Here at Thistle Doo we are all about food forests. Within our three acres we have a large food forest that was first established in 2022. All of the plants and trees we sell are particulary suitable to be planted as part of a food forest. So what is a food forest?
Well. Imagine a forest or a woodland. A natural woodland. Depending on where you are in the world your forest will be different but I am imagining a temperate woodland in the UK. It contains different trees such as oak and ash, alder and hazel. There is the occasional crab apple tree, maybe a wild plum. There are bushes and nettles and vines like ivy climbing up from the floor to the canopy. This forest is a self-sustaining system. It exists within the wider world of course and everything is connected to everything else but for the moment we can see this forest as a system within itself. And brilliantly, it doesn't need any maintenance. Nobody has to water the forest. Nobody has to fertilise it. No one has to go into the forest every now and again and clear out the rubbish. The rubbish (or dead matter) is composted into soil which feeds the forest. The alder and other plants take nitrogen from the air and feed the forest. There is enough rain to water the forest and even when there is a drought, most of the forest plants are perennial so they have long established roots that tap into the water table far below the surface. The forest requires no intervention from humans. It will just keep on being a forest for hundreds if not thousands of years.
From our human perspective however, it doesn't produce much food. There might be decent nuts on those hazel trees but crab apples aren't very tasty and the wild plums are tiny. We might be lucky and get some wild garlic and mushrooms of course, if we know what we are looking for. So what would happen if we were to take the forest as a model for our system and then replace the elements either with ones that are especially edible to humans or ones that support the edible species? Let's switch the crab apples for our favourite types of juicy apples, pears and cherries. Let's replace the wild plum with a cultivated variety of plum. The wild garlic can stay but we can plant redcurrants, blackcurrants and gooseberries that like the shade of the forest and yet give us plenty of fruit to stir into our porridge. Perennial Kale give us brassica flavours and so many nutrients all year round. For the vines we can have kiwi and grapes. We can also add nitrogen-fixers to our forest to keep it fertile: alder grow really quickly at Thistle Doo and we use them to chop-and-drop to create soil around our fruit trees. We also grow fast-growing elder as a chop-and-drop and there is comfrey everywhere. Comfrey has long roots that bring up nutrients from far below and store them in their dark-green leaves. We use these leaves to make compost and comfrey tea which is environmentally regenerative tomato food.
And still this food forest doesn't need fertilising or clearing out. We might water new plants in the early stages but eventually this system will be completey self-sufficient and will stand for hundreds of years, producing delicious food for generations. This is the beauty of a food-forest. There are thousands of different plants that would work well in a food forest. Here at Thistle Doo we are growing as many as we can for the time being.