Fruit

Along the front of our property, from the front walk to the northern boundary is a ribbon of growth which I liked to refer to as “The Hedgerow”, all very European! I called it this because the space was long and thin and I wanted some diversity of plant species in there, but didn’t know quite how to design it. I have since come across the concept of the food forest and it has sunken into my thick head that the food forest model can work in long and narrow intensive as well as larger, 3 dimensional and extensive. The mature trees are already in place (more about that later) as well of some of the smaller tree stuff so the main design work will be on the understory(s). Hence the new name! The area is long and narrow (longitudinal) and the understory needs to go in to complete the food forest area so there you have it – LUFFA!

I originally made the bed that would become the LUFFA by getting some vertical 200mm sections of pine logs joined with wire to form raised bed borders. I used the garden watering hose to lay out the shape that I wanted, it was easier to move than the border materials. Once I had the shape, I laid out the border, using tent pegs to ensure it stayed upright, then dug out any grass underneath where the bed would be. I ordered some organic garden mix from a local supplier and used that to build up the bed, and finally mulched the bed with wood chips. Some stuff, like the large trees have been there for many years, but now it was time to design the LUFFA as a whole.

When designing a food forest it is generally accepted that here are seven levels (some people add a water plant and fungi level to make nine, but I am sticking with the more traditional seven). These seven levels are described below -

1. Large trees (or Canopy) – They are generally full size fruit, nut or timber trees that will take a while to grow and may get as high as 10 metres plus.
2. Small trees – dwarf fruit trees, generally and mainly citrus due to the resistance to fruit fly attack and their hardy growth, although others such as dwarf fig, nectarine and elderberry are also possibilities as well as coffee and/or tea bushes. They are usually less than 4 metres tall.
3. Shrubs – These are lower than the fruit trees and include currants and berries such as raspberry, loganberry or black berry (thornless) as well as some of the larger herbs such as rosemary, wormwood, lavender and citronella.
4. Herbaceous – these plants are smaller again and include perennial vegetables such as rhubarb, globe artichoke, perennial silver been and asparagus. Other herbaceous plants include comfrey and borage to bring deep nutrients to the surface and for medicinal and compost-making purposes. Herbs which would fit into this layer include yarrow, lemon balm and calendula and perennial leeks and garlic chives round the selection out as being edible pest repellents.
5. Root crops - Perennial root crops such as Jerusalem artichokes and yacon produce their yield below ground although the spreading habit of Jerusalem artichokes would require them to be contained, perhaps by growing in a large buried pot or sink. Arrowroot also fits into this category. Annual root crops such as beets, carrot or parsnip can be grown in clearings which allow enough sun in.
6. Groundcovers – these act as a living mulch as well as providing a yield. Plants in this category include strawberries, sweet potato, warrigal greens and nasturtium. Edible weeds including fat hen, dandelion, amaranth, mallow, sow thistle, purslane, fat hen or chickweed may become volunteer species and should be encouraged if not sown/planted outright.
7. Climbers – these would be trained to climb the large trees already in place and could include scarlet runner beans (also called 7 year beans because they reshoot from their root for a number of years after planting), choko, passionfruit or kiwifruit although kiwifruit require both male and female plants to produce fruit.

Seeing as the area had pre-existing plants, the first part of the planning process was to write down what plants I had in each level, in this case it added up to the following –

Large trees – 3 x melaleuca Alternifolia tea trees (the type they distil tea tree oil from) and one bay tree (Lauris Nobilis)
Small trees – 1 decent sized Feijoa and one small (almost shrubby) coffee tree.
Shrubs – 1 rose bush
Herbaceous Plants – 1 pig face and some mint (came from a cutting someone gave me, I have no idea which mint it is!)
Root crops – Nil
Ground covers – Nil
Climbers – 1 thornless blackberry

Some of the area just south of the bay tree is also taken up by sweet potato tendrils which spill over from the banana circle next to it. I suppose it is somewhat of a toss-up whether the sweet potato is classed as a root crop of climber seeing as it can function as both! Since it is not planted in the LUFFA area itself I chose to ignore it.

The Map

The next trick was to draw up a map so I could locate everything and see what space I had to work with. Yes, I am sure that there are computer programs out there that would simplify things but being a card carrying Luddite, I did it the old fashioned way. The process is simplified if you pick yourself up an A4 (or even A3 if you can find it) graph book (mine call itself a “grid” book for some unknown reason). A good grid size is 5mm, or about 1/4“ in imperial.

I then measured up the length of the area I was going to work with and used a ruler to see how well it fitted onto the A4 grid. The area was almost 16 metres long, and using the ruler I found that 16 centimetres only came half way up the page, which would give a scale of two grids (or 10mm) per metre. To give me the biggest drawing on the A4 page to work with I multiplied things by 1.5 so that the scale became 3 grids (15mm) per metre and the drawing would still have room on the top end for a title etc.

Using my wonderful partner in sustainability to hold the tape measure, I was able to measure the length along the LUFFA for each of the plants already in place, I had to pick one end as the datum and chose the south end for no particular reason. I drew a line as long as the LUFFA on the scale pad and then marked off where each of the existing plants was located. By measuring the width of the LUFFA at each of the points where there was a plant and transferring those points to the scale map, I could join the dots up on each side and approximate the size and shape of the bed to scale.

Unfortunately, when I laid out the bed originally I got a bit arty and instead of a straight sided bed, which would be easy to draw but boring, I put in a whole stack of curves. This made things a little more interesting when I tried to transfer the shape of the bed to the scale drawing, a nice regular shape would have been much easier.

I now had the shape of the bed on one side of the sheet and I could draw in where each of the plants were and some idea of the area they covered, then label them. I also wanted to retain a “clean” outline of the bed which I could use to mark in where I wanted to put the new stuff. After much thought, I figured it was easiest to photocopy the sheet, then slip the photocopied shape under the original sheet to the right of the drawing and use it like tracing paper. I just traced around the outline of the photocopied shape with a pencil, giving me two outlines on the one sheet, side by side.

I then marked in the existing plants on the left hand drawing. Up to this point, apart from the original measuring, the work had all been done outside so it was time to do a reality check. I took the drawing out to see if it matched what was really out there and, low and behold, I had stuffed up some measurements and a couple of the plants were actually closer together than I had drawn them. This brought home the importance of a reality check at some stage, and the good sense in using pencil rather than something more permanent!

The Plan

To be able to plan what to put in to make the LUFFA more productive I needed to get a feeling for which plants would make sense to put in for each section, I had to do some research. The product of that research, available here, a list of productive plants for each of the niches I was looking to fill. There were lots of plants I wanted to put in the LUFFA but when it all came down to it I could only fit in a few. So once I had extracted a list from my research, I had to prioritise them, based on how useful they would be to me, how much space they would take up and how well they would do in the protected, but partially shady environment of the LUFFA.

Taking into account all of that, I decided on the following –

1. Large trees – nil
2. Small trees – lemon myrtle (pruned to keep it small)
3. Shrubs – Nil
4. Herbaceous – calendula, comfrey,
5. Ground covers – strawberries, miner’s lettuce
6. Roots – bunching onions, garlic
7. Climbers – sweet potato; basella (Malabar spinach) hops

The only thing left was then to complete the plan by drawing in the new plants and where they would go on the, as yet, clean outline of the bed on the right hand side of the plan. With the plan completed all I have to do now is implement it. Stay tuned!