Permaculture Food Forest: My Heart’s Dream Garden | Grandma Kouzi
A lazy foodie’s dream is a self-sufficient garden for the truly idle — a permaculture food forest where the harvest is as bountiful as possible and the labour as minimal as possible.
Back when I was studying permaculture in Taiwan, I first properly came across the concept of a “food forest”. I had heard the term long before then, but had automatically shut it out, assuming a food forest demanded owning an actual forest — far too extravagant, nothing to do with me. In reality, it is a companion planting system that makes three-dimensional use of space and can be as small as a single plot. Mm-hm, now this suits me.
By layering edible plants, a food forest makes rational use of sunlight and land, growing more plants within a given area; while harvesting food, the land also develops a healthy ecosystem.
There was one idea from my studies I recognised as a kindred spirit: in a mature food forest system, the primary task of humans is simply to harvest. These words were spoken directly to my soul. As a lazy foodie, I simply had to put them into practice in Villain Valley.
I. Villain Valley’s Food Forest System
We had barely finished breaking the land — no gate, no nothing, in those very first days — when I splashed out on two Chinese bayberry trees and planted them on either side of the road. I pictured a day when their canopies would arch over the path and meet overhead, forming a bayberry archway. That would be the most poetic entrance in all of Villain Valley. A gate like no other, and you get fruit from it too. For big, sweet, delicious bayberries, I gladly paid double.
Two lone Chinese bayberry trees on their own will not do. To achieve a layered ecosystem that makes full use of sunlight at canopy, shrub and ground level while maximising every inch of soil, I propagated rose of Sharon from cuttings beneath the trees, added mid-height edible shrubs, then planted pumpkins, deliberately guiding the vines to creep along the ground and suppress weeds. Sunlight and soil working in tandem — there you go, a food forest.
The following year I planted peanuts and soybeans under the canopy, and French beans beside the rose of Sharon, letting them scramble straight up the branches without needing a trellis. All of these are nitrogen-fixing plants; the peanut and soybean foliage blankets the soil and aids weed suppression. A richer food forest system — sorted.
Peanut stalks and bean stubble returned to the ground on the spot — mulching and weed suppression, nitrogen return, humus build-up, all in one stroke. The life nurtured by this patch of earth goes back to it, and the soil grows richer with every season. Every ingredient for a sustainable food forest was in place.
Beside the loquat tree I planted ginger and maize. I had also sown beetroot and grass fennel, but germination was so poor that only a handful survived. I could not leave the soil bare and wait for weeds, so I filled in with soybeans, pumpkins and sweet potato. Legumes are my go-to emergency reserves, but I will keep cultivating grass fennel — it is a perennial.
Of the dozen or so black locusts along the river’s edge, half survived. By the second year they stood five metres tall; by the third they began to flower, and at last you could eat them. The plantain beside the black locust is a low-maintenance plant. Fish mint along the ground is so vigorous it needs no upkeep at all. Closer to the ditch are daylilies and wild ginger lily. A note while I am on the subject: to me, wild ginger lily is not an ornamental — it is a vegetable, indispensable to a mixed vegetable soup.
From the waterside food forest we have already eaten black locust blossoms, daylily, wild ginger lily and fish mint. Prayers for next year: wild rice stem, lotus flowers, lotus seed pods and lotus root.
II. Lazy-Friendly Plants
Fruit trees are the finest investment a long-term farmer can make — a top student of permaculture, without a shadow of a doubt. Villain Valley also grows generous quantities of mint, Dandelion, waybread, barbed skullcap and fish mint, all dual-purpose medicinal and edible perennial herbaceous crops. They can be planted once and eaten for a lifetime, serve as living ground cover that guards against soil erosion, suppress weeds, and shave a good deal off the weeding workload.
Among the same perennial herbaceous crops are daylily, wild rice stem and wild ginger lily — all tall waterside plants that crave more sunlight. In their first year after planting they need tending and weeding, but once established, very little further fuss is required. Their tillering ability is formidable; by the second and third year a single plant has become a whole clump. Once they have grown up, there is no foothold left for weeds around them.
The roster of lazy-friendly plants then slowly expanded to welcome a handful of self-perpetuating annuals. The Yunnan wild tomato, for instance: drop a fruit on the ground and a new seedling will sprout of its own accord the following year. Even undigested tomato seeds in the droppings of a greedy little bird can manage to “sow themselves”.
Malabar spinach is much the same — an annual by classification, yet fully capable of self-seeding.
