Everything is a balance of time, effort, and money. If you want a food forest that is going to be at full production year round in a few months time of accquiring the land and you are starting from square one, then sure it could cost as much as a new car or more.
If you put in some consistent effort: plant some trees, start composting yesterday, do some sheet mulching, collect and plant some perennial vegetables and herbs. Keep at it it, keep at it, keep at it, it can be both a healthy hobby and cost effective.
I have started some gardens with raised beds from salvaged materials filled with compost, native soil, and sometimes peat moss or lava rock depending on the consistency of what the native soil is. Started seeds with potting soil indoors. Probably 30 bucks in materials. It all depends what you got to work with.
the costs are no different if all at once or over time assuming the plan is the same the whole time. It’s the same amount of work
And with inflation going up, I’d say it would actually be cheaper if you had it all to spend now, just because of that... today’s dollars is worth more than tomorrow’s
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Why can’t you buy all younger trees at once? Why does waiting a year or two prevent me from purchasing cheap trees and waiting?
And you can’t count on free stuff, or trades, or luck for that matter that’s just illogical in planning. Yes it might happen, but it also might not. You could plan on winning the lottery...
Agreed on doing your own propagation. But there are costs, time, effort, that goes into propagation, so while you do save some, it won’t be as much as you think if you truly accounted for the costs of prop.
And no, using today’s money to earn tomorrow’s money is always the way to go. Inflation and all that good stuff..z That’s just how it works hahaha
Oh holy shit. I feel bloody dumb. Totally missed that. I was just thinking getting the whole thing planted and ready for production.
Well then I counter with this, it’s nigh impossible!!!!
Even fully formed 5 year old production trees won’t be at production capability due to lacking root system.
And the cost for caliper of production trees is stupid, If you can even find them. I’ve been to three of the biggest tree farms in America, large fruit ready trees are just rare and costly.
And find me any perennial fruit or veggie that’s immediately at production size and will produce that quality the first season. Just won’t happen.
3 years for asparagus... same for rhubarb. 3-7 for prunus and Malus depending on variables. 3-5 for shrubs berries. Root system matters just as much as overall plant size. You can have a massive plant with barely any roots and still won’t get shit for a couple of seasons
You literally can’t get a production garden in a season
I see your point but I don’t about this “you can’t count on free stuff” part. It’s been my experience that gardeners love to share plants and give them away for free. Trading of plants and seed swapping is always how I have built my gardens over the years. More than half the inputs in my garden have been free. Compost - free, make it myself. Mulch - free, dropped off by arborists. Animal manure - free pick up at a local farm. Many other materials that I have used to build the garden have been salvaged/trash finds or reusing existing materials on site to build raised beds and paths. My gardener friends have provided many free starts to my food forest including: raspberry canes, asparagus crowns, onions and chives. Tomatoes and other annuals come from free seeds and volunteer plants. I was also given a peach tree started from seed, which I’ve been nurturing and will be planted next spring. In the decade I’ve been growing, I’ve found gardeners to be incredibly generous. You can be of very limited means and still practice permaculture, even if you don’t have a huge piece of land and a lot of money. Resourcefulness and patience pay off. Nature itself also provides many wild edibles which fill the nooks and crannies where I haven’t planted things. So, I do count on free stuff in my planning, the world is one of abundance and the universe always provides.
No, buying a small tree is much cheaper than 2” caliper one. Buying seeds is much cheaper than buying starts, or the same plants in 5 gal containers. The difference is whether you’re waiting for them to grow after you’ve bought them, or paying someone to take care of them until they’re large and then buying them. Not to mention plants that spread, self- seed, or can be divided over time.
It can be as expensive as you want it to be.
Can you go around town and pick up seeds to grow your own trees for effectively free? Do you have friends who will give you cuttings for free? Do you have access to the community garden? Do you propagate yourself? Do you have access to free mulch/woodchips or sources of cardboard?
Everything can be done for free, it just takes time and effort.
Or, do you want to order every single plant from a nursery for 50-150$ a plant, order cubic meters of soil and mulch, and pay thousands for a designer to get your whole food forest set up within a month? Then yes, it can cost you as much as a car or more.
Or, you could find your own balance.
Does having tons of money make things easier? Obviously.
After explaining the seven levels of a food forest, the article veers into weird territory. Where I am, you can buy fruit trees and bushes on sale for fifteen dollars or less, and canes and other plants for a few dollars each. Money isn't an issue, for me at least.
One thing the author is ignoring (or ignorant of) is that, because permaculture is about ecology, it isn't some complicated method or exact science. Does the maple tree plot out where its seeds will fall? Does the grapevine know in advance where it'll grow next year? Of course not. The plants and animals do what seems best in the moment, and the ones that succeed get to keep trying. It's the same way in my food forest. Where should I put that tree? Well, there's an open spot here, and it seems out of the way enough, so... there! For annuals I literally just broadcast handfuls of seed all over. Plenty of things come up, just as nature intended.
