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Perennial Wooded Garden

 Perennial Wooded Garden

What is a perennial wooded garden?   A perennial wooded garden is known by other names such as a survival garden or hidden food plot or permaculture.  A perennial wooded garden is not  as much a garden as we see it with its organized rows but more of an organized chaos.  The main focus of the perennial wooded garden is the one time planting of trees, shrubs, vegetables and herbs that continue to grow and produce year after year with little to no human input.  It is much as it would grow in the wild with the exception that we plant it where it will most compliment or benefit the other plans in your gardens yet it maintains it natural chaotic appearance rather than in neat orderly rows.

Rick Austin is the person who I am basing most of this idea on.  I recently listened to a web seminar that he was a part of and just ordered his book “Secret Garden of Survival: How to grow a camouflaged food- forest.” Which is what I am basing this plan on.  The major difference between his and my plans are the environment in which we are based.  The base will be the same between what he is doing and what I will do just the plants will be different.

If you have been following my blog you already know that I was planning on planting Apple, Pear, Cherry, butternut and chestnuts trees.  Well what I am going to do is take the North eastern most ½ acre of the property and I am going to take 1/3 of these trees and plant them in that 220 X 100 foot section, should be about 20 trees (12 of which will be apple) total in that section.  Next to each tree will be planted a vine type plant. The vining plant will use the tree as its support, much as it would in the wild.   These will be either a cold weather variety of grape (homemade wine anyone?) or ground nuts, also known as wild beans.  Ground nuts pop a whopping 17 percent protein making me believe that if we do not like the taste they will make an excellent winter fodder food for the livestock and it doubles as a nitrogen fixer. Around these trees I will plant shrubs and bushes such as blue berry, black berry chokecherry and hazelnuts.

And finally outside of the shrub line we will plant perennial herbs such as thyme, mountain mint, basil, chives and sage along with fruits and vegetables, such as strawberries, rhubarb and asparagus.
Rick claims he gets 6 gallons of various fruits, nuts and vegetables on a daily basis from his ½ plot with nothing required but the time to go out and harvest it every day.  Granted he is in the Carolina’s and not Minnesota so I do not expect anywhere near that output but I am curious to see how it turns out. 

I do of course have to wonder if this is possible why does more people not do this, and then the answer hits me.  Almost all of the foods on in this plot will not produce until the second or third year and very few people today are willing to wait that long on a return so commercially it is not worth the effort and most people just do not think long term.  On a different note, there is going to be one more addition to my perennial wooded garden. 

Bees

Honestly I have gone back and forth thinking about bees.  There is not really a need to put bees out, currently a bee company has quite a few hives out on the property in the north west corner that they keep out there during the spring and summer months and that they move south for the winter every year and in return the family gets honey from them in exchange for the keeping the bees there.  Finally, I decided I would like to go for it, I am looking for a natural sweetener to more or less replace processed sugar and I love the storage life of honey, more to the point is Terri has pretty much informed me she that she can very well go through a lot of honey if it did not cost so much!
I also want to unsure pollinators are available in the early spring and later in the year when the other bees maybe in transit or used elsewhere.  My putting two top bar type hives in that north east corner should not cause as issues to the other bees and would give me my own supply of honey.

My new boss at work I recently found out was a bee keeper at his last duty station in Germany so I do plan to pick his brain quite a bit.  He was interested in doing it here in Amman as well but it turns out you are not allowed to keep bees within the city of Amman.  Another interest of his is woodworking so I am hoping that I can convince him to help me build a couple of hives with me that I will be able to use when we retire!

So if any of you are in the north US and if you have any suggestions for cold weather tolerant perennials please let me know!

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