When peanuts are pulled, any pods missed in the harvest will fall into the soil and sprout on their own. So I planted some on the slopes along the water’s edge. Where the bank is too steep to manage and a crop too tricky to lift, I simply leave it — and sit back to wait for new peanuts next year.
Then, to my delight, I discovered that some root and tuber crops can overwinter in the ground and sprout on their own the following year without replanting. Ginger and turmeric are both condiments used in small quantities, so whatever I cannot finish stays in the ground and sprouts where it was planted the next spring. At first it was a happy accident; after that I started deliberately trying root crops for overwintering.
The local speciality, betel nut taro, planted along the paddy bund, shares the sunlight with the rice in a layered arrangement — another food forest in miniature. Once dug up in autumn after maturity, storage life is limited: a moment’s inattention and they develop blotchy mould. Leave them in the ground and dig as you need them, and they will keep for six months. But once winter sets in they need some fussing over: the exposed part of the plant is vulnerable not only to frost but to rats gnawing away, so you must mound soil over them to ensure safe overwintering. The following year, betel nut taro sprouts from its original spot without needing replanting. The one drawback is that after sprouting, the tubers are still edible but have lost their creamy, starchy texture — the mouthfeel suffers considerably.
In Villain Valley, eating is the supreme criterion for testing truth, and laziness should be the second-highest. If something is both delicious and a lazy-friendly crop, then it is truth in its purest form — and must be grown in abundance. I planted all four sides of the paddy field. All but one edge, where I have turmeric, is betel nut taro — the land put to full use, planted to the point of over-supply.
III. Deliciousness Is the Only Hard Rule
My dream is self-sufficiency, moving from the basic “eat what you have” toward the ideal “have what you eat”. Fruit is the hardest frontier. Fruit trees need years before they bear, and a foodie’s cravings will not wait. The biggest hurdle to self-sufficiency is, and has always been, fruit.
A foodie is born with a sweet tooth, forever yearning for deliciousness. Fresh flowers and fruit alike are the worst offenders for pesticide residues. I never buy fresh flowers and never lose a moment’s sleep over that, but I simply cannot do without fruit. Once we had achieved self-sufficiency in vegetables and staples here in Villain Valley, the contradiction between our thin home-grown fruit supply and pesticide-laden store-bought produce became ever more acute. The cleaner everything else passing our lips, the more torn I feel — until, in its second year, the rose of Sharon stepped forward, rescuing me from my fruit famine as if answering a prayer.
I first planted rose of Sharon because it is the ultimate lazy-person’s crop — over a flowering season stretching past four months it produces non-stop, and it is endlessly versatile: stir-fried, folded into omelettes, simmered in stews, stirred through congee. Then I discovered you can eat it raw. “Fruit is a plant fruit meant to be eaten raw” — raw rose of Sharon has a clean, refreshing flavour and a pleasant texture, and so it joined Villain Valley’s first tier of home-grown fruit.
For a foodie, being merely “edible” is not enough — it must be “delicious”.
Rose of Sharon not only substitutes directly for fruit; paired with cold-macerated roselle jam it is particularly exquisite. Roselle, an annual herb, was the first species in Villain Valley to reach self-sufficiency. After the calyces have been fermented into wine, they make a fine cold-macerated jam — wonderful, but you dare not eat too much. The original with just a whisper of sugar is too sour; push past that and your teeth ache. Add more sugar and it turns so sweet and fragrant it cloyes. Then the rose of Sharon arrived, and with the roselle jam the sweet and the sour balance each other perfectly, each making up for the other’s shortcoming. This year I added perilla–bayberry jam, and rose of Sharon gained yet another companion — happiness doubled.
The Chinese bayberry trees I bought were mature specimens, and they fruited the very next year — but the season was short, just a week. This year, in their third year of bearing, more than half the crop from the two trees rotted.
The bayberries are so sour that just a few sets your teeth on edge — a small handful is my absolute limit in a day. I can only look on, helpless, as they rot. It was not until the bayberry season was drawing to a close this year that I finally found the perfect way to enjoy them: blend them with perilla leaves into a juice.
