A Forest Garden Year: With Martin Crawford

Synopsis

Fifteen years ago, inspired by the pioneering work of Robert Hart, gardener Martin Crawford moved from conventional organic gardening to creating a forest garden from a bare field. Today his garden is a wonderful example of what can be done with a minimum of effort to produce an abundant crop of unusual edible trees, plants, shrubs and ground cover. You can apply the principles of forest gardening to spaces big and small. Here Martin takes you through the seasons in his Devon forest garden, and shows you how to plan your planting to mimic the layering, density and diversity of a forest. A wide variety of edible plants can be grown: for example, Nepalese raspberry, Siberian purslane, Turkish rocket and Good King Henry, lime trees (their leaves make a good salad), bamboo (young shoots are tasty when steamed), snowbell trees (for their fruit), mulberry and chokeberry. A Forest Garden Year shows you how to graft an apple tree to crop a variety of apples over several months, how to grow shiitake mushrooms and perennial leeks, how to pollard and prune, protect crops from wind, attract beneficial insects and increase valuable minerals in the soil - all the while creating a haven for yourself and for wildlife.