Touring an amazing food forest with over 300 edible plants | Discovery | Gardening Australia
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- Опубліковано 27 тра 2024
- Jane tours an established food forest where nearly everything you see is good enough to eat. Subscribe 🔔 ab.co/GA-subscribe
Deep in the Yarra Valley about an hour Northeast of Melbourne, Jane visits a garden filled with over 300 plants from around the world. This dense one-acre food forest is purposed as an edible and medicinal forest. It is also a wedding venue and home to the initiator of the project, Louise Ward, who lives here with her husband. Louise says they are “mimicking the normal forest as a food system...things that you would find when you go into a forest. Some things you can eat and some things you can't, but they all have their purpose within the forest. That's what the edible forest is all about.”
Louise came across the idea while researching permaculture and saw the term edible forest. “I thought wow that would be amazing... it'll be like the garden of Eden. People can walk in and taste. I can just see it in front of me,” she says. The site began as a clear open paddock on clay soil, so to improve the soil she and her husband brought in manure of all kinds. Now, everywhere you look is covered in plants along structured pathways and the result is that “there's a lot of produce,” says Louise, “We’re always having to think what we do with it. Because we’ve got the business here, we use it in the menus as well.”
Horticulturalist Jamie Sweetman has looked after these plants for nearly four years and takes tour groups around the garden. Jamie says, “we've got about 330 plants in here and about 200 are edible. The other hundred just fit into the system, so they will be attracting beneficial bugs or nitrogen-fixing. Everything has to have an excuse to be in here.” Large areas of the garden are protected by a netted structure which keeps out deer, rabbits and cockatoos, while still allowing the smaller creatures in. Jamie says, “the little birds can come in, so we've got blue wrens in here... they come in and out of the fence line as they please. The bees and the dragon flies, all the good stuff.”
Some of the plants harvested for medicinal purposes include rosehips and elderberry which can be made into syrups. Peruvian gooseberries can be eaten fresh, but a favourite this time of year is the chokeberry. Jamie says despite the name, “no, you won't choke but they're quite astringent. In saying that they have more antioxidants in them than blueberries. Easier to grow, they make a great hedge, easy to harvest and all ripen at the same time... they are in the rose family, you can kind of tell by the leaf shape.”
A common method of repurposing green waste is to chop-and-drop. Jamie explains “you'll cut something down and drop it on the ground so that the nutrients can go back into the ground.” The version they’re using in the edible forest is a wire structure shaped into a cylinder in which the green waste is piled up. Jamie says, “we will pull that up soon, throw some mulch over the top, leave it for a while and it’s building soil on site.” They also have a wetland area where everything is edible, including the Australian native water fern, nardoo, and a range of other nitrogen fixing plants such as the Persian silk tree. Jamie explains that nitrogen-fixing plants “have nodules on their roots that turn nitrogen into forms that other plants find accessible, so they’re self-fertilising our garden for us.”
Amongst all these plants with purpose, Louise does have a special favourite, the gotu kola. Louise says, “it’s a medicinal one, so it's not the most beautiful looking one... it’s very very happy over here and it’s a great little groundcover, too.” Louise says, “gardening is one of the best things I've ever discovered. It's just wonderful. Getting your hands dirty is just one of the most wonderful things in the world. It's really good for you mentally. It's everything.”
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Awww this tour was refreshing wish my garden looked like this.
Thanks for watching!
Make it! :3
a food forest, now that is a cool idea
We think so too!
YES. And you don't need a lot of space - mine is maybe about 350m² and I have loads of trees, on dwarfing rootstock or Columnar varieties and Vines on fences... Berry bushes an perenial vegetables. Organic Food with ZERO Food-Miles
@@MartinaSchoppe Nice! i live in the tropical zone in africa, somalia. My grandpa had a food forest that had 800 trees and other random plants were growing. it is a desert here but in the wet season the rain is massive. My grandpa sadly died of cancer at 110. He must've been strong to live that long.
Beautiful! Shared on Landscape Architecture TV. Thanks.
Thanks for sharing!
I would guess, that with all edibles, it would depend greatly on the varieties of each plant,🤔🤷♀️, but I could be wrong! Very interesting thank you. More should be done like this, especially our native varieties, and the withdrawal to be used correctly! 😉🤷♀️
Can we visit this place
I’d love to visit too!
Yes, google 'edible forest'
I just love this channel!
Thanks so much!
Soy seguidor de vuestro magnífico canal desde hace mucho tiempo. Me encantaría que pusierais subtítulos en español. Muchas gracias
Love this! My dream
Great show people 🌱🍆💯👍👀
Thanks for watching!
I am wanting to do this on my land any advice,I want things that would have been here before how would I find out that? And I want to e able to feed my family to
How is watered? it's a shame not to include this kind of pertinent information in the segment.
00:20 Whats name of that tree?
400 hundred fruit trees 200 hundred diffrent date palm all australia eol
Sbe must have money to cover with nets and fence from deer and cockatoos. They destroy everything in my garden