No water — just bayberries and perilla in the blender. One kilogram of bayberries yields one glass of pure, additive-free juice, and I polish it off in one go. Bayberry season falls in mid-May, when Fujian is already sweltering; bayberry with perilla makes a sublime drink to beat the heat. My blender has variable speed. After much experimentation I settled on a setting that breaks down the flesh and extracts the juice without shattering the stones. Once blended, I sort out the bayberry stones to feed to the chickens, then ferment the perilla-bayberry pulp with sugar to make wine. The pomace left after winemaking becomes a cold-macerated jam. Spread perilla–bayberry jam on a rose of Sharon petal, add a touch of passion fruit, and it is divine.
Another home-grown fruit that doubles the pleasure when paired with something else is the white sweet potato. Although both the white sweet potato and the common sweet potato are eaten for their underground tubers, they are fundamentally two different things. White sweet potato — also called white yam — is a leguminous crop. The seeds are flat, a little like small broad beans, a touch larger than soybeans but smaller than peanuts, and the flowers are blue-purple, reminiscent of hyacinth bean blossoms.
This leguminous tuber is juicy and faintly sweet. Besides eating it straight, you can toss it into a fruit salad: cut the white sweet potato into generous chunks, pair it with perilla–bayberry cold-macerated jam, spoon in a few passion fruit seeds, stir everything together, chill for two hours, and you have something outrageously good.
IV. Animals in the Food Forest
I tried many varieties of yam. The earliest was a local variety of “water yam“, also called the “foot-plate yam” — high-yielding, with a soft, starchy texture. Both the white-skinned and the purple-skinned kinds are delicious. The one flaw is that they cannot overwinter: once the frost bites, they rot in the ground. Overwintering water yams means digging them out — that is the downside; but they keep better than betel nut taro — that is the upside — and even someone with my rough-and-ready approach to storage can manage them with ease.
Yam, on the other hand, takes the cold. White-skinned and red-skinned alike, no problem at all — you dig and eat all through the winter, right through to May. The yam sends up fresh shoots on the spot, and after sprouting the texture hardly changes.
So far the biggest challenge with yam-family crops is not planting but harvesting. “In a mature food forest system, the primary task of humans is simply to harvest” sounds wonderfully easy — until you meet a yam. The better the vine grows, the deeper it burrows, and the thing is so delicate: one touch and it tears, one tug and it snaps. The first year I grew them I had no idea what was in store. Digging up water yams called for every weapon in the arsenal, and in the end I was on my knees on the bare ground in prostration.
A friend later suggested filling woven sacks with soil; at harvest you simply slit the bag open. But the yams did not seem happy in there — they all turned into pocket editions. If any green-fingered sage among my readers has a strategy for living at peace with yams, I am all ears.
Yam is a climber. This strangling competitor should not be interplanted with other crops — it can only pair up with ducks. Having them inside the shed risked the ducks laying waste, so I planted a ring around the outside of the duck house instead. Once the vines grow tall enough to climb up, they claim full sun all to themselves; the tangle of yam vine shades the ducks below, the duck droppings feed the yams — a symbiosis, and another expression of the food forest.
First thing when you rise early in Villain Valley: let the ducks out. The moment you open the door, that flat-billed lot comes bustling after you, beating their wings, charging into the pond, while I get on with collecting duck eggs.
The second item on my morning routine is a circuit of the garden. A dawn patrol is pure bliss; I cannot help wanting to sing. Lately it has been “You will cross the mountain, see the boundless blue sky, the birds skimming over the sea.” The ducks in the pond are tottering up the dam, trying to get over the net in front of them. The lyrics give me a fright: I must not let the ducks hear this. Once those creatures break jail, I am done for.
That sets off a day that never stops: planting, harvesting, weeding that never ends, golden apple snails that never stop coming (the rice paddy’s nemesis, the golden apple snail, is the ducks’ favourite snack), and daydreaming that never runs out either. The very last task each evening is rounding up the ducks — driving the whole party home from the pond after a day of having the time of their lives. You absolutely must not let them roost out overnight, or they will lay their eggs in the water. Free piece of obscure trivia: ducks lay their eggs at night, and the timing is very close to the small hours. Source: I wake naturally around five, open the door before six, and ninety per cent of the eggs I pick up are still warm.
Thinking about it, my relationship with this little farm is not so different. The land nurtures me; set within it, I sow, I pick, I weed and prune for the food forest, and I use a dry composting toilet so my own waste feeds the land in return. The life of this land has nourished me, and in turn I give back to it. My existence, too, is one thread in the food forest.
*Editor’s note: Grandma Kouzi’s next piece is titled “In the Garden: From Restless Guilt to Settled Peace of Mind”, which expands on this very topic.
Editor: Xiaodan