Here’s a video of my 1 acre Permaculture food forest a few months after our first planting.
It is my hope that I can keep sharing these cool little fly-over videos with you as my food forest develops, add ponds, irrigation, and more plantings; so that you can get ideas to bring up with a designer yourself, or in attempts to do your own permaculture design work.
What You Could Learn From This Food Forest
Six months ago I set the goal for myself to learn how to grow all my own food to feed my personal and extended family indefinitely if I ever had to, without outside resources like chicken food, compost, fertilizers seeds etc.
I wanted to learn how to grow food as if my life depended on it, because who knows, maybe one day it will.
I had heard that growing all your own food was MUCH harder then you would think, and wanted to develop those skills in case our nations future doesn’t turn out to be as rosy as most others seem to think it’ll be.
Now I don’t know what your background is, but if you’ve ever achieved anything significant in your life you know that there is ALWAYS a steep learning curve.
It’s always MUCH harder to achieve wonderful things than you ever thought it would be, and you make an incredible amount of mistakes along the way.
First Hand Experience Is The Best Teacher
Knowing this presented a problem for me… because to grow a fruit tree takes 3-5 years. And if I had a goal of feeding my family by growing my own food like fruit from trees, I really didn’t want to have to wait 3-5 years to learn all the lessons I needed to learn, especially in attempting to grow my own food for a Shit Hit The Fan (SHTF) type of scenario where my life might count on it.
That is why I hired a professional permaculture designer to help me lay out a permaculture design to avoid as many fatal flaws as possible (and it turns out there are many).
From the first time I met my designer and watched her look at my property, I realized I would have been truly hosed if I’d attempted to plant a permaculture food forest on my own.
My designer could look at what I thought were just weeds and tell that a lot of water flowed through right there, or that soil was poor in areas and rich in others. She could tell what species of trees and what types of root stalks would thrive and which ones would not.
She taught me more things then I can go into in this post, and even went ahead and did things on my property without explaining why; knowing that after a few months I would understand and appreciate her design.
And boy oh boy do I.
I would go so far as to say that if you have NO experience, and you have some extra money like I did I think you would shave YEARS off of your learning curve. Food forests aren’t something that just work without having a lot of planning done on spacing requirements and plants that support each other, and I would have surely had to start over in many areas, or worse I probably would have just quite as waiting another 5 years to see if I did it right on my second try just wouldn’t have been worth it.
Quick Newbie Tip For Hiring A Permaculture Designer
Try to find someone who has operated a permaculture farm in YOUR climate, as a newbie I didn’t realize how important this was. And preferably someone from your area who is familiar with lots of different plants that do well, or that do poorly in your area. They’ll save you time trying to grow something that doesn’t grow well.