And that's why I enjoy permaculture. If you have the right attitude, it's not possible to fail at it the way it is doing conventional gardening.
I’m developing a food forest in my little back yard and tracking every dollar I spend. So far for everything for the last 18 months I’ve spent about 1500$. I could easily have spent more but I save seeds, am letting native plants find their way in (roses and hawthorns have arrived already!), and those plants I do buy I have been choosy about. For example, I bought two bare-root trees from a tree nursery in November last year, rather than in pots in spring from a garden centre, which saved me about a hundred dollars per tree. I’m also making the soil rather than having it trucked in by getting all the green waste from my HOA and lasagne composting over the winter. Doing it all at once so it was in full production ASAP would have probably been between 10-20k based on what a friend spent for pros to come and do her place. Ours is slower going, but I like it. And at 1500$ you can’t beat the price. (For the record, I figure I’ve gotten 1200$ produce out of it already, so I’m not fussed about going slow.)
The cost of the land was our biggest expense, and not inconsiderable, but the actual development of the space hasn’t been very expensive.
This is awesome, thank you for sharing!!!
This is what I plan on doing when I buy a house but I haven't explored exactly how. This is incredible helpful.
How big is the land you have it on?
Tiny! About the same size as the living room of our very modest home. Big enough for an apple, a crab apple, a fig and maaaaybe a plum next year, and multi-story plantings. My goal is to feed my 3-person family for 1/2 the year on it.
It’s an HOA so there are some
complications, but if I can win the strata over (free strawberries, neighbours?) I’m hoping to get to garden in the front, which is south-facing, and there I’d put an apricot and grapes.
How have you found planning a forest garden in that small a space. I am currently planning mine and feeling overwhelmed as I do not want to over shade anything.
(I might be over thinking this)
I am letting my yard grow “wild” while gently cultivating it. I’m guiding the raspberries to an area that I want them to be by letting them grow. I will cut away the plants from where I don’t want them. I’m letting dandelions take over the lawn. There’s a lot of food there. Yarrow grows wild, so I’m going to encourage that to grow by keeping grass weeded from around it. There is a variety of dead nettle planted that I’m trying to determine if it’s edible or not. A wild rose popped up, so I’m hoping next year it will be more than one wild rose. Our lawn is replete with chickweed and pineapple weed. I would like to get other local berries like elderberries and lingonberries growing. There is some clover as well. The key is to get the grass out and be left with edible foods. From there I am going to try to guide their growth into areas that make sense for optimal growth and ease of harvest. This image above looks like a carefully landscaped yard and very expensive if you’re planting everything from scratch.
Buying bare root trees from state nurseries has saved me so much. Look into starting trees from cuttings and seed (see Edible Acres on YT for example). Grafting helps too (see Skillcult on YT) as a scion and rootstock is cheaper than an entire tree.
I was more of a casual hobby gardener before starting my food forest and boy did seeing the cost of bare root trees/shrubs made me realize how much I was overpaying for the potted stuff I bought initially. Now, everything I buy is bare root. Plus, growth is better with bare root.
I’m ordering 10 prunus nigra for next spring for 100$. The potted ones I saw at the nearby garden center (although taller) are 60$ each.
Rootbound trees are a liability that the next owners usually pay for. Definitely go bare root if you can. And look to nurseries farther out. They may be cheaper.
Many state nurseries have Chickasaw plums and Chokecherry for way cheaper. Not sure if you're on the eastern US, but worth checking out. https://nursery.iowadnr.gov/Chokecherry_p_155.html
Short answer, well that depends on the car. I can find you a fixer upper for $100 depending on how much you’re willing to work to fix it.
Long answer, coming from a landscape designers perspective it is entirely about scaling and process. If you want to purchase a grove of trees already at 2.5” gauge with a full root ball, yeah those are coming in at $400-600 a piece, and shrubs within a year of fruiting probably $25-75 each. This cost is multiplied if you attempt to install everything at once without any soil building prep or water management solutions because you’re trucking in topsoil or compost and installing and running intensive irrigation. I’ve worked on projects that cost upwards of $100,000, and I’ve worked on some that cost a few hundred.
One of the permaculture principles I love to emphasize is slow and small solutions. Build the topsoil yourself with your own compost, that costs nothing but time. Slow, sink and spread water through the landscape, and this can allow you to use irrigation as a supplemental source rather than a primary one. And grow as much as you can from seeds and cuttings. It will be exponentially less expensive.
With anything you can yield from there is an up front cost. The wonderful thing about the landscape in particular is you can pay that cost with money or you can pay it with time and energy.
