A forest garden approach
The Untamed Gardener
Aisling Blackburn
Oh, stony grey soil of Monaghan, the laugh from my love you thieved
- Patrick Kavanagh
There’s a pep in my step as I skip along the road, extending my walk to get my heart pumping on this bright cumulus morning. Behind the fence a triangular group of small lambs eye me warily, newly separated, some are defiant and protective.
The land here is just not suitable for crop growing. Some of my neighbours have had success but it takes a heck of a lot of work. An esker is a sandy gravelly stony snake of geology that is good for growing bulbs. I love bulbs and they do very well here, mostly. But what I have ended up with is what you might call a forest garden - more by happenstance than intent. Unconventional wildflower meadows and forest gardens make sense for us and our busy lifestyles; they offer all the benefits of having a garden without the strain, as well as providing food for the table. As Patrick Whitefield author of - How to make a forest garden- says “It’s more like steering a boat than rowing one.”
Why does it take so much work to cultivate these sandy, clay, gravelly stoney soils? On the one hand the ground isn’t soggy and is easily drained, but imported soil and compost just seem to get gobbled up somehow. Any bare bits are quickly infested with perennial weeds which are very difficult to deal with; mint running riot all over the place so between the previously mentioned bamboo, ground elder and bindweed it is impossible to keep up – so I don’t, I gave up a very long time ago. What is starting to work though is a type of forest gardening. This is gardening in layers, is one way to explain it.
The top layer is formed of fruit and nut bearing trees- apple; pear; plum; cobnut; quince.
The middle layer includes fruit bushes such as – blackcurrant; redcurrant; white currant; blackberry; blueberry; raspberry; honeyberry; hybrid berries and unusually Mahonia.
The herbaceous layer is formed of perennial vegetables such as rhubarb; Portuguese kale and nine-star broccoli. Biennials like chard and perpetual spinach; Wild garlic and three-cornered leek are reliable natives as well as clumps of nettle. Herbs also form part of this layer, lovage, flatleaf parsley; thyme; oregano; rosemary and so on.
You won’t find many annuals like lettuce, the root layer may have carrots; beetroot; potato; Jerusalem artichoke; Yacon; Oca, which you might not have heard of, which can be grown here and there in ‘badger holes’, as a forest garden is essentially a no-dig garden. And although every forest garden is a no-dig, not all no-digs are forest gardens.
There are no compost areas as such in a forest garden – I have one in mine, but the cone or dalek bin would work very well here. ‘Chop and drop’, is a system of cutting unwanted material from the soil up, chopping it and letting it drop on the spot where it forms a mulch. A mulch is a layer on top of the soil formed of organic material such as weeds, or straw or whathaveyou; this mimics what would naturally happen in a forest of leafy litter. It works best around mature plants that are not so vulnerable to slug attack.
In Jampa Ling we are using as a mulch the dried leafy branches of bamboo; a very high- carbon material. It protected the potatoes the other night quite well from the hard frost. We are also using it around the strawberries. The rye grass rows are almost five feet tall including flower heads. It was sown back in November of 2025 as a green manure. Green manures are a living alternative to putting down layers of plastic sheeting or cardboard. Rye grass adds carbon to the soil as the roots are left in the ground and not pulled up, while the cut straw is put to other uses in the garden. This idea came from Masanobu Fukuoka in his book, The One- Straw Revolution. (1975). In his do-nothing approach, the soil is never bare, there is no weeding, no artificial chemicals or insect control no ploughing or even sowing! Only scattering seed. Had he and Paddy met, I wonder now, how would the smooth lea-field of the latter’s brow lie instead, maybe unfurrowed and peaceful?