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The Forest Garden
Last Friday, I had the opportunity to talk to my best friend, who's living in Italy. Side note: Skype is amazing. Using my computer, I could call him in Italy for almost nothing (actually, it was exactly nothing because my girlfriend had leftover credit from when she lived in England last summer, but it would have been very cheap even if I'd been paying for it). Anyway, I wanted to share something interesting that he shared with me.
He went for a week or two to England to visit Martin Crawford, who runs the Agroforestry Research Trust in the UK. The buzzword here is "Forest Garden," about which you can find a number of books on Amazon.com. The basic idea, though, is this: you are designing an ecological space in which various food-producing plants will work in harmony to sustain one another, largely without human intervention.
This is basically coming to you third-hand, but the guy who started this place in England used to be a traditional gardener, but it was just too much work. There were so many steps, too much input, not enough output. Now that the forest garden he's been creating is 10 years old, he can't give all of his surplus away, and all this without much work. Defying conventional wisdom, he doesn't prune his fruit trees, accepting lower yields for a lot less work, but still getting enough. I gather that he avoids many traditional fruits, like apples, in favor of less common things like persimmons. Why? Whereas apples are susceptible to all sorts of diseases and pests, the persimmon tree is not--there are few enough of them that nothing really developed to take advantage of them.
Part of the design of a forest garden also involves growing plants that fix nitrogen in the soil (avoiding fertilizers), growing plants that repel pests or attract the predators of the pests. It's really very cool and I think would be worth looking into. Just like in college, where free food is good food, food that's grown without much work from the gardener sounds awfully good.