Forest Garden

This is a big subject because it is really the question of the overall design of the farm. Integration is the name of the game and we can't expect for it to be anything other than a work in progress.

To that end we may as well follow the conversation. Ive been getting into this part in my reading, as I wend my way through Edible Forest Gardens. I have an impulse to try and read everything through, which may or may not be helping me here. But Matt blew up the conversation by sending me this and got me started going through the index of the second EFG volume for the various economic uses of trees, few of which I knew about. I don't know trees well anyway, but it's coming. I learned that green ash is a great species for coppice forestry, where the main stem is cut and many stems spring from the stump. This can be great for firewood and ash is the tradtional wood for long-handled tools (hickory for shorthandled).


Also listed on uBid is the Osage orange, which was conspicuously absent from the EFG indices. Though its native range is east Texas, it is one of the most planted trees in the US and has favorable associated trees for our area: walnut, hickory,ash, mulberry, and oak. Also called hedgeapple it was used widely as a thorny impassible living hedge. Its wood packs the most BTUs of any wood at 32 million and change per cord and burns bright colors. It is also held to be the best wood for making bows. Its aromatic qualities (in the chemical sense) make it useful in a number of applications.

Paw Paw is the tree I have been thinking most about recently, and believe it could be one of our most important trees. I am not aware of any economic uses aside from its fruit, though it is the (semi?)exclusive forage of the zebra swallowtail butterfly.

But it is the fruit that is the most exciting. I have never had a Paw Paw but it sustained indigenous people and was George Washington's favorite dessert. You eat it with a spoon and the fruit is held to be like vanilla custard with pineapple and mango. It sounds like a tropical fruit in every way but its native range is the east coast of the US and into Kentucky and Ohio. Our very own tropical fruit!

But it's soft and hard to transport and hasn't gotten the PR attention. But once I identified this tree I was seeing it everywhere. Fruit all around me and I never knew!

In the woods at the farm, within about 100 feet of the treeline, where openings in the canopy cast a patch of light on the forest floor, foot-tall Paw Paw saplings grow like a ground cover. I've seen a hundred individual plants, I'm sure. That is, unless these seedlings are suckered from the root system of an older tree... We should be able to determine this when we dig some out, though one report said they have deep taproots and fragile root systems. Hopefully we'll be able to identify seed-borne saplings.

I envision the Paw Paw as one of the principal fruit trees, a centerpiece yield, in our forest garden/orchard project, for many reasons. Chief among them is the fact that this is a native tree. This means that it is already adapted to the conditions it will face on the farm. It knows the soil and the weather and the insects and microbes, and is in balance with them, meaning, like, bugs won't whack your trees. More broadly, this is the rightful home of this tree and incorporating it into our diets and landscapes helps us live in more right balance with the land. Other reasons:
1. The aforementioned zebra swallowtail butterfly. If we have Paw Paws all over the farm, we also have these scenic critters.
2. Interest in native foods is growing all over the country and the Paw Paw in particular has seen press and attention from extension folks. This could mean an interesting and potentially lucrative market for fresh local Paw Paws. There is a lot of information at the KYSU site linked above.
3. The fruit is apparently extremely nutritious as well as being billed as luscious, complex, and tropical in flavor.
4. The Paw Paw is a floodplain understory tree and is tolerant of shade, making it especially useful for our forest gardening. The more sun it gets, the more fruit it bears, but it's nice to have some flexibility.
5. There is tremendous potential for the development of new varieties. The site maintained by Kentucky State University lists 46 named varieties as well as sources for nursery stock. That isn't terribly many for orchard fruit.

Each tree sprouted from seed that we replant in the sun will be a chance at a new variety. This is maybe even more exciting to me than if the hundreds of trees I imagine were all of the tastiest variety. The amount of grafting that may follow is daunting but that first big fruiting year where we get to taste and compare all the wild paw paws is really something to look forward to.