenceposts

If you forecast the future, you will be doomed to fail

Spacing

• Tree spacing ¼ – ½ of combined tree diameters
• But, can plant small trees under high trees eg Italian alder
• Windbreak protection is 3 * the height, eg 2m hedge gives 6m protection
• Cross pollinators 2-3 trees apart
• Nitrogen fixing trees can be 30–40m away
• Ash roots as wide as high (same for poplar). Normally 1/3 of height.

Many small errors multiply and lead to great unhappiness

Out in the garden

• Toona sinensis - pollard every winter
• Tilia cordata - pollard every 3-4 years
• White mulberry - leaf crop cooked, high in protein
• Cornus kousa - 25m in 20 years
• Valerian - potassium accelerator cut for onsite mulch
• Plum yew - ripe in November
• Phyllostachys
  • shade tolerant
  • can grow 25cm per day!
  • can spread 2-3m per year
  • maintenance 1-2 times per year
  • 5m high, 2cm canes
  • 80 canes
  • 120 shoots
  • 10 shoots per meal
• Pear, medlar, hawthorn can graft on existing hawthorn
• Crataegus ellwegariana - tarpaulin on ground, shake branches
• Black locust for timber 20-30 years

Most attractive fruit colours to birds

In descending order:

• Purple
• Red
• Orange
• Black (mulberries)

• Cornus capitata - edible fruit 3.5-4cm end Nov, banana flavour
• Zanthoxylum schinifolium - leaves for flavouring in spring
• Pineapple guava
• Sweet chestnut Marigoule, early ripening 30-35kg. Harvest with tarpaulin, frequently especially if windy. Knock the branches.
• Syrian hawthorn, thornless, delicious raw
• European bladdernut - shade tolerant, understorey, pistachio flavour nuts, 1cm
• Bog myrtle - N-fixer, armoatic leaves, insect repellent, lovely
• Tibetan whitebeam - fruits 2cm like marzipan
• Bamboo for playground
• Shrubby alders for extra N, lie prunings flat
• Zanthoxylum alatum Nepalese pepper, fragrance like black pepper
• Compost toilet in tent
• Swamp cypress, v. tolerant of damp, hard wood, coppice for fence posts

Outside again, Saturday afternoon

Self-seeding only happens in context

• Ground ivy (Glechoma hederacea), aromatic, good cover, good bee plant
• Japanese & Chinese yam, hardy in UK, raosted
• Turkish rocket, cooked. Evergreen in UK
• Ostrich fern - for shrubbery late March
• Lemon balm, mint, oregano, possibly anti-bacterial, anti-fungal
• Japanese butterbur (Petasites japonicus)- damp shade
• Solomons Seal, Polyganatum biflorum - damp shade
• Let raspberries move
• Turkish rhubarb (Rheum palmatum) - fairly shade tolerant
• Gunnera - N-fixing, in leaf stalks by algae
• Sweet cicely - perennial: leaf, seed and root crop
• Hops for shoots
• Nepalese raspberry - shade, fanatastic ground cover for woodland

Maintenance: 1 day per week for 2 acre garden over the year. Efficient.

• Most perennials 1-5 months germination!
• Purslane - bettroot flavoured, shde, self-seeding
• Pulmonaria - bee plant & accumulator

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• Hop
  • Grow up lower branches of Italian alder
  • 1 plant provides 100g dried hops, enough for 50 litres beer
  • 3-4 shoots going up, Apr-Jul/Aug - for the rest, harvest the hop shoots
• Meadowseet - lovely feathery cream flowers, 2m, bee plant
• Babbingtons leek
  • harvest as leek, cut shot
  • distribute bulbils by broadcast in light groundcover
  • garlicky flavour
• Korean raspberry good for shade under treas

Ground cover techniques

• Mulch strip, moving plants
• 3-10 plants per m²
• Set up mother beds
• Dwarf comfrey, good spreading cover. Don’t cut for mulch.
• Periwinkle - flowers all year, good evergreen cover for shade

• Swiss mint - type of mint for teas, not particularly spreading
• Tropaeolum tuberosum (Mashua) perennial nasturtium
  • tuber very productive
  • leave in the ground, just harvest what you need, leave tubers to regrow

