With new chapter: coping with extreme weather
Forest Gardening or Agroforestry is a way of growing edible crops with nature doing most of the work. Modelled on young woodland, a wide range of crops is grown in vertical layers. Species are chosen for their beneficial effects on each other, creating a healthy system that maintains its own fertility, with little need for digging, weeding or pest control. Whether a small area in your back garden or a larger plot, here is advice on how to create a beautiful space with great environmental benefits from planning and design (using permaculture principles) to planting and maintenance. With a changing climate, we must grow food sustainably, without compromising soil health, food quality or biodiversity and Forest Gardening offers an exciting solution to the challenge.
Creating a Forest Garden also includes a detailed directory of over 500 trees, shrubs, herbaceous perennials, annuals, root crops and climbers – almost all of them edible and many very unusual.
As well as more familiar plants you can grow your own chokeberries, goji berries, yams, heartnuts, bamboo shoots and buffalo currants.
The author: Martin Crawford has spent over 20 years in organic agriculture and horticulture and is director of The Agroforestry Research Trust, a non-profit-making charity that researches into temperate agroforestry and all aspects of plant cropping and uses, with a focus on tree, shrub and perennial crops. The Trust produces several publications and a quarterly journal, and sells plants and seeds. See www.agroforestry.co.uk for more information.
"Even if you weren't going to try forest gardening, I challenge you not to want to by the end of this book. This is a seminal piece of work on truly sustainable gardening, written with great spirit and soul."
Alys Fowler, author and presenter, The Edible Garden
"Martin Crawford has spent 15 years creating what is almost certainly the best forest garden in the temperate world . . . and the breadth of his knowledge matches the depth of his experience. I've been looking forward to this book ever since I heard he was writing it."
Patrick Whitefield, author, Permaculture in a Nutshell and The Earth Care Manual"
