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Posts from Forest Garden Wales Blog for 04/22/2019
By [email protected] (Jake Rayson) on Apr 19, 2019 02:49 pm
A dead hedge, made from posts and scrubby branches, is an ideal temporary windbreak and wildlife habitat.
I’ve just found out about the benefits of a dead hedge from Janie who came on the forest garden workshop. It’s a hedge made from cut branches and foliage, so an ideal way of using up hedge cuttings.
They are also nice and easy to make—you bang some home-made posts in the ground (6-8cm posts are easy to hammer in, smaller ones flex too much) and pile up the branches inbetween the posts.
We planted a Yushania anceps ‘Pitt White’ bamboo in the Ornamental Forest Garden but it’s been battered a bit by winds, as the windbreak hedges have yet to get established, and the Broom nurse trees aren’t in place yet. So a dead hedge is an ideal solution.
A top tip is to build the dead hedge near to where you are cutting the branches. Unfortunately I had wood chipped the brash from the hedge last week, so I had to drag up a few piles of branches a couple of hundred yards.
The dead hedge will take a while to decompose, as the branches aren’t touching the ground. It provides ideal shelter for insects, small birds and small mammals, plus you can top the hedge with more cuttings when it starts to reduce in bulk.
By [email protected] (Jake Rayson) on Apr 19, 2019 02:42 pm
A forest garden works with nature to grow edible crops, which is why it’s good for climate change. Here are the reasons why.
Climate change is caused by living in an unsustainable way. Forest gardens by definition are a sustainable and sustaining form of gardening.
A forest garden is self-sustaining because, once it’s established, it doesn’t require any extra inputs. This means fewer demands on the world’s resources.
As a forest garden is a balanced ecosystem, it provides its own pest control and its own fertility.
There is a diversity of species, for the health of garden and also for a more interesting diet. You don’t want to eat the same thing over and again!
A forest garden provides habitat for wildlife. Cut ‘n’ drop mulching, composting in place, leaving brash on the ground or in dead hedges; all of these provide habitat.
Permanent living ground cover, in the form of ground cover plants, means soil is undisturbed and soil life can get established. This includes mycorrhizal fungi network, which helps move nutrients between plants.
Trees and soil life capture carbon. A mature tree captures around 20kg a year and there are about 20 full sized trees and a hundred or so smaller trees and shrubs in our forest garden.
Because of the interconnected plants, a forest garden absorbs and retains more water, which means less run-off, which helps prevent flooding.
By design, a forest garden is low-maintenance, so people are more likely to stick with gardening, ideally meaning more forest gardens, meaning more sustatinable environments.
If people are in the forest garden growing their own produce, it means they consume less from elsewhere.
Involvement in any garden, particularly a forest or wildlife garden, increases an awareness of the essential nature of nature. We are part of nature, by definition we can’t live without it.
A forest garden is a resilient garden, providing shelter from extremes of wind and sun, providing a harvest from one source if another harvest fails.
