Overarching and Specific Goals:

• Why do you want a forest garden? What are you yearning for that you believe a forest garden will give you? What value does it offer you, or what values does it embody?

  • The forest garden provides us with 85% of all our extant food needs

  • Our economic well being is taken care of by selling products that originate from our garden

  • Our spiritual and physical health is supported by our garden.

  • Our forest garden provides us an environment for repose and for the satisfaction of our curiosities.

  • Our awareness and ecological consciousness is sharpened and increased when we spend time in our garden.

  • Our garden is a place we are proud and excited to show to friends.

  • Our garden is romantic, mystical, and evokes a sense of yugen.

  • We are happy our forest garden is an ecologically biodiverse oasis, supporting the healing of the Earth after centuries of devastation from colonialism to modern industrialism.

  • Our garden supports the gathering of two hundred people for parties, group meals, dancing, classes and meditation in its outer zones.

• What are you looking for in a forest garden? What specific and tangible benefits do you hope to gain? How will you know you have achieved your overarching goals?

  • Our forest garden doesn’t even look like a farm.

  • The stream rushes down swiftly and we feel still. The flowers fall incessantly, yet we feel quiet.

  • Our forest garden supports its workers completely economically.

  • The bioregional archetype notoriety our forest garden has attracts others who want to create similar and connective ecosystems.

  • The self renewing fertility, sustainable water demand, minimal herbivory, minimal competition, healthy plants, and diverse succession stages all attribute to overyielding polycultures we use everyday and in business, signifying completeness.

Your Approach to Key Issues

• Natives, exotics and opportunists

  • We use whatever species best fit our niches, desired functions and uses without regard to place of origin.

  • We use natives copiously to fulfill our desired functions and uses.

• Adapt or modify

  • In zone 1 and somewhat in zone 2, we modify the site to the design’s requirements.

  • In zones 3 outwards we select species and develop a design that works with the existing conditions of the site.

• Work for valued crops or eat what grows:

  • Our market garden and possibly the CSA require us to work for crops whose general maintenance is relatively high.

  • We do not use any herbicides, fungicides or non-organic pesticides. We use dormant oils as they’re needed.

  • We experiment with tree pruning strategies a la Fukuoka.

  • All organic use of pesticides is a last resort measure.

  • We grow all socially lucrative vegetable, grain, fruit, nut, medicinal, vining, root, and meat crops.

  • We are adaptable to the necessities of our patrons.

  • We emphasize palatable, resilient, “pest-proof” species where appropriate.

• Experimentation:

  • We experiment with various polycultures and guilds as much as it doesn’t dramatically fool with the market garden’s and CSA’s smooth running.

  • We experiment with various polycultures and guild arrangements, acorn grain milling and palatability, grafting, propagation, mushroom cultivation, and habitat creation for endangered species.

  • Our experimentation doesn’t gamble a steady crop for the CSA.

  • We draw skills and knowledge from acclaimed masters in greenhouse design, moldering compost toilets, and building to create attached houses and toilets that work for our needs and special requirements.

Desired Crops and Uses

• What kinds of foods do you like to eat? Are certain kinds of foods a priority?

  • Our diet is diverse and encompasses any and all edible fruits, nuts, berries, shoots, leaves, roots, culinary herbs, edible flowers, mushrooms, fish, crustaceans, poultry, eggs, pig and goat products that are USDA hardy to our zone and growable in our greenhouses.

  • We prioritize fresh fruit, vegetables, nuts, poultry products, culinary herbs and salad greens in our growing strategy.

• What specific crops do you want to grow?

  • (see attached niche analysis form)

• Approximately how much fruit do you eat in a year? How many nuts? Would you eat more of these if you were growing them and had them available?

• What medicinal herbs do you regularly use, or might you use? Condiment herbs?

  • We use horseradish, catsup, honey, hot pepper Chalupa like sauce, and tamari, umeboshi plum vinegar, and miso as condiment herbs.

  • We use, grow, tincture, stock, replace, give, and sell numerous different herbs fitting to heal or relieve symptoms and sickness of all different kinds. We strive to thoroughly relieve our want of health insurance and do not need to ever purchase any pharmaceuticals outside of extreme, life-threatening situations.

• Do you want to process foods and herbs for storage (e.g., canning, drying, preserves, tinctures) or just use them fresh?

  • Food and herb processing is in alignment with our activity of almost complete food self-sustenance. We process foods and herbs in value-added activities and for cold season sustenance.