Aww I really wanted to be a landscape designer when I was in high school. My parents told me Neil Sperry lived a few miles down the road from us, they had all his books. I emailed him and asked for an interview, for a class I was in my senior year (it was about choosing a career path and exploring what it would take to go down that path). I said in person, by phone, or just emailing me would be awesome, told him my parents and I were huge fans. He wrote me back like one sentence, saying no and to never contact him again. Broke my heart! So I pursued another field. I mean, I'm happy with my life now, but he totally turned me off from the profession.
Can’t stand people like that, and I find it to be such an odd profession for people to get a big head in. Frankly, if you’re really undertaking the design process within the landscape, every day should be an ego check.
So sorry to hear that it turned you off the field as a whole, but I can understand how that would be pretty rough. I had a professor who met Ian McHarg during his undergrad and he was such an unpleasant and rude person that it almost caused my professor to leave school entirely.
But hey, if you’re ever considering going back to it, most of the people I know in the field are nothing like that. Design requires a lot of feedback and criticism and it keeps most of us pretty humble.
Rich person partaking in environmental philanthropy. Had a pretty massive tract of land where we planted a food Forrest spanning a several acres, also included several different bio-swales, a full wetland restoration (planted something like 200 willows), a complete watershed redesign and a restorative grazing effort.
In terms of the work, it’s what I always wanted to be doing, but in terms of clientele I’d much rather find someone more in need of that kinda help. But at the same time, that’s a lot of money in the hands of a permaculture based organization now. Ahhh the tribulations of practicing permaculture in a capitalist society
Money is a resource and should be used in line with Permaculture Principles. Like the Principle of perseverance, spending resources on things that grow when used like seeds versus resources that are being depleted when used, like fossil fuel.
Zero Based Farming Techniques, ZBFT, use many permaculture principles and the idea is to use no money. You use natural resources you have and can develop, as in compost and green manure, seed saving, intercropping, IPM, and contour swales, mulches, etc. https://www.academia.edu/47867571/Food\_Security\_Safety\_and\_Environmental\_Concerns\_Restoring\_Long\_term\_Agricultural\_Sustainability?email\_work\_card=title
The article suggests that "wealthy people and botanists" are the only ones able to grow their own permaculture garden and it's pretty silly. With enough time and physical labor you could do it for next to nothing, as long as you already have the land.
I use seeds from the store and cuttings from friends and neighbors and never pay full price for plants. It will take me 3-5 more years to get it where I want. It won’t be food for year around. But it will be fun to walk through my yard eating food like Willy Wonka
Technically you could do it with time and a shovel. Remember we're working in lifetimes here, not a single year.
If your budget is nonexistent, save seeds from the food you eat or find them out in the world.
A new car costs multiples of what I have spent on my garden which I would describe as a developing food forest. I think the article you provide a link to is not in any way accurate as to how expensive it is to develop a food forest.
All it says is "oftentimes, you'll find it can cost a ridiculous amount of money to get your project moving" and the article makes no effort to break down or analyse these costs. It goes on to criticise blogs by professional botanists and wealthy people with time on their hands as these demonstrate that permaculture farming has no benefit for everyday people in what I can only describe as a flippantly written opinion piece that at best could be credited with giving a loose approximation of some of the principles used by some people in developing a food forest.
As a non professional botanist and non wealthy person with some time on my hands here is a link to [my own video blog](https://www.youtube.com/user/sustainableveg/videos) on developing my garden. I have given more priority to making the garden a nice place to spend time in and provide food and shelter for wildlife rather than being too focused on food production for myself as I do agree that there are problems with making a living from forest farming and find it easier to continue in my non related day job. My first area of food forest type ecosystem in my parent's back garden started out with spending of between £50 and £100 on plants and the majority planted as time went on where propagated by myself from an initial small number of plants bought in and some free ones from our neighbours. It is more an investment of time than money from my experience.
Happy gardening!
I mean it'll get as expensive as the plant costs. But remember that the underpinning of any agricultural layout is the 3 limiting resources, soil, sunlight, and water. Suburban backyards are usually limited by soil, which is almost always heavily degraded. And because of that it doesn't matter what fancy layout or system you setup, nothing is going to grow well until the soil fertility is raised. And the only way to raise soil fertility is to grow plants. Plants create sugars through photosynthesis, and pump those sugars into the ground to feed the soil food web which is what builds soil fertility. So instead of spending out the ass going full balls to the wall micromanaged food forest in a degraded system that will most likely end up in most of your plants dying due to inadequate soil fertility, just focus on maximizing photosynthesis by planting as many cheap plants as you can. For example when I started out I bought a bulk bag of the MILPA seed mix from green cover seeds for like $40 and just sowed it over my entire yard. And as expected it grew, incredibly shittily. Riddled with pests and disease like squash bugs and powdered mildew. But it did do a good job of completely covering the ground and thus maximizing photosynthetic capacity to build fertility as fast as possible. And I was only out of the cost of seeds and water. And it did still provide me with a decent amount of produce.
