Transform urban environments, gardens, suburbs, schools and streets into productive, natural landscapes.

Question: How can the world feed its people without relying on endless inputs of petro-chemical fertizers and pesticides in a resource efficient and nature friendly way?

Answer: With extensive horticulture/ food forage systems modelled on nature itself, step forward the Forest Garden.

A one-day practical and informative presentation and seminar run by Steve Jones and Sector39.

' Inspirational, insightful, challenging and hugely informative.'

Sector39 are based at Ty Cornel, Llanrhaeadr Ym Mochnant, Powys, SY10 0JW. To discuss your booking call Steve on Tel: 01971 780180 (Mob) 0771 981 8959

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Dates of up and coming courses

• At RISC Reading, September 24th, £45 inc lunch

An Introduction to Forest Gardening and Edible landscaping

This day covers the basic principles required to start your own food forest and involves a mix of theoretical study, slides and video as well as some practical design and planting work. It covers the principles of ecology and how to develop genuinely sustainable landscapes.

More broadly, we will also be looking at strategies to reclaim and green our urban and sub urban landscapes'

Why Forest Gardens?

The hard part of gardening or farming is establishing vulnerable young plants where pests, weeds, drought or deluge at the establishment phase can mean disaster to young crops. Thought, care, planning and nurturing are required when establishing an edible landscape, however once established a perennial forest garden becomes increasingly robust, self regulating and able to generate most of the nutrients required whilst its biodiversity makes it resilient to pest attack.
(click on images below for a Hi-Res version suitable for printing)

Edible perennial landscaping is an application of the principles of permaculture design, which are themselves modelled from observations of natural systems. Agriculture by contrast is centred on annual plants, namely grasses like wheat and rice and requires a return to bare earth each season. Once established perennial gardens yield for decades or even centuries and tree crops regularly outperform annuals in terms of productivity whilst requiring significantly less inputs and management. Sure, annuals have their place in the grand scheme of things but the massive potential of perennials is regularly overlooked in our agribusiness led, modern farming practices.

Strawberry Tree and Black Bamboo, on the RISC Rooftop forest garden

The 'Green Revolution' post war productivity surge in agriculture massively boosted world food production, enabling huge monocultures to be developed, protected by heavy use of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. Although at first yields increased 3 or 4 fold, even more, they then started to decline.

Image by Sector39, Click to download print quality version

Soil and biodiversity have suffered long term impairment, water tables have been significantly lowered by irrigation and numerous other problems have resulted from this industrialisation of food production. The greatest challenge of all though, is that our food production systems are now addicted to cheap oil and petro-chemicals and even a quick glance at a primary school geography text book will remind you that oil is a finite resource. As global oil production reaches its peak and starts its inevitable decline it is time to revaluate the fundamental assumptions behind our farming systems.

See a short Video of the RISC Roof Garden (By Mill Green Solutions)

See info sheet, see a recent blog post

More about Forest Gardens and Edible Landscpaes

The RISC rooftop forest garden

A forest garden, or food forest is an application of the principles of ecology and permaculture design to create a very low maintentance yet productive growing system. A low input, high output system, it is kind of the holy grail in gardening and a key building block for developing much more sustainable and nature friendly food production systems.

They can work on any scale, in any climate in just about every environment, it is all about working with the principles of nature and seeing the patterns and applying them to one's own particular setting.

Leading pioneers in the this field include Robert Hart, of Wenlock Shropshire, who inspired by what he had seen in Kerala South India developed the first temperate forest garden in his half acre back garden. Since then the mantle has been taken up by MArtic Crawford, and his Agro Forest Research Trust, Plants for a Future as well as many other. The RISC Garden is a stunning example of the application of these principle sin the most unlikely of settings.

The course is suitable for anyone interested in growing food in a low maintenance easily managed forest system. On a larger scale food forests and edible landscapes offer us perhaps the most productive and robust system of food growing available and will form a key part of our sustainable future. Find out how easy it is to begin your own on this lively and informative one day course

The Sector39 permaculture design partnership grew out of work with RISC in Reading developing the roof-top forest garden and related education work. The garden was developed using permaculture design principles and has maturedinto a stunning example of what is possible using these techniques.

Since this project Sector39 have worked with the Cwm Harry Land Trust to develop an urban community garden on a light industrial estate in Newtown, Powys as well as Treflach Farm, Shropshire where we are developing regular courses in Permaculture Design.

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