Thank god raising a food forest doesn't involve standardized testing, college applications and immunizations. All the tough choices at the moment seem to involve which weeds should we pull and which should we leave? We have some nettles that are higher than the young trees planted beside them... and some lambs quarter that is the same size as the two year old ground cherry starting to fruit beside it. All of that stuff doesn't seem to be too much of an issue actually. The real problems are the grasses popping up (we don't want them around the fruit trees for sure), the dock, the carpet weed, smart weed in the more wet spots (although it is good for identifying which spots are wet when its not raining)... but anyway you get the idea. There are some things in here that are pesky and we want to keep them down until the rest of the plants have a fair shot at growing up. So I've been investigating plants that would be more useful and that will spread without too much work to fill the space between other plants. I figure that if we had a lot of something useful as a high ground cover, we could still have a place for small animals to dwell and something to compete with the weeds that don't serve an immediate relevant purpose or might harm the plants that we are invested in. So the few things that I'm going to try are Soap Wort, St. Johns Wort and Chamomile. Clover was suggested to me but I was thinking about something a bit higher growing and something that we could use for more applications. Soap wort if you don't know anything about it is an interesting plant. Its essentially a weed with beautiful white or purple flowers. When the flower is wet and rubbed, it lathers. Turns out people have been using this as soap for thousands of years. I'm really excited to try growing it here. I don't believe anyone here has tried it before.
There is also a failed herb spiral down by the movable greenhouse (also not very close to the door to the kitchen, I'm not sure why they chose this spot). The chamomile there has gone totally crazy. My goal is to transplant as much of that as I can. My thought is that it will go really crazy in the food forest too, but if we need to cut it down or pull it, we can dry it or make tea out of it. Actually, at the ashram we can be pretty sure that it will actually get used in such large amounts. Now that I think about it, its pretty ridiculous that we ever buy chamomile at all...
The third plant is St. Johns Wort which I'm told spreads very quickly. Also, its very useful as a medicinal herb and has pretty flowers. So thats what I'm trying. If anyone has other ideas about plants that are good for this application in a food forest, please share your thoughts and experiences with us with a comment or email!
Here are a few photos of the food forest I've been working with:
Thanks for reading and come visit us if you're ever in New York! www.sivanandayogaranch.org
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