Food Forest Update

Now in Rainy Season, we’re experiencing some prolific growth. Here’s a shot of our one year old  food forest. Try to imagine, 2 years ago this land was completely bare. Now it’s turned completely green, full of shrubs, trees, undergrowth, vines – it really is turning into a proper forest!

In this photo of one section of our food forest you can see amla (fruit with the highest Vitamin C content in the world), cha-om (a perrenial vegetable that tastes like turkey and smells like farts), papaya (paw-paw), Parkia speciosa (a leguminous tree whose seeds are put in curries), lemongrass, galangal (ingredient of famous Thai curry tom kha), mulberry, starfruit and cotton. Hard to see, but there, is a beautiful pomegranate doing surprisingly well. Growing in between and underneath there is laab laab bean, peanut, pumpkin and sweet potato. Also, behind the shrubs, there is flowering passionfruit, soon to bear fruit.

In this photo, you can see amla, cha-om, papaya, tamarind, banana and cotton growing in our food forest. Nice to see a lot of native trees coming up wild and doing extremely well. Local people have told us that many of these have potent medicinal qualities. For instance with one tree, just right of the center of this photo, if a mother is not producing enough breast milk, she can chew on the bark of the tree and the milk will come. We are excited about what surprises this forest will hold!

Also, just to put into perspective how much everything has grown, that bar of wood across the photo is 2 meters high! That means those trees over the wooden bar grew over 2 meters tall in just 1 year!

The wooden bar was the framework of a shadehouse we built to protect our young food forest from the heat of the dry season. However, we had to remove the shadecloth after less than a year, as the trees started to grow through the roof!

After just one year, this once barren land is now teeming with life and food, thanks to the forces of Nature and a bit of Permaculture!

http://permapai.wordpress.com/2012/08/23/food-forest-update/