My Forest Gardening Journey

I just wanted to share my new journey into the community of forest gardeners. I was lucky enough to get some funding from Surrey Wildlife Trust for a forest gardening course with the Orchard Project.

The course was brilliant and really engaging, and, having just finished, I am raring to go and practice what I’ve learnt.

Forest gardening is for me a bringing together of so many types of growing that I’ve dipped into over the years: permaculture; cottage gardening; companion gardening; no-dig; organic; community etc, and it really felt the absolute best course I could have chosen.

The concept is simple - look at any healthy, natural woodland setting and you’ll see a symbiosis of plants all living in harmony eg: tree canopies allowing light in the early spring for bluebells and garlic to flower, then providing shade and an underground network of roots and fungi to keep the soil alive and moist. Shrubs and bushes and herbaceous plants in the understorey all playing a part in their ecosystem, and climbers using the trees for support and providing habitat for insects and birds.

These groups of plants - tree, shrub, climber, ground cover are called guilds, and if you get the combination right, they become self-sustaining and mutually beneficial.

A great example would be an apple tree that needs lots of nutrients to produce fruit. So you’d plant a comfrey plant under it, which brings nitrogen and potassium with its long tap roots and feeds them to the tree. The comfrey also comes into flower and attracts the pollinators to the tree to enable the fruit to set. All the pea family are nitrogen fixers, so you could add a perennial sweet pea to climb up the tree and feed it, as well as providing nectar.

Once you’ve filled your garden with guilds of perennial plants that either provide food or medicine or dye or flowers, you have beauty and a productive low maintenance food forest for years ahead.

At the moment we’re planting what we already have plenty of - herbs, comfrey, currants for example, but we’re excited to start putting in some lesser seen perennials such as perennial kales and broccolis, dye plants and perennial roots such as skirret, ginger and liquorice.

The hope is to show what can be done on a low budget to garden sustainably and organically for climate change resilient foods.

The best quote from my course was “nothing is a mistake, everything is an experiment” which is a fantastic life mantra and makes me feel very differently about being adventurous and having a go.