A Food Forest in your Garden
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This page is about a food forest garden in an Aberdeen allotment. The core of this site is a collection of plant portraits, covering the propagation, growing, harvesting, storing, and eating of individual plants used in forest gardening.
A Food Forest in your Garden
6M ago
Finally, all the seeds I collected in 2022 have been cleaned up and put on my seed list, ready for sowing in 2023. There are all the old favourites, plus a few new things like perennial leek seed, hog peanut/earth bean (Amphicarpaea), crow garlic bulbils, broad beans, zenteika daylily and Nanking cherry – plus a ..read more
A Food Forest in your Garden
10M ago
Here is my list of forest garden courses currently arranged for 2023. Introduction to forest gardening This one day course will introduce the principles and the plants of edible forest gardening. Topics will include how a forest garden works, the forest garden year, forest garden plants, and harvesting and cooking forest garden crops. The course ..read more
A Food Forest in your Garden
11M ago
Finally, all the seeds I collected in 2022 have been cleaned up and put on my seed list, ready for sowing in 2023. There are all the old favourites, plus a few new things like perennial leek seed, hog peanut/earth bean (Amphicarpaea), crow garlic bulbils, broad beans, zenteika daylily and Nanking cherry – plus a ..read more
A Food Forest in your Garden
1y ago
I first came across saltbush (Atriplex halimus) at the Plants for a Future site down in Cornwall. I loved the salty taste of the leaves and spent many years trying to establish it in Aberdeen. Unfortunately we are on the edge of its range here and I lost a succession of plants, usually over winter ..read more
A Food Forest in your Garden
1y ago
One of the questions I am asked most often about forest gardening is which plants to start with. I find this a hard question to answer for a number of reasons. One is that the key to a forest garden is diversity, so the answer I really want to give is all of them, which ..read more
A Food Forest in your Garden
1y ago
For all those who have been asking, I have put together a programme of courses on forest gardening for 2022. I’ve tried to offer a bit more variety than the introductions that I have done in previous years – although these are still definitely in the mix. Introduction to forest gardening This one day course ..read more
A Food Forest in your Garden
1y ago
Nettle (Urtica dioica) is the Jeckyll and Hyde of the home garden. It has no neutral qualities, only excellent and abominable ones. On the negative side, they spread aggressively by seed and underground runners, and attack anyone who dares try to weed them out with hypodermic syringes full of irritants. And as the leaves mature ..read more
A Food Forest in your Garden
1y ago
With the addition of these Chinese quince seeds, that’s the list of the seeds that I have available for sowing in 2022 pretty much complete. Many forest garden seeds need stratification (winter cold). This seems to be in plentiful supply at present, but sowing of these seeds – unless it’s in the fridge – shouldn’t ..read more
A Food Forest in your Garden
1y ago
This seems like a good time of year to post about snowbell (Allium triquetrum, also known as three cornered leek), one of the most useful plants in the forest garden in winter. A strange quirk of nature means that many of the best plants for the Scottish forest garden in the depths of winter come ..read more
A Food Forest in your Garden
1y ago
Silverweed has a long history as a cultivated crop. It was sufficiently important, in the landscape-scale agro-ecology of the pre-colonial Pacific North West, that access to good patches was controlled by law. Closer to home, Alexander Carmichael says in the notes to the Carmina Gadelica that silverweed root (brisgean) was much used in the Gàidhealtachd before ..read more