Eric and I (with the help of our wonderful friends) created the following goals to help us design our Edible Forest Garden:

Our urban forest garden is an intensively managed backyard foraging paradise, a megadiverse living ark of useful and multifunctional plants from our own bioregion and around the world. The forest garden is the unifying element of a larger permaculture design for food production, wildlife habitat, and social spaces that encompasses the entire property.

Desired foods and other useful products:

- We eat fresh fruit from May to November from the gardens (with more of some things to store and process when possible).

-The forest garden provides greens, shoots, roots, and mushrooms in season.

-We also eat well from the greenhouse, fish farming, and aquatic vegetable and annual and tropical garden elements

Other essential needs we want the garden to fulfull:

-The permaculture design for the property as a whole integrates the forest garden with space for a “patio,” ponds and wetlands, a greenhouse, a tropical food garden, and annual garden beds, plus a private sitting area, tool and equipment storage, possibly a large water tank, and mulch and compost piles.

-Vehicle access down one of the alleys allows us to bring in materials.

-Our garden is an educational and demonstration site showing what forest gardens and urban permaculture can accomplish.

Desired successional stages and vegetation architecture or patterns:

-The garden is a mosaic of annual beds, oldfields, thicket/shrublands, and some shadier forested habitats, with the majority in midsuccession aggradation.

-We have different spaces with different “feels”—some wilder, some managed and manicured, some sunny and open, some shady, and some private.

How the garden relates to the larger ecosystem and neighborhood context:

-Our garden serves as a refuge in our biologically impoverished neighborhood, attracting and housing a great diversity of beneficial wildlife, particularly birds and invertebrates.

-We bring our dead and blighted backyard to life, creating a lush, semiprivate oasis that inspires our neighbors to plant their own.

Our maintenance and establishment efforts and approximate total budget:

-We establish our garden in phases using annual spring planting parties.

-We use pulses of work alternating with periods of less maintenance, but we do up to an hour a week in the forest garden, usually less.

-We spend about $1000 a year during the establishment years.

Our basic approach to key issues:

-We choose the species in our garden based on their ability to fit a specific niche regardless of region of origin, although we go out of our way to incorporate underutilized eastern natives.

-To quickly maximize productivity, we choose to transform our small, infertile lot rather than adapt to it or slowly change it.

-We put in some extra work to grow apples and stone fruits, although more of our emphasis is on resilient, “pest-proof” species.