This year's ag project at our house is creating a forest garden, a/k/a permaculture, but I think forest gardening is much more poetic.

Thus far, we've planted apple (2), plum (2), apricot (1), peach (1), and cherry (1) trees, 8 grapevines (3 varieties -- purple = Fredonia and Venus, white = niagara), and laid out two herb beds, one with rosemary, lemon thyme, tarragon, 2 kinds of oregano, and one with a bay laurel bush and some echinacea plants. We've also got rhubarb and asparagus, and have scoped out some wild blackberries to keep an eye on, if they turn out to be disease free, we'lre going to transplant a few.

We've got a collection of other plants in containers, waiting for the return of warm weather to get their beds laid out -- wintergreen, purple hyacinth bean, scarlet runner beans, catnip, stevia, lovage, plus of course lots of tomatoes.

A friend sent me a pile of "vine peach" seeds, so we're planting them too. I have lots of those seeds, so if anybody would like some, send me a self-addressed stamped envelope and I will send you a dozen (our address is 1524 NW 21st, OKC, OK 73106. It's a relative of the cantelope, and was described to me as very hardy and extremely prolific, smells totally like peaches, but not as sweet. Can be made into a "mock apple pie" filling, or "vine peach sauce" or "vine peach butter", it's taste seems to improve with added sugar.

Our property's open space is shaped like a backwards C, with frontage along two streets. The beds we are making that front onto the street are basically shapped like irregular triangles, nestled together with paths between them, each one outlined with "rustic lumber" (that is to say, wood from our wood pile, which means we didn't have to buy landscaping timbers, and in any event, what kind of a forest garden would we have without some rotting wood on the ground?

We're planning a "Shady Salad" bed, with perennials like fat hen, good king henry, water dropwort, winter purslane, chickweed, lambs quarters, and salad burnet, and a "Sunny Salad" garden with some various kinds of lettuces, borage, marjoram, winter savory.

So give us a couple of months, and then if anybody happens to be in the neighborhood, please feel free to stop by and nibble on our lawn (our goal is no more bermuda grass!!!!).

Robert Waldrop, OKC Better Times Webzine + Energy Conservation News and Resources

PS. For fans of the original Y2k printable flyers, they have been re-written to "de-y2k-topic" them so that they are useful for any generalized disaster situation, plus new printable flyers have been written to meet current everyday needs. They remain at the original printable flyers address of Printable Flyers

-- Anonymous, March 27, 2001

Answers

Response to Making a forest garden

The garden sounds great! I hope you get as much enjoyment out of watching growas you do setting it up. Of course, I am sure you will!

btw, I wonder if you made sure that the lumber you used was not pressure treated. Seems that some of the pressure treated would has undesirable chemicals in it. Just thought I'd mention that.

enjoy!

-- Anonymous, March 27, 2001

Response to Making a forest garden

Don't know where you are, Robert, but I have "spice trees", that grow under the canopy of larger trees, in the spring they scent the air like baking apple pies! I also have enchenea, and seeds, I'd gladly send to you, I have shag bark hickory nuts, and black walnuts growing in the 10 acres of our portions of the woods......and may apples, that are said to be eadible. all these can thrive in shade or diffused light. your "garden" sounds lovely!

-- Anonymous, March 27, 2001

Robert, that's an impressive amount of work for one year. Still waiting for my columnar apple trees I planted 5 or 6 years ago to blossom, let alone produce any fruit. Meantime they serve their landscape purpose of framing the gate, and I am relieved to see that this winter's monster storms don't seem to have hurt them.

Is your lawn one that you can walk over? I tend to wonder about the ability to weed large areas like that without squashing the plants you wanted to keep. I'm assuming there's some weeding involved, at least in getting it established.

-- Anonymous, March 27, 2001

Barefoot,

The wood we are using to frame our beds is not treated, it's chunks of firewood. It does a good job and looks attractive. We did buy some lumber to make the trellis that we have installed down the entire west side of our house, but we got plain untreated. I was looking at the pressure treated lumber, but after reading the label, there was no way I was letting my nice grapevines, not to mention the grapes themselves, get anywhere close to it.

-- Anonymous, March 27, 2001

SAR01,

We're in Oklahoma City, zone 7, and I'm really interested in your "spice trees". What kind of spices? I don't think we have room for the black walnut, I'm not familiar with the shag bark hickory or the may apples. Are these trees or bushes? We have one large mature pecan tree. One of these days we hope to have as much as ten acres! In the meantime, we're trying to do the best we can with what we have, so that when we get more land, we'll know what to do with it, hehehe.

-- Anonymous, March 27, 2001

Brooks, all the edible plants are/will be in beds, our design plan is to replace all of the bermuda grass lawn with a patchwork of trees, beds with perennials and annuals, and mulched pathways. Although a lot of what we are planting some people would classify as weeds, so they're probably pretty hardy plants. Still, since they're going into salads. . .

We've also got some seeds coming for the Siberian Pea Tree (which is actually a shrub, but it can grow pretty big). The seeds are edible, and described as "like lentils". Not sure where'll to put them, but we'll eventually figure it out.

-- Anonymous, March 27, 2001

Robert, I don't know the botanical name of the spice trees, I f I come across it, will forward it to you. they only grow about 4-6 feet high, and the top fans out, and they scent up my whole 10 acres, if you drive by in the spring, you smell the spices, and the russion Olive tree when it is in full bloom.

-- Anonymous, March 27, 2001

When I was a kid, my Dad's work took us to one of the Utah cities for the summer, either Ogden or Logan (I think the latter). The main thing I remember about our particular neighborhood was that just about everybody had fruit trees in their backyard, huge crops of apricots, plums, cherries, etc.

-- Anonymous, March 27, 2001

Sar01,

These spice trees/bushes sound great. Were the seeds you mentioned of those trees? I'd sure like to try them. Russian olives grow well in this area, so maybe the spice trees will too.

-- Anonymous, March 28, 2001