In an effort to prevent myself from ignoring the forest garden again this year and letting it turn into a weed jungle, I'm making a lot of changes.

The first step is to incentivize working in the forest garden during the growing season.  To that end (and because our tomatoes did so well there last year), I'm making lots of new beds to plant tomatoes and butternut squash into.  You can see part of this year's tomato alley at the top of the page.

I built the new beds by simply wheelbarrowing partially rotted compost out of the chicken pasture and topping it off with straw.  There are very few perennial weeds in the areas I chose because the waterlogged soil is so terrible nothing can survive unless I raise the plants' roots up out of the wet.  I figure that making these extremely simple kill mulches now will ensure that most weeds have died by May, but I can always come back through and add cardboard beneath the straw if anything starts to poke up through.  (As you can see, I did add cardboard in select areas where perennial weeds were evident.)

Since they're in the forest garden, the new beds serve double duty.  This year, they'll be part of the vegetable garden, but each one is attached to a tree mound, and as the tree grows, more and more of the bed's growing area will be mulched with leaves instead of straw and given over to tree roots.  A modified version of this expanding tree mound technique has served me well in the forest garden island.

My original plan involved building keyhole beds surrounding the fruit trees, but I've ditched that goal as I learned more about my own gardening style.  Yes, keyhole beds seem to make a lot of sense as a way of expanding a circular tree mound, but they're tough to maintain if you have to mow the aisles.  Instead, I'm making all of my new beds linear and leaving plenty of room for the mower to fit in between.  I'll probably fill in aisles as the trees overshadow them, ending up with solid raised beds in the seldom-trampled areas under trees.

In case this post makes the forest garden project sound well thought out, let me hasten to add that I was really just playing around in the sun Friday, making it up as I went along.  By the end of the summer, I'll know if my seat-of-my-pants changes made sense or not.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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