If you google food forest, you’ll read that a food forest is meant to mimic nature. But what type of nature? Nature where?

We have a food forest! Kindof! maybe! Yet what a forest looks like is dependent on the context — wind, water, pots of gold— we find ourselves in. I’ve previously written about growing fruit trees in Cape Town but I wanted to write specifically about the concept of a food forest, and what that might look like in areas without summer rainfall.

When I was first introduced to permaculture, it was the prospect of integrated growing, and the aesthetics and functionality of a food forest that excited me the most. This is where permaculture is potentially visionary: We can create a space that provides beauty, food for people, habitat and food for animals, medicine, and biomass.

But sometimes permaculture can be weaker on the details, because the details are so context-dependent. I think this is good! In our context, we have to build a ton of knowledge that is our own, hard-won insight. It must be a lived practice rather than a theoretical system, and it is ever-evolving.

Many of the mature food forests I’ve encountered are in places with much more rainfall, and much less wind, than our environment. They are places that might naturally have forests.

In places where there wouldn’t naturally be forest, the questions are a little different: Could it be sustainable to have a forest in our area under human cultivation? How? What are the implications of this, and how could it be so?

What are you actually seeing when you see a food forest, and how can you interpret, enjoy, and learn from what you’re seeing? If you’re creating a planting at a school in the Cape flats, what is the goal, and how might it be possible to create something that will exist for a long time? Productivity over decades is so much more sustainable than quick bursts of productivity followed by disaster and recovery.

Naturally occuring forests in Cape Town

Forests do occur naturally in the Cape. If we look up at our mountains (Newlands forest, Skeleton Gorge) if we look at the milkwoods on our coasts, and at riparian strips along rivers with wild olive, Cape ash, keurboom, waterberry, rooiels, yellowwood, wild almond.

There are also many places where a forest can occur, comprised of very invasive species like port jackson, who are able to fix nitrogen and survive in very dry contexts. In fact, our property was well on its way to becoming a forest of port jackson when we moved here.

To have a productive food forest in this area generally requires intervention.

There are also large areas of Cape Town, including most of the Cape Flats, that would naturally be strandveld: Wind-pruned, low, thicket. In these contexts, maybe mimicking lower, denser, self-sheltering food “thickets” is a better analogue than a food forest.

The forest contexts tend to be fire refuges, often sheltered from wind, with subsurface water of some kind. So when we try to create a food forest, we’re actually trying to mimic the conditions of these places: shelter, moisture, some wind protection.

Borrowing from the structure of forests

• Layering

• succession

• Soil cover

• root partitioning at different depths (i.e. different plant layers draw from different depths)

• nutrient cycling

• Self-shading

These processes are perhaps the most powerful learning tools when you’re thinking about your own space. You’re basically constantly making trade-offs: if you add shade you can reduce watering requirements, but you also potential increase root competition and reduce yield.

Mimicking nature is not the same as neglect or lack of design

When I planted our first pomegranate on our property, I had this idea that mimicking nature meant choosing hardy fruiting species and then letting them figure it out. “Figuring it out” mainly meant dying.

Fruit trees are generally cultivated species. Some require less work than others, but you have to pay attention to their needs and carefully consider how to meet them with the constraints of your space, time and money.

The goal of having a food forest

It’s too easy to be vague about goals. But having a clear ranking of your priorities will help a lot in deciding on your design.

• Calories per square metre. A food forest is generally poor at this. An irrigated annual bed does a lot better. That’s why our farm has both— we max out a lot of our attention and irrigation in higher-yield annual plantings, and then consider our food forest in terms of some of the other goals that follow. That said, you should pay some attention to harvestable yield, otherwise it’s no longer a food forest. It’s easy to enjoy the fact that you have fruit trees and not pay sufficient attention to the fact that you’re not actually eating much fruit.

• Low input once established. I think of our food forest as a type of retirement plan, and have a ten year plan that integrates and connects many of our annual beds into the food forest. But to get fruit trees started, even with the benefits of shelter and water, requires attention, compost, and care.

• Shade and cooling. Creating shade and cooling in an urban space is a meaningful goal. I love being able to walk in parts of our food forest where we actually have a canopy established. Even 11 years in, much of our food forest is still not at that height, but the abundance of plants does create significant shade and cooling.