SUNDAY

• Prof. Martin Wolfe, Organic Research Centre
• Integrated Forest Gardening - worth a read
• Eric Toensmeier ‘Edible Forest Gardens’ 2 vols, quite academic

FGN

• Aim to facilitate visits to other members gardens
• About 200, 160 in UK

Nutrient budgets

• Heavy cropping fruits require extra N, 6-10 g/m² per year
• Rough rule - 2/3 area of heavy cropping plant to be N-fixing plants
• Portable compost toilet
  • Dig hole
  • Use for one season
  • Fill and move
• If pH les than 6.0, then lime

In the new forest garden

• The Forest Garden Greenhouse by Jerome Osentowski
• Transitional ground cover - trefoil, clover, mustard etc

Transitional ground cover process

1. Put down chipped bark
2. Plant perennials and long term cover (eg strawberries)
3. Plant temporary cover thickly
4. Strawberry expands

• Plant comfrey around fruit trees!
• All mallows have edible leaves
• Train bramble fruits (thornless) on to Elaeagnus umbellata
• Liquorice, horseradish - eat young leaves in spring
• 400m² (1 acre) enough for family of four

Sea buckthorn harvesting

• Cut whole fruting branch
• Freezer for 1 hour
• Tap & fruits come off
• Harvest from sides, not upward growth

Propogation

• Seaweed solution
• 3 days nettle & comfrey feed
• Mulch 6 months for grass, 12 morths for docks & dandelions

Predator strips

• Senecio (Brachyglottis)
• Meadowsweet
• Sweet cicely

For land-based work, you have to be efficient

Harvesting nuts & apples

• Tap the branches with big stick if it hasn’t been windy
• Harvest nuts frequently, every 2 days
• Each tree has approx 2 week harvest
• Nut Wizard £60 - can use with chestnuts once free from burr
• Chestnut harvest end September
• Make sure ground cover under nut tree is short or mown eg wild garlic dies back or cut comfrey
• Silky 3.6m telescopic pruning saw
• Nut drying machine 35°C - 1kW heater with fan

Preparing chestnuts

• Chestnuts 60% water (cf walnuts), need 50-55°C in shell to dry, 3 days. Shells crack easier when dry.
• Put chestnuts in hessian sack, bash on concrete, skin comes off
• To use dried chestnuts, soak overnight in water
• Cook 40 minutes
• Hawos electric stone mill, designed for grain, will smash nuts

Mushrooms

• Oyster
• Shitake - easiest
• Fresh logs, no less than 2 months old
• Denser wood preferred
  • Oak - 10-12 years mushrooms
  • Alder - 6 years
• Anne Miller, Scotland, for fungus spawn & food grade wax
• High protein crop
• Store logs somwhere shady and damp
• Chaos funorum for edible fungus inoculant
• Paul Stamets - ideas and books

Shocking the Shitake log

• Soak the log overnight
• Bang hard
• Keep out of way of slugs
• Buds appear after week
• Rest for 3 months
• Shock every 3 months
• Harvest shitake 7-8cm, quickly
• 1 kilo every 3 months, 30 kilos over 10 years

Propogating mycelium

• Put inoculated log into thick plastic sack
• Keep for one year, winter to winter
• Scrape off mycelium, put into holes

Cleft grafting

• Sloe - graft plums
• Hawthorn - graft medlar, pear
• Buy graft wood from Brogdale
• Cut graftwood in January on dry, sunny day
• Put in fridge for up to 3 months
• In spring, graft in April/May
• Cleft graft easiest
• Straight split, no side branches. Lever with screwdriver
• Graftwood 1cm-70mm
• Leave 2-3 buds
• Line up inner edge of dark bark
• Wax over surface using grafting wax
• Will grow to full width
• As existing tree, will grow vigorously
• Italian grafting pliers available (Brondesbury Garden Centre)

Apple grafting

• Plant apple rootstock
• Let grow for 2-3 years
• Cut 2cm branch
• Graft wood on

Kiwi

• Climbing kiwi
• Coppice with tree every 3-4 years
• Grow on South side