Food Forest Tour in Australia
Jane tours an established food forest where nearly everything you see is good enough to eat.
Deep in the Yarra Valley about an hour Northeast of Melbourne, Jane visits a garden filled with over 300 plants from around the world. This dense one-acre food forest is purposed as an edible and medicinal forest. It is also a wedding venue and home to the initiator of the project, Louise Ward, who lives here with her husband. Louise says they are “mimicking the normal forest as a food system...things that you would find when you go into a forest. Some things you can eat and some things you can't, but they all have their purpose within the forest. That's what the edible forest is all about.”
Louise came across the idea while researching permaculture and saw the term edible forest. “I thought wow that would be amazing... it'll be like the garden of Eden. People can walk in and taste. I can just see it in front of me,” she says. The site began as a clear open paddock on clay soil, so to improve the soil she and her husband brought in manure of all kinds. Now, everywhere you look is covered in plants along structured pathways and the result is that “there's a lot of produce,” says Louise, “We’re always having to think what we do with it. Because we’ve got the business here, we use it in the menus as well.”
Horticulturalist Jamie Sweetman has looked after these plants for nearly four years and takes tour groups around the garden. Jamie says, “we've got about 330 plants in here and about 200 are edible. The other hundred just fit into the system, so they will be attracting beneficial bugs or nitrogen-fixing. Everything has to have an excuse to be in here.” Large areas of the garden are protected by a netted structure which keeps out deer, rabbits and cockatoos, while still allowing the smaller creatures in. Jamie says, “the little birds can come in, so we've got blue wrens in here... they come in and out of the fence line as they please. The bees and the dragon flies, all the good stuff.”
Some of the plants harvested for medicinal purposes include rosehips and elderberry which can be made into syrups. Peruvian gooseberries can be eaten fresh, but a favourite this time of year is the chokeberry. Jamie says despite the name, “no, you won't choke but they're quite astringent. In saying that they have more antioxidants in them than blueberries. Easier to grow, they make a great hedge, easy to harvest and all ripen at the same time... they are in the rose family, you can kind of tell by the leaf shape.”
A common method of repurposing green waste is to chop-and-drop. Jamie explains “you'll cut something down and drop it on the ground so that the nutrients can go back into the ground.” The version they’re using in the edible forest is a wire structure shaped into a cylinder in which the green waste is piled up. Jamie says, “we will pull that up soon, throw some mulch over the top, leave it for a while and it’s building soil on site.” They also have a wetland area where everything is edible, including the Australian native water fern, nardoo, and a range of other nitrogen fixing plants such as the Persian silk tree. Jamie explains that nitrogen-fixing plants “have nodules on their roots that turn nitrogen into forms that other plants find accessible, so they’re self-fertilising our garden for us.”
Amongst all these plants with purpose, Louise does have a special favourite, the gotu kola. Louise says, “it’s a medicinal one, so it's not the most beautiful looking one... it’s very very happy over here and it’s a great little groundcover, too.” Louise says, “gardening is one of the best things I've ever discovered. It's just wonderful. Getting your hands dirty is just one of the most wonderful things in the world. It's really good for you mentally. It's everything.”
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