Not your typical garden, they can help us reimagine how we produce food in a warming world.
I am writing today from my apartment in New York City, on a windy winter’s day. Not a leaf is green on our roof garden. There is no canopy. Only skyscrapers.
It’s a far cry from the garden that Ana Gaspar Aguerri and her husband, Ian Macaulay, showed me in the tropical rainforest of Costa Rica a few weeks ago.
Theirs is a garden that imitates the architecture of a natural forest, one that they say produces all the food they want to eat. There are towering breadfruit trees, ginger as tall as me, sweet potato vines, spinach, taro under the ground. All perennial plants.
I visited Gaspar and Macaulay in late December. It was pouring rain that morning. I snaked uphill on an unpaved winding road in a rental. My teenager was with me, singing Janelle Monáe at the top of her lungs (again). We sat for a while in Gaspar’s kitchen, drinking tea and waiting for the rain to subside. Finally, when it did, I borrowed rain boots from Gaspar and we went walking. The ground was muddy. Heat rose from the wet earth. Howler monkeys leaped through the trees. A toucan had left a half-eaten papaya under a tree. Gaspar didn’t mind. There was enough for humans and wildlife.
Fine, I thought. A food forest in a rainforest. Fascinating. But niche.
Only when I got back home and started poking around did I realize that food forests aren’t niche at all. They’ve been around forever, mainly in the tropics, though enterprising gardeners have created food forests in very different habitats across the United States, from vacant city lots in Philadelphia, public parks in Seattle and Asheville, to schoolyards in South Florida.
The reason I want to tell you about food forests is that they can be useful in reimagining how we grow food in a warming world.
That’s one of my goals for Climate Forward this year. To help us reimagine how to do things. With or without toucans.
A food forest is neither wilderness nor an orchard.
“A food forest is what it sounds like — a forest you can eat,” said Cara Rockwell, a Florida International University professor who studies food forests.
It stems from the multilayered, multispecies gardens that have existed for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years, in the tropics, she said. Often, they served as kitchen gardens. Women tended to them.
Like a wild forest, they have trees both short and tall, shrubs and vines, ground cover and fungi. They can have animals, too. Even cattle can graze among fruit trees. The idea is to build healthy soils, create shade, allow beneficial insects to thrive. The idea is not to produce the highest yields possible of one crop, which is the goal of modern industrial farming. Nor are they exactly backyard or neighborhood gardens, with rows of annual crops and flowers. They have several layers, from underground tubers to vines to shrubs to short and tall trees. All play different roles. All, or most, are perennials.
There are many food forests today in the United States, including on public land. I haven’t found anyone who tracks their numbers, though researchers told me that it’s become ever more popular in the last 15 years.
Can it feed us?
That depends.
Gaspar insists that it’s possible to produce enough food for two people on 2,000 square meters, or about half an acre, at least in their part of the world where crops grow year-round. She and Macaulay teach their techniques — based on the principles of permaculture (short for permanent agriculture, which relies on perennial crops) — on their farm, called Finca Tierra. If you go, be prepared to stay in bamboo cabins open on two sides. (They provide mosquito nets over the beds.)
Gaspar, who is Costa Rican, ditched her career as a human rights lawyer to work on Finca Tierra. Macaulay, an American, grew up in Ohio and trained to be an urban planner. Growing food is only part of their goal. Gaspar says the farm eased the pressures of making money to buy food. It freed up more of her time. “It’s about creating a sustainable lifestyle,” she said.
Food forests can meet other goals.
Elaine Fiore has a different mission. She has helped to create 24 food forests on school grounds in Broward County in South Florida. They give children a place to sit still, she said, and learn about how things grow. “I’ll pull a leaf off a plant and I’ll eat it,” she said, “and they think it’s crazy!”
She is planting soursop, jackfruit, cranberry hibiscus, mint. It’s her second year doing it, so the trees are still young. Kids sometimes do yoga in the food forest. They learn about microclimates. They decorate the grounds with toy dinosaurs. At one school, they learned how much iguanas love young sweet potato vines. The reptiles decimated a third of their garden, Fiore said.
Eventually, she said, she hopes the fruits of the food forests can be used in the school cafeterias. In the long run, that can persuade kids to eat a more varied, more nutritious diet, she hopes.
Food forests are no walk in the park.
They don’t need a lot of land, but they need that land for a long time, long enough for trees to grow and mature. They also need to be weeded and mulched — a lot, especially in the beginning — and then, trees need to be pruned to keep fruits within reach. They need caretakers. And managers to figure out who gets to harvest, how to staff, whether paid or not.
Nature can impose its own limits. Jose Ramirez, a Los Angeles-based artist and gardener, has devoted his yard to fruit trees — mango, avocado, fig — with some perennials in the understory, like nettles. But it’s Los Angeles. The earth is dry. There’s not enough water to mimic a forest of the tropics.
There are many models. Seattle’s Beacon Food Forest is open to public picking. The Urban Food Forest at Browns Mill is owned and managed by the city of Atlanta. The Philadelphia Orchard Project works with community groups to manage each orchard. (Some are designed as food forests, while others contain only fruit trees.)
They can be hardy.
Rockwell, the professor who studies food forests, says they are especially well-suited to a climate-changed era, including in Miami, where she lives, where early summer can be scorching hot and dry.
In her own yard, she has 10 edible species in a six-square-foot patch. There’s taro in the ground, longevity spinach close to the ground, passion fruit vines that climb up a trellis, shrubs of mint and chaya. She allows herself one annual crop: collard greens. A mulberry tree filters the sun. On the edge of the yard is a star fruit and a dwarf mango. Both provide shade. Compared to a row of annuals, a food forest like hers can withstand higher temperatures and longer dry spells. “For providing protection from heat, it’s really a no-brainer,” she said.
Food forests can include nonnative species, she said. But they should steer clear of invasive species that can displace native plants. Consult your state or local environmental agency for a list of invasive species.
Want to learn more?
Catherine Bukowski produced this guide in 2019: “The Community Food Forest Handbook: How to Plan, Organize, and Nurture Edible Gathering Places”
Cara Rockwell published tips for South Florida.
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Minnesota’s lakes: The administration also said it would set a 20-year moratorium on mining upstream from the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.
Sacred land: Indigenous groups are fighting a copper project in Arizona that companies say is crucial for producing batteries and reducing the use of fossil fuels.
Rats and recycling: New York’s mayor said the city would expand composting programs and improve trash collection. The plan is supposed to get rid of rats, too.
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From outside The Times
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Before you go: The Sierra Club tries to move forward
The Sierra Club, the largest environmental group in the United States, was convulsed by the 2020 murder of George Floyd and forced to confront painful questions about its mission and history, including whether its founder, John Muir, was biased against people of color. Now, after three years of turmoil, the organization has appointed Ben Jealous, a civil rights activist and nonprofit leader, to be its executive director
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Manuela Andreoni, Claire O’Neill and Douglas Alteen contributed to Climate Forward. Read past editions of the newsletter here.
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