• Do you want your fruits and other produce to be spread throughout the season or lumped in batches of harvest? Specify timing if you can for different crop types, specific crop species, or crops for storage versus crops for fresh eating.

  • We produce fruit and nuts of all different types that ripen at different times due to inter- and intra-species variety, thus providing fresh eating and reduced processing workload, which is spread throughout the growing season.

  • Many crops, including root foods, grains, and some vegetables, are harvested in bunches at the end of the growing season to prepare winter provisions.

• What other uses and functions are important to you?

  • Our garden additionally functions to provide food for our chickens, pigs, turkeys and goats, and provides cut flowers for zone 0 use, forage for hummingbirds and butterflies, ornamental aesthetics, and scented plants in high traffic and foul smelling areas.

  • Our aquaculture setup not only provides us with a high protein food source, but also helps us bioremediate polluted waters that come from our underground aquifer.

Desired Landscape Patterns

• What kind of environment do you hope to create? A shady forest, an open savanna, a wild oldfield mosaic, a tidy orchard? More than one? A sequence?

  • Our forest garden is a mosaic of dynamic successionary stages in patches including forest ecologies in the outer zones, and windbreaks and savannaesque oldfield mosaics in the closer zones.

  • We help direct the ecological succession of our environment, through intelligent rotating agroforestry.

• Are there specific wild areas or gardens that you want to mimic? What is it about these places you want to bring to your garden?

  • Our garden is somewhat ecologically similar to Jerome’s garden at the CRMPI.

  • We mimic CRMPI’s taste for aesthetics, business, functionality and ethic in earth care.

• Review the patterns in chapter 2. What site patterns (#s 3 through 8) and patterns of the garden (#s 9 through 22) might you want to use? Do other patterns in the pattern language particularly speak to you? If so, list them.

  • We utilize and integrate the site pattern of habitat diversity throughout and in accordance to the different zones and sectors of the forest garden.

  • Site repair and water use in our forest garden decreases in activity and intensity as we move outwards in the garden’s zones.

  • Every zone of our forest garden has some place for casual living, whether conspicuous or inconspicuous.

  • Some conspicuous living rooms of our garden integrate the mandala design pattern (#10).

  • Our garden comprises an accumulation of various ecological patches more or less separated by garden paths.

  • Many of our pre-successionary forest patches are temporary shrublands before the forest matures.

  • Star and flower shaped minithickets of thorny, thicket-like plants, particularly of the Rubus genus, abound in zone 2 of the forest garden.

  • An oldfield mosaic is the dominating successionary feature in zone 1 of our forest garden.

  • Woodland gardening is prevalent in zone 3 and somewhat (40%) in zone 2 of our forest garden.

  • A mature-forest forest garden motif is prevalent in our windbreaks, windfunnels, woodlot, and in zone 4.

  • Sporadic gaps and clearings permeate the zone 4 mature-forest forest garden.

  • The overall landscape of our forest garden is a shifting mosaic at different ecological successionary stages.

  • We consciously plan the successions of the forest garden to match plant lifespan and coppice rotations.

Logistical and Budget Issues

• How many people will be maintaining the forest garden? Who? How much time per week on a consistent basis per person? How much time per week during “rush” work periods, such as planting and harvesting?

  • Maintenance, guidance, and creation of the forest garden will be done by workers in the worker’s cooperative and by volunteers.

  • Numbers of total workers may range from 1-6 people.

  • Each person puts a total of 30-35 hours a week into the forest garden.

  • Each person puts a total of 40-50 hours a week into the forest garden during “rush” work periods of planting and harvesting.

• What kind of budget do you have for system establishment (time and money)? Do you intend all-at-once or piecemeal establishment (See pattern #s 30 through 34)?

  • Our primary succession stages call us to relay-plant biomass producing plants, dynamic accumulators, and nitrogen fixers until the soil is healthy enough to support more useful and desirable plants.

  • The windbreaks and zone 1 forest garden are planted as instant successions.

  • The zones 2, 3 and 4 forest garden is planted as nuclei that merge in order to save money on plant expenditure and to observe the polyculture’s combination interactions.

  • Money for the development of the forest garden comes from market garden, CSA, nursery and other farm product sales revenue and from gifts and grants, including the government’s Conservation Reserve Program.

  • Labor time comes from members of the worker’s cooperative.

  • Early stage forest garden financing comes out of pocket, from gifts, and from whatever money the living cooperative consensuses to provide.