By Mindy McIntosh-Shetter
Gardening and renting has created a dichotomy of those who have verses those who have not.
But recent human ingenuity has stepped in to create an even garden path for urban dwellers that rent or just do not have the land or space to garden traditionally. The new gardening path is permaculture.
This by definition is an agricultural system that incorporates trees, shrub, and perennials along with animals in a self-sustaining ecosystem that produces crops and other products. The bases of this concept is to create a more natural gardening habitat that is polyculture in nature not monoculture and mimics a forest. This type of gardening is referred to as forest gardening.
The first step to this process is to understand the structure of a forest. A forest ecosystem is divided into seven layers. These layers are canopy, low tree layer, shrub layer, herbaceous, rhizosphere, soil surface, and vertical layer. One may ask at this point what does this have to do with urban gardening. The simple answer is this ecosystem can be mimicked in a simple container that can produce a wide-range of fruits, nuts, flowers, herbs, and vegetables just to name a few.
So how does one design a forest garden in a container? The first step is to decide what you want to grow and where those plants fit into the seven layers. But keep in mind each layer must be covered with a plant. Skipping layers will disturb the natural flow of this ecosystem and its microclimates and biological interrelationships that are so important in this type of planting. To understand where plants fit into the seven layers a brief description is provided below.
*Note the smaller the number the smaller the plant needs to be.
1. Canopy-These include large fruit or nut trees. They provide shade for all other plants and a vertical growing surface for another layer. 2. Low Tree Layer-This layer consists of dwarf fruit trees. 3. Shrub Layer-This layer includes berries such as blueberries, currants, and huckleberry along with shrub type herbs such as rosemary, sage, and lavender. 4. Herbaceous-This layer includes herbs, tea plants, green leafy vegetables such as lettuce, kale, and spinach along with mints. 5. Rhizosphere-This layer consists of root crops such as carrots, beets, and radishes along with garlic, onions, and shallots. But avoid potatoes and yams because harvesting these tubers will destroy the soil too much. 6. Soil Surface-This layer consists of low growing plants such as strawberries and pumpkins 7. Vertical layer-This layer consists of vining vegetables such as cucumbers, gourds, beans, and peas.
To create the forest garden merely plan your container garden according to the layers described above. Then consider the container that will need to be at least the size of a bushel basket. While this large container may sound extreme it is required to accommodate all the plants in the forest garden and will prove to be worth the effort. This form of gardening maximizes your space while creating visual interest. It also cuts down on maintenance time because it uses time-tested biological processes.
Forest gardening will not stop world hunger but instead adds another tool to the gardener’s planting bench. So renters unite and try a forest garden. While forest gardening in a container is not true permaculture since no animals are involved it is a start for the renter and a movement toward greening up the food desert.
So until we blog again garden high, garden low, garden everywhere we go. Monoculture out, polyculture in as Mother Nature smiles with a big, fat grin. So renters, urbanites, and farmers alike join hands because together we can save ourselves from the food blight and save our land with a little effort from every hand.
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