The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Forest garden experiment

Experimental bedsI've been reading Harvey Ussery's permaculture articles in both Mother Earth News and Backyard Poultry Magazine with glee, and this article about creating a forest garden really caught my fancy.  I detest wasted space, and about half of our growing space right now feels wasted to me --- it's open, weedy areas between young fruit trees.

I've planted vegetables and berries between the trees in one half of the young orchard, but the other half has soil so terrible that I figure by the time I get it enriched enough to grow anything worthwhile, the trees will have closed in over my beds.  The area is also chock full of Japanese Honeysuckle and wild blackberries, making it difficult to grow anything.

Sunday afternoon I got a bee in my bonnet and decided to experiment in that awful soil area.  I'm trying three different methods (which you can see above.)  Read about the three beds....



Anna Hess's books
Want more in-depth information? Browse through our books.

Or explore more posts by date or by subject.

About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



Want to be notified when new comments are posted on this page? Click on the RSS button after you add a comment to subscribe to the comment feed, or simply check the box beside "email replies to me" while writing your comment.






profile counter myspace



Powered by Branchable Wiki Hosting.

Required disclosures:

As an Amazon Associate, I earn a few pennies every time you buy something using one of my affiliate links. Don't worry, though --- I only recommend products I thoroughly stand behind!

Also, this site has Google ads on it. Third party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a user's prior visits to a website. Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to users based on their visit to various sites. You can opt out of personalized advertising by visiting this site.