• Soil building and infiltration. Turning a hard, hydrophobic surface into a sponge. In some areas, this is a huge benefit!!!

• Habitat and biodiversity. A food forest creates shelter and habitat for wild animals and birds, and the more diversity in your planting, the more diverse your ecology.

• Beauty, place and somewhere to walk with your kids. One of the biggest differences between an orchard and a food forest is the experience of walking through it, observing and enjoying.

• Demonstration and teaching. Over the years, we’ve grappled with the fact that most people can’t actually recognise fruit trees, and just see an overgrown mess. While we haven’t fundamentally changed the structure, imagining who will walk through, and what their experience might be, helps to broaden the benefits beyond your immediate circle.

• Fire resilience. An irrigated, high-moisture, deciduous planting on the urban edge is less flammable than fynbos or gum, and can function as a green break.

The Seven-layer diagram

For the most part, this diagram tends to assume rainfall that coincides with the growing season, and would require a tremendous amount of water in our context. Dry-climate traditions look really different! Olive/fig/vine/almond widely spaced with open ground; Spanish dehesa; North African oasis agroforestry date palm over citrus over vegetables, which is stacked, but only because there's a spring under it.

But it is useful in the sense that it suggests that we can stack layers in areas where we have water (e.g. around greywater systems), and then spread food-producing trees where we don’t.

More on water

Because we don’t have summer rainfall, we face the choice to either build our systems to accommodate this or find ways to mobilise huge amounts of water in the summer.

Figs, olives, pomegranate, almond, grape, carob, mulberry, deciduous stone and pome fruit are less water hungry than subtropical, large leafed species like banana, mango, avocado, etc.

One mature fruit tree in peak summer conditions requires hundreds of litres of water over the course of the summer. If you multiply that by the number of fruit trees you have or want, it can be a bit terrifying. Rainwater tank capacity simply cannot cover both vegetables and fruit trees adequately. Rainwater from the winter is more of a supplement.

But there are things that you can do!

1. work on the water storage within your landscape:
   through deep mulch, shade, swales, and creating good soil over time. It’s cheap, it lasts a long time, and a single rain event can create massive amounts of storage.

2. Grow or build proper windbreaks. Wind removes more water than heat does. Plant windbreaks before you plant food-bearing trees. A windbreak is the highest-leverage intervention in most places.

3. Greywater! Greywater is year-round, and can create oases that transform the surrounding landscape. Our bananas are all grown on runoff or greywater areas, and it allows us to grow some high-water needs trees.

Human management, nature, and the limits of these

When we see videos of food forests, we are seeing a snapshot of one successful process, and it’s very difficult to extrapolate all the information that we need. We’re sometimes watching twenty years of someone’s life in ten minutes!!!

A food forest isn’t ultimately less work than an orchard, it’s just different. This actually makes it more difficult because it requires a lot of judgement and is very hard to delegate. It requires long-term, institutional or organisational memory. If you are starting a food forest in a space where there will be staff turnover, creating systems for memory, training and human succession are as important as the food forest itself.

In urban spaces, one of our biggest resources is organic urban waste. Tapping into this is a primary way to add fertility and water-holding capacity, and accelerate the progress of your food forest. While now, eleven years in, we could survive as a closed-loop system, this was not how we built our system, and it would have been extremely difficult to build without the inputs of urban waste we received.

It’s impossible to manage your way out of water deficit or wind exposure, so these are the most important things to look at head on before you start, as in many projects these are budgetary issues, as wind protection and water systems can be a matter of money.

Animals in a food forest

This is already getting really long, so I’ll save this section for another day!

Land tenure

A food forest takes a long time to establish, and on municipal or rented land, the question of who plants versus who eats is vital.

What we’d do differently next time!

• Start with many more indigenous and windbreak trees. We didn’t immediately get rid of our port jackson, which think was probably a good thing, but I wish I’d paid more attention to indigenous trees and bushes like camphor, coastal oak, milkwood, karee, cape saffron, keurboom, pelargoniums, wild rosemary, as well as lavenders, rosemary, hardy shrubs and bushes. These are the plants and trees that have actually changed our landscape into a softer, more habitable environment.

• Start all our fruit trees around our greywater system, radiating outwards.

• Figure out water before we planted trees!

I’d love to hear about your food forest efforts, and how you’re thinking about priorities in your space. I hope this newsletter can be one you look back on as a resource.

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