Food Forest

I got alerted to this project by Carl Pickens, while in the final weeks leading up New Zealand's first Food Forest Hui (Sep 26-28). More information on the Hui.

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Have you ever wondered how many plants you might need for a food forest? Well take a look at this, and you’ll get a good feeling for the numbers.

Andy Cambeis is spending some time on Waiheke and we got together on the weekend to go over the wording of his “Manual for creating a Food Forest on Public Land“. We did this because of a couple of bright young women – a publisher and a graphic designer – who are working to turn this into an app for iPhone and iPad, and which I hope we’ll get a preview of at the Food Forest Hui at the end of September.

While I was there Andy kindly allowed me to shoot this video which shows the volume of plants he is raising in a window sill in the house where he’s staying. While he has a few more canopy trees than would be included in a 700SqM ‘pod’, and there are no climbers represented, this is the essence of the plants needed for a temperate food forest pod.

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Three well attended talks to appreciative audiences in Taranaki and Manawatu, resulted in a lead on a hidden 20 year old food forest in the Central Plateau.

Public talks

It was a short lead time, but this didn’t seem to matter, in these days of being able to share information rapidly through the networks. Kama Burwell, a very competent and active permaculturalist working at the Hive Taranaki Environment Centre, spread the word and drew in 40+ people on a chilly Monday night, aided by an interview on Access Radio Taranaki that morning.

One of the highlights for me was meeting Ché Rogers and seeing the tagged Facebook photos of his forest garden, taken with his daughter in the pictures for a sense of scale. He let me download them andadd some graphic tags of my own.

The following night 30 people came out in Marton, from the efforts of Lorraine Bartlett who invited us to meet in the Marton Arts Centre. It was a particularly warm and generous welcome, and the talk was followed by an abundant pot luck meal, which kept the conversations going for some time until we had to leave to head over to Fielding.

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From a simple impulse to connect a few people in a conversation, and share some stories of progress in the food forest space in Aotearoa (New Zealand), this webinar idea gained traction rather faster than I expected.

The inaugural Food Forest webinar – from Aotearoa

When I made a post on Facebook page to say there were 35 people signed up for the Webinar, it was at about 7 days to go. To date, there have been 75 people, from all up and down the country who have signed up. Not bad for two weeks lead time.

Even John Valenzuela registered to attend. John is the horticulturist, consultant and educator from Marin County California, best known for his work with rare fruit, home gardening, trees, traditional agriculture, plant propagation, and ethnobotany – I’m hoping we can get him back to present one day. By the time it arrived I had sent notifications to 70 people.

On the day, 43 attendees logged in and saw and heard the presentations from Finn MacKesy, Jon Foote and myself (or parts of them). There were some technical issues, for example some people couldn’t get in if they arrived late. I found out that I had overlooked the limit of attendees for the subscription level I had paid for (more on that later). My apologies. But overall it went quite well - as you'll see from the recording.

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