HOW IT STARTED
The Beginnings of Our Food Forest
I grew up in South Florida surrounded by plants. My paternal grandparents basically had a jungle around their house. They were avid plant collectors, from rare cycads and palms to all sorts of flowering plants and orchids. But there were also the fruit trees.
My childhood memories are full of fresh coconuts, mangos in such excess that my grandma would dehydrate them, guavas that she would turn into jellies, fresh mamey sapote, and oranges that she would peel in a spiral then cut in half so my brother and I could each enjoy the freshest, juiciest fruit on the planet.
My maternal grandparents’ property, on the other hand, wasn’t a jungle straight out of the tropics; still, it was a beautiful yard just as you would imagine in old Florida. It may not have a been a thick jungle, but it was just as magical. There were sea grapes, mulberries, and grapefruits, and other introduced tropical trees like starfruit and calamondin.
Even at home, a smaller property than either of my grandparents, my parents grew avocados, tangerines, mamey, and sugar apples (sweetsop).
A canopy view of my paternal grandparents’ jungle
Mulberries from my maternal grandparents’ tree
The view from my paternal grandparents’ front porch
Looking out from my paternal grandparents’ greenhouse
A zebra butterfly on a native flower, Bidens alba
Another jungle canopy view
When Tyler and I moved in together at the beginning of 2019, we started planting ornamentals and fruit trees right away. But it wasn’t until 2020 that we, like many people during the pandemic, decided to start growing more food. I will admit, it wasn’t the bountiful harvest we were hoping for that first year. We planted a bit too late; I think it was May by the time we put tomato seedlings in a raised bed we built. They had a lot of leaves, but not that much fruit. We didn’t have a lot of compost so we depended on fertilizers. On top of that, the summer heat seemed a lot worse when you watched it beat down on your plants and un-mulched soil. Once the tomato plants were done, we didn’t garden much the rest of the year. We were a little disheartened by our crushed expectations. Luckily, we kept reading, watching, and learning.
Benji by our first raised bed (May 2020)
Side yard before many plantings (Jan 2020)
Lychee tree (April 2020)
Tyler by our first mango tree (May 2019)
After some recommendations by a coworker at my job as an engineer, we started to watch Charles Dowding on YouTube. That led us down a rabbit hole of information. We learned about no-dig gardening and keeping the soil intact to preserve the life there. We realized we probably should not have ripped out the tomato plants when they were done, but rather clipped them at the base. We started learning about mycelium, the fungal network, beneficial bacteria, composting; about how compost feeds soil life which in turn feeds the plants; and about biodiversity, nitrogen-fixers, and the importance of mulching.
Starting to fill in the side yard with native flowers, and some food-producing plants and trees (June 2021)
We learned how critical it is to grow a variety of native plants to support the multitude of pollinators that help give us food. Native plants also feed other animals and birds, either directly or by supporting stable populations of various species to serve as food for larger creatures up the food chain. A migrating bird may stop in your backyard for a snack and rest before it continues on its long journey, helping the conservation of that bird species. Native plants in home settings can be the life raft for the many species native to a region, especially in this age of over-development and suburban sprawl.
Tyler and I feel like we have only scratched the surface on topics like agroforestry, permaculture, regenerative agriculture, and hydrology. We still have much to learn, but we finally started to feel like we were understanding concepts that we could immediately apply to our food forest. The results are already starting to show.
A bunch of native plants we purchased from Green Isle Gardens (Aug 2021)
Many of these concepts seemed so obvious once I learned them. My grandma would always compost and talk about placing food scraps or coffee grounds around trees. Their micro-jungle was a perfect example of a circular system, with things growing and dying, and then falling back into the earth to act as a natural mulch or be broken down by insects and fungus for nutrients again. It’s like humans only applied the most simplified concepts to industrial agriculture, and did away with all the diverse and complicated systems that are actually what makes nature just work.
Newly inspired, 2021 brought us more knowledge, more plants, and larger harvests. Our house is on a less than 0.2 acre lot, but we have managed to plant over 20 trees and over a hundred other species of native flowers, ornamentals, and vegetable crops. That may seem like a lot, but our yard is still hardly full. You start to realize how much you can actually fit into a pretty small area, and all you have to do is start planting.
Coconut seedling transplanted from my paternal grandparents’ yard (Sep 2020)
Necklace pod and coontie palm, two plants native to Florida (Nov 2020)
A harvest of carrots, bok choy, green beans, tomatoes, radish, and black turtle beans (May 2021)
Katuk and papaya tree plantings (Nov 2020)
A couple of papayas harvested from the same tree above, just over a year later (Mar 2022)
Our food forest has mango, avocado, mulberry, lychee, pigeon pea, canistel, elderberry, moringa, tangerine, lime, papaya, black sapote, and sweetsop. We have native strawberries, native peppergrass, dragon fruit, passionfruit, turmeric, ginger, longevity spinach, and katuk. We’ve planted native milkweeds for the monarch butterflies, chapman’s sensitive plant (senna mexicana var. chapmanii), viburnum obovatum, coreopsis, tropical sage (salvia coccinea), muhly grass, sunshine mimosa, spiderwort, and other native flowers; because of this, we’ve seen an increase in the variety of bees, including native burrowing bees, visiting our yard. We have native cabbage palm and laurel oak, both loved by a variety of birds. Using hugulkultur and no-dig techniques in raised garden beds, we have been growing tomatoes, peppers, kales, carrots, radishes, garlic chives, parsley, dill, basil, eggplant, watermelon, and more.
Asclepias perennis, a native milkweed (Mar 2022)
From lawn to paradise (Mar 2022)
First fruit on native wild strawberry, Fragaria virginiana (April 2022)
Implementing some hugulkultur techniques in a raised bed (Nov 2021)
A colorful and diverse harvest (April 2022)
Lepidium virginicum, or pepper grass, an edible plant native to Florida (Aug 2021)
Dried turmeric powder (Feb 2021)
Because we have greatly increased the diversity of plants in our yard, we have brought life and balance to what was almost entirely grassy lawn before. We have ladybugs, parasitic wasps, and predatory stinkbugs, just to name a few. We have lizards and black racer snakes. We have blue jays, mocking birds, woodpeckers, hawks, vultures, wood storks, ducks, ibises, and herons in our neighborhood. Having many healthy plants as well as a variety of insects and predators means we have a more complex food system and few to none pest issues. Any pests that do show up in the garden end up being food for some other insect, or the plant gets composted if it was at the end of its life cycle anyway. Worst case, we simply hose them off with water or pick them off by hand.
A species of carpenter bee native to Florida (April 2021)
An eastern black racer, a non-venomous snake native to Florida (Mar 2022)
A monarch caterpillar feasting on native milkweed (April 2022)
We are only at the beginning of our agricultural journey. I started collecting data on inputs to our garden, as well as outputs and amounts harvested; we are learning what thrives in our growing zone as well as our specific microclimate; we are planning and designing for optimizing the food production from our property; and we are thinking about the ways we can diversify our harvests, from egg-laying hens to mushroom logs. We plan to add rainwater collection and distribution systems, as well as renewable energy from solar and wind. Beyond, into the only slightly more distant future, our plan is to scale up to a several-acre property with all of the knowledge we have acquired here.
Our dream is to grow delicious food, benefit the planet, and share our process and everything we’ve learned with everyone. We imagine a future where agriculture is a decentralized network of small organic farms using permaculture and regenerative techniques, and providing produce locally. We’re just one part of the already growing movement.
Written by Heather Martin, 05/12/22
Photos by Heather Martin