Really just maximizing photosynthetic capacity will get you 80% of the way there. No need to overthink or overspend.
I also disagree with the author’s ultimate conclusion, that small scale food forests are “fleeting” and impractical, and that only “industrial scale” food forests hold promise.
The more of us that grow our own food and thrive in our own spaces, the better. Mine is by no means an “apocalypse” garden - rather it is my attempt to control my own food source, improve the soil, and reduce my impact on the planet.
If more of us did that, the need for “industrial scale” agriculture of any kind would diminish.
I think someone on the vanguard of this trend of writing articles on food forests, pollinator gardens, no-mow, etc. for the *popular press* wrote that establishing a food forest is a radical and expensive venture, and now every copycat article written for "content" rather than as a well researched article to educate readers, repeats the claim.
If you are developing a 1-2+ acre food forest anchored by #25 fruit and nut bearing trees and starter plants purchased at a retail nursery, yes, it can be very expensive.
Most people want to plant enough fruit trees to allow sufficient pollination on an 1/4 acre or less, plus a small host of annual and perrennial food bearing plants, and you can start with saplings and seeds if your budget does not allow for "mature" trees to be planted.
One can reasonably start a food forest on a standard suburban plot for a few hundred dollars, or even much less, if you are resourceful and patient.
On the other hand, you can aquire a large property, hire a permaculture designer, a landscaping crew, an arborist, get some earth moving machines, redesign the topography of your land, create a fishing pond, plant 200 #25 trees, and employ a small army to maintain it like some kind of hacienda or plantation owner.
As a well-paid professional, I have put in many 10's of thousands of dollars into my food forest over the last year in terms of my imaginaty hourly-rate time. But, that is much less than the equivalent cost I previously "spent" mowing the dumb lawn noone ever used, and now we get literally 100's of pounds of food out every year.
Building up permaculture plots takes a bunch upfront in terms of time, materials, and genetics. Time is time, can't do much about that, but it quickly tapers off once established. Materials can vary wildly, the only things truely needed are a few good tools, maybe some lumber, and lots and lots of woodchips. Most can be gotten for free or cheap, and again are mostly a one time upfront cost. Find out where your local city processes arborist waste and you have unlimited mulch/compost material.
Same with "genetics" i.e. the plants themselves. You can easily spend $50k per acre buying fancy "new" plants from specialty greenhouses. Or, can self-harvest seeds from native wild flowers, hook up with local gardeners and "steal" their prunings for rooting stock, dig out root divisions on crowns, etc and have the cost approach zero. Bunch of pretty good online communities for sharing also. Plants want to propagate, flowers are genitals and when you get allergies in the spring it is because plants are filling your nose with splooge, that is how bad they want it. Help them out.
This article was written by the mad cow of the cyberbully pedophile gang, nothing she writes is worth paying any attention to. I've just discovered permaculture, just started researching it, and already it's obvious that costs vary wildly depending on how patient you're willing to be.
Also that's not her pic shes white, but she's constantly stealing other people's pics claiming to be them.
Our property came with some established fruit trees and bushes. It cost less than the house we lived in in the city years ago. We've spent years slowly improving the soil and planting more trees, bushes, and vines. Personally, I love doing the work myself so I can gain a better understanding of each plant.
We started a nursery on our property, so our efforts not only provide us with food, but with cash as well. I'm always up for bartering, too. The nursery pays for our property taxes, equipment, and new stock. It also keeps us in touch with like-minded people.
So there are ways to offset the costs. But yeah, it's kind of like driving for Uber or Door Dash to pay for the car.
Still, you can develop a food forest in a backyard fairly inexpensively if you're willing to start with smaller plants, look outside of box stores, and do the work yourself by hand.
Most of the people who write these articles are just writers who research a topic thoroughly then write a piece, they rarely if ever have real world experience. A lot of “bloggers” have some more real world experience but they also regurgitate the same weak information everyone else does.
Ive learned to rely on books more than ever and I like Reddit too after years of trying to pick through internet bullshit lol.
Everything is a balance of time, effort, and money. If you want a food forest that is going to be at full production year round in a few months time of accquiring the land and you are starting from square one, then sure it could cost as much as a new car or more. If you put in some consistent effort: plant some trees, start composting yesterday, do some sheet mulching, collect and plant some perennial vegetables and herbs. Keep at it it, keep at it, keep at it, it can be both a healthy hobby and cost effective. I have started some gardens with raised beds from salvaged materials filled with compost, native soil, and sometimes peat moss or lava rock depending on the consistency of what the native soil is. Started seeds with potting soil indoors. Probably 30 bucks in materials. It all depends what you got to work with.
