CHENNAI: Who is the best gardener according to you? For me, it is mother nature. She seems to produce and maintain these amazing bio-diverse self-sustaining habitats around the world — forests! No one ever fertilises a forest, no one ever removes weeds — no one even waters a forest — but it all just seems to work, and they provide food and shelter to a vast majority of species.
What if we could build our own self-sustaining forests by applying similar principles, and nudge these forests to grow food for us? One of the key principles we learn from observing forests is that we need bio-diversity to build self-sustainable systems, which are resilient and need minimal external intervention. So, we need to plant a lot of different types of plants.
You need to choose plants similarly and make sure space is utilised vertically and horizontally by having different categories of plants which have different heights on maturity, planted densely together. This allows maximum capture of solar energy and formation of intricate relationships between plants which will help make the tiny ecosystem self-sufficient. For example, while tall trees can draw their nutrients from the soil, their fallen leaves will form a mulch layer for the herbs and vegetables with shallow roots, and gradually decompose to provide nutrients to them.
Of course, since you are looking at building a forest which will provide food, you need to choose a lot of fruit plants, perennial vegetables, edible herbs and medicinal plants. They should be diverse, have different heights, and ideally be species which are known to thrive well locally. Prepare the land with enough organic matter while setting up the forest, instead of waiting for nature to take its course. For this, you need to do soil amendments based on what the soil lacks, cover it with straw mulch and ensure you water your saplings regularly for the first 1-2 years, till they become strong.
Once your forest is established, you can depend on seasonal rain to do the work. The second shortcut you need to take is to plant trees which can rapidly create biomass that gets constantly added back to the soil — this means, you need to include some fast-growing trees like Sesbania, whose branches can be pruned by “chopping and dropping” to the ground every few months. Planting such trees and following the chop-and-drop process, will accelerate the addition of biomass, and aid in forest formation faster. Your forests also have a thriving insect life, which aids the ecosystem.
So don’t use chemicals — even if you see some insect damage, be patient and wait for sometime for the whole ecosystem to set up. While you can build food forest in your garden, another variation of food forests, are community food forests, which neighbourhoods or apartment complexes can build, in larger land. The author is CEO, Farmizen, a platform connecting organic and natural farmers to consumers with same-day delivery.