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User–Generated Food Forest Resource is Online

The Apios Institute for Regenerative Perennial Agriculture has spent several years developing a user–generated resource on food forests. Users can add content on species, polycultures, and sites. This content ranges from videos, text, recipes, and photos, and emphasizes personal experience or direct observation of species in other gardens and the wild. Thus far we have focused on cold climates, but we are working on building our system to include (over time) all the world’s climates. We have pilot tested a version in Spanish for Mesoamerica and the Caribbean.

After several years where I posted almost all of the content, I’m very happy to report that we have other users regularly posting fascinating reports. At this point we have roughly one hundred members. Members can choose from paying $25 (US) per year or a free work-trade option if they pledge to provide content.

What’s unique and interesting about the website is that each species profile is linked to every polyculture and garden which contains it, and vice versa. Thus if I look up pawpaw I get not only its ‘species page’ with reports on hand–pollination, variety comparisons, reports on tolerance of urban soils, and observations on the species in the wild, but it also links to ‘polyculture pages’ that include pawpaw (black locust-pawpaw, pawpaw-hog peanut-ramps, etc.), and to ‘garden pages’ that profile gardens including pawpaws.

One useful outcome is that we have already gotten some good polycultures replicated on multiple sites. One of our primary aims is to share information on polycultures that work and engage in decentralized, replicated trials.

We chose to focus on personal experience because only the species are so little-known. I’ve written several books about permaculture plants and nobody knows better than me that plants don’t read books, and can behave very differently on different soils and in different sites. Our hope is to gather first-hand experience from multiple sources to build a shared resource for forest gardeners.

We have lots of improvements in mind, though we are an all–volunteer organization so progress doesn’t always keep pace with our ideals. One project I’m very excited about is implementing a user–generated classification system for polycultures. Using tags and other tools we hope, as an online community, to generate a pattern language and typology of polycultures, while simultaneously recording successful and non-successful examples.

Eric Toensmeier

Eric Toensmeier is the award-winning author of Paradise Lot and Perennial Vegetables, and the co-author of Edible Forest Gardens. He is an appointed lecturer at Yale University, a Senior Biosequestration Fellow with Project Drawdown, and an international trainer. Eric presents in English, Spanish, and botanical Latin throughout the Americas and beyond. He has studied useful perennial plants and their roles in agroforestry systems for over two decades. Eric has owned a seed company, managed an urban farm that leased parcels to Hispanic and refugee growers, and provided planning and business trainings to farmers. He is the author of The Carbon Farming Solution: A Global Toolkit of Perennial Crops and Regenerative Agricultural Practices for Climate Change Mitigation and Food Security released in February 2016.

One Comment

  1. Although my membership dues are overdue, this is an awesome site with a lot going for it. Really the only thing that would make it better is if more people shared their projects and experiences. This is truly a gift for plant geeks that want to expand their knowledge and designers that are less into the growie side and need practical input on putting together polycultures for projects, especially if working in a different climate zone. I think I need to update my account and start posting stuff about new projects were working on… Thanks for this gift to the permaculture community!

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