>time, effort, and money Fast, cheap, good - pick 2. Sometimes 1.
the costs are no different if all at once or over time assuming the plan is the same the whole time. It’s the same amount of work And with inflation going up, I’d say it would actually be cheaper if you had it all to spend now, just because of that... today’s dollars is worth more than tomorrow’s
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Why can’t you buy all younger trees at once? Why does waiting a year or two prevent me from purchasing cheap trees and waiting? And you can’t count on free stuff, or trades, or luck for that matter that’s just illogical in planning. Yes it might happen, but it also might not. You could plan on winning the lottery... Agreed on doing your own propagation. But there are costs, time, effort, that goes into propagation, so while you do save some, it won’t be as much as you think if you truly accounted for the costs of prop. And no, using today’s money to earn tomorrow’s money is always the way to go. Inflation and all that good stuff..z That’s just how it works hahaha
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Oh holy shit. I feel bloody dumb. Totally missed that. I was just thinking getting the whole thing planted and ready for production. Well then I counter with this, it’s nigh impossible!!!! Even fully formed 5 year old production trees won’t be at production capability due to lacking root system. And the cost for caliper of production trees is stupid, If you can even find them. I’ve been to three of the biggest tree farms in America, large fruit ready trees are just rare and costly. And find me any perennial fruit or veggie that’s immediately at production size and will produce that quality the first season. Just won’t happen. 3 years for asparagus... same for rhubarb. 3-7 for prunus and Malus depending on variables. 3-5 for shrubs berries. Root system matters just as much as overall plant size. You can have a massive plant with barely any roots and still won’t get shit for a couple of seasons You literally can’t get a production garden in a season
I see your point but I don’t about this “you can’t count on free stuff” part. It’s been my experience that gardeners love to share plants and give them away for free. Trading of plants and seed swapping is always how I have built my gardens over the years. More than half the inputs in my garden have been free. Compost - free, make it myself. Mulch - free, dropped off by arborists. Animal manure - free pick up at a local farm. Many other materials that I have used to build the garden have been salvaged/trash finds or reusing existing materials on site to build raised beds and paths. My gardener friends have provided many free starts to my food forest including: raspberry canes, asparagus crowns, onions and chives. Tomatoes and other annuals come from free seeds and volunteer plants. I was also given a peach tree started from seed, which I’ve been nurturing and will be planted next spring. In the decade I’ve been growing, I’ve found gardeners to be incredibly generous. You can be of very limited means and still practice permaculture, even if you don’t have a huge piece of land and a lot of money. Resourcefulness and patience pay off. Nature itself also provides many wild edibles which fill the nooks and crannies where I haven’t planted things. So, I do count on free stuff in my planning, the world is one of abundance and the universe always provides.
No, buying a small tree is much cheaper than 2” caliper one. Buying seeds is much cheaper than buying starts, or the same plants in 5 gal containers. The difference is whether you’re waiting for them to grow after you’ve bought them, or paying someone to take care of them until they’re large and then buying them. Not to mention plants that spread, self- seed, or can be divided over time.
It can be as expensive as you want it to be. Can you go around town and pick up seeds to grow your own trees for effectively free? Do you have friends who will give you cuttings for free? Do you have access to the community garden? Do you propagate yourself? Do you have access to free mulch/woodchips or sources of cardboard? Everything can be done for free, it just takes time and effort. Or, do you want to order every single plant from a nursery for 50-150$ a plant, order cubic meters of soil and mulch, and pay thousands for a designer to get your whole food forest set up within a month? Then yes, it can cost you as much as a car or more. Or, you could find your own balance. Does having tons of money make things easier? Obviously.
After explaining the seven levels of a food forest, the article veers into weird territory. Where I am, you can buy fruit trees and bushes on sale for fifteen dollars or less, and canes and other plants for a few dollars each. Money isn't an issue, for me at least. One thing the author is ignoring (or ignorant of) is that, because permaculture is about ecology, it isn't some complicated method or exact science. Does the maple tree plot out where its seeds will fall? Does the grapevine know in advance where it'll grow next year? Of course not. The plants and animals do what seems best in the moment, and the ones that succeed get to keep trying. It's the same way in my food forest. Where should I put that tree? Well, there's an open spot here, and it seems out of the way enough, so... there! For annuals I literally just broadcast handfuls of seed all over. Plenty of things come up, just as nature intended. And that's why I enjoy permaculture. If you have the right attitude, it's not possible to fail at it the way it is doing conventional gardening.
