"A forest garden is a three dimensional garden of useful plants." "So there's trees, shrubs, ground cover plants, perennial plants all designed to maximise beneficial interactions and minimize competition, designed to be sustainable in the long term by having plants that feed other plants by having plants for bees to sustain a pollinating population," "sustainable from other ways too, because most of the plants are perennial, you know trees or smaller plants and so the soil is not dug most of the time and not digging the soil is really important in term of sustainability" "because every time you dig the soil, a lot of carbon goes into the air." "This is looking quite good at the moment." "This is Chinese dogwood, which is as you can see, a fantastic beautiful plant in flower but actually has a very nice edible fruit which follows later in the year." "Apart from food, there are various other things you can grow and I do in this forest garden so I include medicinal plants," "I include plants for dying, for basketry use, plants for fibers, there are of course a lot of bee plants, sometimes plants are here specifically for bees, so you might look at a particular plant in this forest garden" "and I won't necessarily harvest that plant myself it might have a system function in terms of feeding another plant, or it might be here specifically for bees because if flowers are at a good time of year for bees" "and so on." "So there is plants for all sources of different uses." "There's ..." "I think forest gardens will have a role to play they are ... you know there is an awful lot of interest at the moment in forest gardens." "Of course mainstream agriculture of course is completely dependent on oil, and you know what happens to oil will have a big effect and of course the oil price will may certainly go up and up over the decades to come," "because, you know, demand will exceed supply." "In this country particularly, you know, tree ... you know, farmers don't tend to know much about trees and foresters don't know much about farming and agroforestry which is kind of in the middle of the two" "therefore is quite ... seems quite difficult for people and farmers to access because, you know, they are not comfortable with trees." "So that's a potential problem that could slow down, you know, the implementation of more agroforestry based systems on farming." "But I think it needs to happen and I think slowly it will happen but ..." "I think it will take ... unfortunalety I think it will take a crisis or two, you know a serious crisis or two, to actually jolt the powers of be into actually you know, making it happen quicker." "This is one of my main salad leaves from the forest garden, it's the young leaf you use, this kind of leaf, not the old one, the old ones would be tough." "An interesting parallel to times which may be coming you know, when in the cold war years the soviet union did a lot of fruit breeding because they wanted to be self sufficient in fruit, you know, they didn't want to have to import fruit from a long distance," "well typically from, you know, the West." "And so they did a lot of interesting fruit breeding, this is one of the plants they bred in fact," "And you know that has a parallel in that ... of course in the moment, as a country, you know, we import a lot of our food and there is no reason why we couldn't, more or less," "grow most of it here." "And of course that's got to be sensible from our sustainability and our resilience aspects, it's got to be sensible and our governments haven't got it yet." "Forest gardens are resilient because of the ... because of the diversity, really." "So, it's diversity of structure so lots of different plants at different levels but also diversity of species, so this forest garden has about 550 species in it, which is probably more than most because I am doing a lot of research and experimenting as well," "but, it's very common for forest gardens to have 200 species and, you know, the majority of which would be food plants you know which ... to ask when we're used to, you know, eating 20 types of vegetables or something," "you know if you're talking about 200 types of food plant, people, initially, might be slightly overwhelmed, but actually ..." "I regard that as actually proving much more normal than relying on 20 you know I think ... if you look at if you look at our near relatives, things like orangutans they regularly eat 400 different types of leaf and fruit," "they know everyone, they recognize every one, you know they know exactly what they are picking that's no reason we couldn't do the same." "And I suspect ... you know diverse diet will lead to more resilient people as well." "Bamboos are fantastically useful plants and of course in China and Japan or other parts of Asia they use bamboo for more things that you could think of." "This one is growing about 20 cm a day at the moment, because of this warm weather so ... and you can actually hear them growing, bamboos are the only plants I can claim to have heard growing because when it's growing that fast and you put your ear near the top" "you can hear the fibers unfurling and crackling away." "So, if I just cut the top of that, and cut it down in the middle, it's very interesting inside, you'll see ... you can see what are going to be the nodes which are these bits on the bamboo cane" "and everything inside this white or light green is edible, so you peel of the outer leaves and then the inside bit is edible you normally steam that ... just steam it for 5 or 10 minutes and then ... because they're normally bitter raw." "This garden is now 16 years old and ..." "I've certainly seen" "I've seen climate changes in that time mainly, you know, increased average temperatures and fewer spring frosts." "Dry springs is something that most farmers hate because they've just sawed all their spring crops, or horticulturists for that matter, you know, and dry weather is just what they don't want in spring so that can be quite severe in terms of growing annual plants" "so, you know, obviously if you're growing perennial plants a dry spring is, more or less irrelevant you know, won't have very much effect at all and similarly, you know, extremes of weather at other times of year are gonna have much less effect" "on perennial crops than on annuals as a rule." "Fungi are probably the most important organisms of all in this forest garden, and of course most of the time we don't see it because they are under the soil surface and ... the fungi I am talking about are mycorrhizal fungi" "which are beneficial fungi that form relationships with almost all plant roots." "And they do some amazing things :" "when they form an association with plant roots they basically give the plant hard to get nutrients because fungi can get those out of the ground much more efficiently than plants and the plant gives the fungi some sugars in return, so it's kind of symbiosis." "But they do other things as well, they protect the plant from diseases and ... they move nutrients around in natural ecosystems and in something like a forest garden if there is more nutrients of one sort in one part of the soil" "and a lack in another part of the soil, this fungi will move it, physically move it from one place to another and then the tree in another place will use it." "So that's how things like nitrogen from my nitrogen fixing trees gets around to fruit trees that need it the fungi move it for you." "The other thing that this fungi do, which has really just been discovered in the last few years is critical in sequestering carbon in stable states in the soil." "So without them you wouldn't get sequestration into the soil." "And of course you don't get these fungi where you dig the soil." "And this huge potential you know for sequestering more carbon into the soil you know ... and certainly you know, everybody seems to want to do that but ... but to do that, you gonna have to move to a much more perennial system." "This is pokeroot which is a quite a well known American wild edible." "Weedy shoots that come through which tend to be at the beginning of June so it's kind of very late spring crop really and the shoots come as really thick like you can see here." "You cook those and they have a sort of healthy asparagus flavor to them really, really substantial vegetable." "But poisonous when it's raw, you know, so you have to cook it but there's lots of plants you know that we eat have little poison in one state or another otherwise I think if potatoes were discovered now they probably wouldn't be allowed in this country" "because you know green potatoes are quite poisonous." "I mean my estimate is that you could certainly feed 4-5 people of an acre of forest garden." "I use a lot of aromatic plants down in my perennial layers so a lot of different side sauce of mint for example and lemon balm or oregano, and other herbs some of which of course is harvested but," "it's doing some useful functions that's some useful functions even if you don't harvest it down this layer because you know they are rich in essential oils, mints and other aromatic plants and essential oils are anti bacterial and anti fungal" "so having those in the understory layers should have a protective effect you know for other plants in term of reducing bacterial diseases and fungal diseases." "The medlar is a fantastic fruit tree which a lot of people don't know but you can see the young fruits here these grow to about 3-3.5 centimeters diameter and ripen on the tree in warm summers otherwise you pick them" "at the first frost and taken indoors and then they ripe in with are sort of very sweet sort of date, baked apple type flavor to them really nice edible fruit ... and also, you know, again very low maintenance" "it doesn't have any pests or diseases it just looks after itself." "Monoculture crops have been dominating all agriculture research for hundreds of years and even now you know mainstream agriculture scientists they don't like looking at more than one crop in one place, it makes things very complicated for them." "This is Sichuan pepper which is obviously a commercial crop grown in China mainly but it's a shrub as you can see a largely shrub and you can see it has just finished flowering it's just starting to form the peppercorns here" "and each of those will form a roundish fruit so the black seed in the middle and a sort of pink shell round the outside." "It's actually that pink shell which is the spice you don't have to use black pepper if you have something like this."