All You Ought to Know about Growing a Food Forest
A Food Forest is a food-producing garden with an assortment of berry shrubs, herbs, edible greens, fruits, and nut trees, among other plants. All these different plants are supposed to grow together following a forest set-up. Nevertheless, in a food forest, every plant is chosen for various uses it provides to human life, either as food, building material, medicine or other making other items like dyes as well as baskets. Having a food forest is very different from traditional agriculture because it involves no tilling, machinery, herbicides, and pesticides or reaping of crops. Once your food forest matures, you don’t need to weed; plant seeds add organic fertilizers and mulch or any typical maintenance work associated with agriculture. All you need to do is to harvest the shoots, nuts, greens, fruits as well as other vegetables produced in it.
The food forest plays an integral role in providing a considerable amount of food and resources for your home as well as those around you while at the same time offering and healthy ecosystem with a diversity of organisms from the plants, insects, birds, fungi to microbial life. It is the perfect condition for home gardening or even traditional agriculture. In the post, we are going to outline some of the right reasons why you should opt to grow a food forest.
First of all, a food forest offers tons of financial advantages. One is that you will reduce the cost that goes to food considering that you will be food sufficient and you will handle your production. This is different from traditional gardening and agriculture because you will not rely heavily on outsourcing gardening materials like fertilizers, plant seeds, and manure. Moreover, you will spend less labor time to get yields compared to what you use for conventional agriculture. This means that the cost of producing food will be less, therefore, translating to savings on food. Moreover, because you are not using harmful agricultural chemicals and fertilizers used in large-scale tilling, you grow clean food, meaning you shrink your health-related costs. You alleviate the risk of getting sick from consuming the chemicals.
In addition to that, you enjoy ecological advantages. You contribute to the improvement of soil health, including a proliferation in soil minerals, humus, and the multiplicity of microbial and fungal life that is responsible for making healthier plants resistant to stress and disease. You are replicating a forest setting, meaning that every part of the ecosystem is balanced, leading to a healthier ecological set-up. This is because you are not using harmful chemicals, and you aren’t overworking the soil. You ensure that you promote a healthy environment for insects that are needed for pollination. The natural herbs and groundcover protect the soil from rain-water run-off.
Not only does the food forest has ecological and financial reasons, but it also serves the social part of human life. It provides a facility for community activity for people of all ages. It can serve as an educational center for the community where you can teach people how to save the planet and the various avails the food forest offers. It can be a source of community pride and will also provide food self-sufficiency.