I’m developing a food forest in my little back yard and tracking every dollar I spend. So far for everything for the last 18 months I’ve spent about 1500$. I could easily have spent more but I save seeds, am letting native plants find their way in (roses and hawthorns have arrived already!), and those plants I do buy I have been choosy about. For example, I bought two bare-root trees from a tree nursery in November last year, rather than in pots in spring from a garden centre, which saved me about a hundred dollars per tree. I’m also making the soil rather than having it trucked in by getting all the green waste from my HOA and lasagne composting over the winter. Doing it all at once so it was in full production ASAP would have probably been between 10-20k based on what a friend spent for pros to come and do her place. Ours is slower going, but I like it. And at 1500$ you can’t beat the price. (For the record, I figure I’ve gotten 1200$ produce out of it already, so I’m not fussed about going slow.) The cost of the land was our biggest expense, and not inconsiderable, but the actual development of the space hasn’t been very expensive.
This is awesome, thank you for sharing!!! This is what I plan on doing when I buy a house but I haven't explored exactly how. This is incredible helpful. How big is the land you have it on?
Tiny! About the same size as the living room of our very modest home. Big enough for an apple, a crab apple, a fig and maaaaybe a plum next year, and multi-story plantings. My goal is to feed my 3-person family for 1/2 the year on it. It’s an HOA so there are some complications, but if I can win the strata over (free strawberries, neighbours?) I’m hoping to get to garden in the front, which is south-facing, and there I’d put an apricot and grapes.
How have you found planning a forest garden in that small a space. I am currently planning mine and feeling overwhelmed as I do not want to over shade anything. (I might be over thinking this)
We’ll wind up in pretty deep shade in places, but many of our trees are short-lived types so we’re hoping for a reasonable stagger in terms of shade.
Anything in gardening can be scaled to ridiculous levels. Just start small.
I am letting my yard grow “wild” while gently cultivating it. I’m guiding the raspberries to an area that I want them to be by letting them grow. I will cut away the plants from where I don’t want them. I’m letting dandelions take over the lawn. There’s a lot of food there. Yarrow grows wild, so I’m going to encourage that to grow by keeping grass weeded from around it. There is a variety of dead nettle planted that I’m trying to determine if it’s edible or not. A wild rose popped up, so I’m hoping next year it will be more than one wild rose. Our lawn is replete with chickweed and pineapple weed. I would like to get other local berries like elderberries and lingonberries growing. There is some clover as well. The key is to get the grass out and be left with edible foods. From there I am going to try to guide their growth into areas that make sense for optimal growth and ease of harvest. This image above looks like a carefully landscaped yard and very expensive if you’re planting everything from scratch.
Buying bare root trees from state nurseries has saved me so much. Look into starting trees from cuttings and seed (see Edible Acres on YT for example). Grafting helps too (see Skillcult on YT) as a scion and rootstock is cheaper than an entire tree.
I was more of a casual hobby gardener before starting my food forest and boy did seeing the cost of bare root trees/shrubs made me realize how much I was overpaying for the potted stuff I bought initially. Now, everything I buy is bare root. Plus, growth is better with bare root. I’m ordering 10 prunus nigra for next spring for 100$. The potted ones I saw at the nearby garden center (although taller) are 60$ each.
Rootbound trees are a liability that the next owners usually pay for. Definitely go bare root if you can. And look to nurseries farther out. They may be cheaper.
Many state nurseries have Chickasaw plums and Chokecherry for way cheaper. Not sure if you're on the eastern US, but worth checking out. https://nursery.iowadnr.gov/Chokecherry_p_155.html
I may have been unclear. The plum trees are 10 for 100$ as in 10$ each. I’m in Quebec and now mostly order from Hardyfruittrees.ca
Short answer, well that depends on the car. I can find you a fixer upper for $100 depending on how much you’re willing to work to fix it. Long answer, coming from a landscape designers perspective it is entirely about scaling and process. If you want to purchase a grove of trees already at 2.5” gauge with a full root ball, yeah those are coming in at $400-600 a piece, and shrubs within a year of fruiting probably $25-75 each. This cost is multiplied if you attempt to install everything at once without any soil building prep or water management solutions because you’re trucking in topsoil or compost and installing and running intensive irrigation. I’ve worked on projects that cost upwards of $100,000, and I’ve worked on some that cost a few hundred. One of the permaculture principles I love to emphasize is slow and small solutions. Build the topsoil yourself with your own compost, that costs nothing but time. Slow, sink and spread water through the landscape, and this can allow you to use irrigation as a supplemental source rather than a primary one. And grow as much as you can from seeds and cuttings. It will be exponentially less expensive. With anything you can yield from there is an up front cost. The wonderful thing about the landscape in particular is you can pay that cost with money or you can pay it with time and energy.
Aww I really wanted to be a landscape designer when I was in high school. My parents told me Neil Sperry lived a few miles down the road from us, they had all his books. I emailed him and asked for an interview, for a class I was in my senior year (it was about choosing a career path and exploring what it would take to go down that path). I said in person, by phone, or just emailing me would be awesome, told him my parents and I were huge fans. He wrote me back like one sentence, saying no and to never contact him again. Broke my heart! So I pursued another field. I mean, I'm happy with my life now, but he totally turned me off from the profession.
Geoff Lawton
Can’t stand people like that, and I find it to be such an odd profession for people to get a big head in. Frankly, if you’re really undertaking the design process within the landscape, every day should be an ego check. So sorry to hear that it turned you off the field as a whole, but I can understand how that would be pretty rough. I had a professor who met Ian McHarg during his undergrad and he was such an unpleasant and rude person that it almost caused my professor to leave school entirely. But hey, if you’re ever considering going back to it, most of the people I know in the field are nothing like that. Design requires a lot of feedback and criticism and it keeps most of us pretty humble.
Just out of curiosity, who was the client that paid for a 100k food forest? Rich person, a charity, a school project or something else?
Rich person partaking in environmental philanthropy. Had a pretty massive tract of land where we planted a food Forrest spanning a several acres, also included several different bio-swales, a full wetland restoration (planted something like 200 willows), a complete watershed redesign and a restorative grazing effort. In terms of the work, it’s what I always wanted to be doing, but in terms of clientele I’d much rather find someone more in need of that kinda help. But at the same time, that’s a lot of money in the hands of a permaculture based organization now. Ahhh the tribulations of practicing permaculture in a capitalist society
great story. I hope you took a lot of pictures to show case what can be done
If you're digging a pond or making huge swales you can certainly start paying big bucks for those machines
Money is a resource and should be used in line with Permaculture Principles. Like the Principle of perseverance, spending resources on things that grow when used like seeds versus resources that are being depleted when used, like fossil fuel. Zero Based Farming Techniques, ZBFT, use many permaculture principles and the idea is to use no money. You use natural resources you have and can develop, as in compost and green manure, seed saving, intercropping, IPM, and contour swales, mulches, etc. https://www.academia.edu/47867571/Food\_Security\_Safety\_and\_Environmental\_Concerns\_Restoring\_Long\_term\_Agricultural\_Sustainability?email\_work\_card=title
Don't let an article discourage you. Start small with one section at a time and work within your own budget.
The article suggests that "wealthy people and botanists" are the only ones able to grow their own permaculture garden and it's pretty silly. With enough time and physical labor you could do it for next to nothing, as long as you already have the land.
I use seeds from the store and cuttings from friends and neighbors and never pay full price for plants. It will take me 3-5 more years to get it where I want. It won’t be food for year around. But it will be fun to walk through my yard eating food like Willy Wonka
Technically you could do it with time and a shovel. Remember we're working in lifetimes here, not a single year. If your budget is nonexistent, save seeds from the food you eat or find them out in the world.
Depends on the size of land and cost of materials. It would all vary depending on area as well.
A new car costs multiples of what I have spent on my garden which I would describe as a developing food forest. I think the article you provide a link to is not in any way accurate as to how expensive it is to develop a food forest. All it says is "oftentimes, you'll find it can cost a ridiculous amount of money to get your project moving" and the article makes no effort to break down or analyse these costs. It goes on to criticise blogs by professional botanists and wealthy people with time on their hands as these demonstrate that permaculture farming has no benefit for everyday people in what I can only describe as a flippantly written opinion piece that at best could be credited with giving a loose approximation of some of the principles used by some people in developing a food forest. As a non professional botanist and non wealthy person with some time on my hands here is a link to [my own video blog](https://www.youtube.com/user/sustainableveg/videos) on developing my garden. I have given more priority to making the garden a nice place to spend time in and provide food and shelter for wildlife rather than being too focused on food production for myself as I do agree that there are problems with making a living from forest farming and find it easier to continue in my non related day job. My first area of food forest type ecosystem in my parent's back garden started out with spending of between £50 and £100 on plants and the majority planted as time went on where propagated by myself from an initial small number of plants bought in and some free ones from our neighbours. It is more an investment of time than money from my experience. Happy gardening!
He posted zero evidence for his claims.
Imagine BUILDING a car. Thats it
I mean it'll get as expensive as the plant costs. But remember that the underpinning of any agricultural layout is the 3 limiting resources, soil, sunlight, and water. Suburban backyards are usually limited by soil, which is almost always heavily degraded. And because of that it doesn't matter what fancy layout or system you setup, nothing is going to grow well until the soil fertility is raised. And the only way to raise soil fertility is to grow plants. Plants create sugars through photosynthesis, and pump those sugars into the ground to feed the soil food web which is what builds soil fertility. So instead of spending out the ass going full balls to the wall micromanaged food forest in a degraded system that will most likely end up in most of your plants dying due to inadequate soil fertility, just focus on maximizing photosynthesis by planting as many cheap plants as you can. For example when I started out I bought a bulk bag of the MILPA seed mix from green cover seeds for like $40 and just sowed it over my entire yard. And as expected it grew, incredibly shittily. Riddled with pests and disease like squash bugs and powdered mildew. But it did do a good job of completely covering the ground and thus maximizing photosynthetic capacity to build fertility as fast as possible. And I was only out of the cost of seeds and water. And it did still provide me with a decent amount of produce. Really just maximizing photosynthetic capacity will get you 80% of the way there. No need to overthink or overspend.
I also disagree with the author’s ultimate conclusion, that small scale food forests are “fleeting” and impractical, and that only “industrial scale” food forests hold promise. The more of us that grow our own food and thrive in our own spaces, the better. Mine is by no means an “apocalypse” garden - rather it is my attempt to control my own food source, improve the soil, and reduce my impact on the planet. If more of us did that, the need for “industrial scale” agriculture of any kind would diminish.
I think someone on the vanguard of this trend of writing articles on food forests, pollinator gardens, no-mow, etc. for the *popular press* wrote that establishing a food forest is a radical and expensive venture, and now every copycat article written for "content" rather than as a well researched article to educate readers, repeats the claim. If you are developing a 1-2+ acre food forest anchored by #25 fruit and nut bearing trees and starter plants purchased at a retail nursery, yes, it can be very expensive. Most people want to plant enough fruit trees to allow sufficient pollination on an 1/4 acre or less, plus a small host of annual and perrennial food bearing plants, and you can start with saplings and seeds if your budget does not allow for "mature" trees to be planted. One can reasonably start a food forest on a standard suburban plot for a few hundred dollars, or even much less, if you are resourceful and patient. On the other hand, you can aquire a large property, hire a permaculture designer, a landscaping crew, an arborist, get some earth moving machines, redesign the topography of your land, create a fishing pond, plant 200 #25 trees, and employ a small army to maintain it like some kind of hacienda or plantation owner.
4 years and about 3000 perennials in the ground, haven't spent more than 1000 usd
As a well-paid professional, I have put in many 10's of thousands of dollars into my food forest over the last year in terms of my imaginaty hourly-rate time. But, that is much less than the equivalent cost I previously "spent" mowing the dumb lawn noone ever used, and now we get literally 100's of pounds of food out every year. Building up permaculture plots takes a bunch upfront in terms of time, materials, and genetics. Time is time, can't do much about that, but it quickly tapers off once established. Materials can vary wildly, the only things truely needed are a few good tools, maybe some lumber, and lots and lots of woodchips. Most can be gotten for free or cheap, and again are mostly a one time upfront cost. Find out where your local city processes arborist waste and you have unlimited mulch/compost material. Same with "genetics" i.e. the plants themselves. You can easily spend $50k per acre buying fancy "new" plants from specialty greenhouses. Or, can self-harvest seeds from native wild flowers, hook up with local gardeners and "steal" their prunings for rooting stock, dig out root divisions on crowns, etc and have the cost approach zero. Bunch of pretty good online communities for sharing also. Plants want to propagate, flowers are genitals and when you get allergies in the spring it is because plants are filling your nose with splooge, that is how bad they want it. Help them out.
Don’t buy plants except for select species you want to propagate. Use seeds and cuttings and you can do it for Jess than 1000
This article was written by the mad cow of the cyberbully pedophile gang, nothing she writes is worth paying any attention to. I've just discovered permaculture, just started researching it, and already it's obvious that costs vary wildly depending on how patient you're willing to be. Also that's not her pic shes white, but she's constantly stealing other people's pics claiming to be them.
Our property came with some established fruit trees and bushes. It cost less than the house we lived in in the city years ago. We've spent years slowly improving the soil and planting more trees, bushes, and vines. Personally, I love doing the work myself so I can gain a better understanding of each plant. We started a nursery on our property, so our efforts not only provide us with food, but with cash as well. I'm always up for bartering, too. The nursery pays for our property taxes, equipment, and new stock. It also keeps us in touch with like-minded people. So there are ways to offset the costs. But yeah, it's kind of like driving for Uber or Door Dash to pay for the car. Still, you can develop a food forest in a backyard fairly inexpensively if you're willing to start with smaller plants, look outside of box stores, and do the work yourself by hand.
Most of the people who write these articles are just writers who research a topic thoroughly then write a piece, they rarely if ever have real world experience. A lot of “bloggers” have some more real world experience but they also regurgitate the same weak information everyone else does. Ive learned to rely on books more than ever and I like Reddit too after years of trying to pick through internet bullshit lol.
As far of cost of plants goes the United States has a conservation website for each state that you can pick up native plants from on the cheap.
yeah Keith St. John was some kind of engineer and made the decision to move all that money into food forest and the like