Permaculture Food Forest: My Dream Garden | Grandma Kouzi
The dream of a lazy foodie is to build a self-sufficient, low-maintenance garden: a sustainable food forest that yields an abundance of produce while demanding minimal labour.
Back when I studied permaculture in Taiwan, I was properly introduced to the concept of a “food forest”. I had encountered the term long before then, but had dismissed it outright, mistakenly assuming that a food forest required owning an actual woodland—far too extravagant for someone like me. In reality, it is a companion-planting system that utilises space in three dimensions. It can be scaled down to a mere corner of a plot. Hmm, that’s right up my street.
By layering edible plants, a food forest makes efficient use of sunlight and soil, allowing more species to thrive within a given area. While you harvest your food, the land simultaneously develops into a resilient ecosystem.
One point from my studies struck a real chord: in a mature food forest system, a human’s primary role is simply to harvest. That resonated deeply with me. As a lazy foodie, I must absolutely put this into practice at Evil Villain Valley.
I. The Food Forest System at Evil Villain Valley
Straight after breaking the land—back when there wasn’t even a proper gate in sight—I splurged on two yangmei (Chinese bayberry) trees, planting them either side of the entrance. I pictured the day their canopies would stretch across the path and intertwine overhead, forming a living yangmei arch. That would become the most poetic gateway to Evil Villain Valley. It’s a refreshingly novel entrance, and it literally bears fruit. I paid twice the usual price, but for the chance to enjoy plump, sweet yangmei that taste absolutely splendid, it was money well spent.
Two isolated waxberry trees simply wouldn’t suffice. To establish a holistic ecosystem that layers canopy height to fully utilise sunlight and land, I took cuttings of hibiscus and medium-sized edible shrubs to plant beneath them. I then added pumpkins, intentionally guiding their vines to sprawl along the ground to suppress weeds. Through the integrated use of light and soil, a food forest takes shape right there.
By the second year, I had planted peanuts and soybeans under the canopies, along with green beans beside the hibiscus, which climbed straight up the branches without requiring dedicated supports. Being nitrogen-fixing plants, they enriched the soil, while the low-growing peanuts and soybeans effectively smothered weeds. This marked the arrival of a truly diverse food forest system.
Returning the peanut and bean stalks to the soil in situ achieves multiple goals at once: they act as mulch to suppress weeds, replenish nitrogen, and build humus. When the life nurtured by the land is returned to it, the earth grows richer with each season. With every element harmonised, the sustainable rhythm of the food forest is complete.
I planted ginger and sweetcorn beside the loquat tree, originally hoping to include beetroot and chervil as well. Germination was disappointing, however, and only a scattering of seedlings survived. Rather than leave the earth bare and waiting for weeds to take hold, I sowed soybeans, pumpkins, and sweet potato leaves instead. Legumes serve as my dependable emergency fillers, but I will persist in cultivating the chervil, given its value as a perennial.
Of the dozen or so black locust trees planted by the water’s edge, around half survived. By their second year they stood five metres tall, and by the third they were flowering and ready to harvest. The banana plants grown alongside them are low-maintenance, while the fish mint covering the ground is so hardy it requires practically no upkeep. Along the ditch, enoki mushrooms and shell ginger thrive. A quick note: to me, shell ginger isn’t a decorative plant but a proper ingredient—an essential addition to my mixed vegetable soups.
From this waterside food forest, I’ve already harvested black locust flowers, enoki mushrooms, shell ginger, and fish mint. I’m hopeful that next year’s yield will include wild rice shoots, lotus flowers, lotus seed pods, and lotus roots.
II. Low-Maintenance Plants
Fruit crops are the finest investment for the patient gardener, unquestionably top-tier for sustainability. At Eren Valley, we also cultivate extensive patches of mint, dandelion, plantain, barbed skullcap, and fish mint. All are medicinal and edible perennial rhizomes. They not only provide a lifetime of harvests from a single planting but also serve as living ground cover to prevent soil erosion, suppress weeds, and significantly reduce weeding chores.
Other perennial rhizomes with similar traits include daylily, wild rice shoot, and ginger lily. These are taller waterside plants that require more sunlight. They need attentive care and weeding in their first year, but once established, they demand little attention. Their tillering capacity is formidable; by the second or third year, a single plant multiplies into a dense clump. Once they take hold, there is simply no room for weeds to survive.
Over time, the roster of low-maintenance plants expanded to include self-reseeding annuals. Take the Yunnan wild tomato, for example: as long as the fruit touches the soil, new seedlings emerge automatically the following year. Even undigested tomato seeds passed in the droppings of foraging little birds can effectively ‘sow’ themselves.
Malabar spinach behaves similarly. Though an annual, it possesses strong self-seeding capabilities.
Peanuts missed at harvest time will also sprout if left in the soil. Accordingly, I’ve sown some along the sloping riverbank. Where the gradient is too steep for easy management or gathering, I simply leave them be, content to reap a fresh crop come next year.
I was later pleasantly surprised to discover that certain root and tuber crops can overwinter in the ground, naturally sprouting the following year without the need for replanting. Ginger and turmeric are both spices used in modest quantities; any surplus left in the earth simply pushes up again the next spring. What began as a happy accident soon led me to deliberately experiment with more root vegetables.
A local speciality, betel leaf taro, planted along the paddy bunds allows the rice and taro to capture sunlight at different levels, effectively creating a mini food forest system. Once harvested in autumn, its shelf life is rather short; handle it carelessly and it will quickly spot and rot. Left in the earth and dug up as needed, however, it will keep perfectly well for half a year. Come winter, though, it does require some attention. The parts exposed above ground are vulnerable to both frost and rodents, so mounding soil over them is essential to ensure they survive the cold months. The betel leaf taro sprouts naturally in situ the following year, sparing the trouble of replanting. The only drawback is that although the corms remain edible after sprouting, they lose their characteristic floury texture, significantly compromising the flavour.
Here in Wuren Valley, taste is the ultimate litmus test, while the virtue of taking it easy ranks just behind. A crop that is both delicious and practically hands-off is pure gardening gospel; it demands our best ground and warrants generous cultivation.I’ve planted them right around the perimeter of the flooded paddy. With one side given over to turmeric, the rest is entirely betel leaf taro, making the most of every available plot to yield more than we can ever use.
III. Good Taste is What Truly Matters
My dream is self-sufficiency, striving to move from the basic “eat what you’ve got” reality to the ideal “have whatever you wish to eat” goal. Achieving self-sufficiency in fruit is the hardest part. Fruit takes years to come into crop, but a food lover’s cravings simply won’t wait—making fruit the biggest hurdle to self-sufficiency.
Food lovers are naturally driven by cravings and a passion for good flavour. Cut flowers and fruit are both frequently heavily contaminated with pesticides. I never buy cut flowers, so I don’t worry about that, but I simply cannot go without fruit. After achieving self-sufficiency in vegetables and staples at Eren Valley, the tension between inadequate homegrown fruit and the pesticide pollution in store-bought fruit grew increasingly sharp. The cleaner my everyday diet became, the more I wrestled with the dilemma, until the hibiscus stepped up in its second year, coming to the rescue and saving me from a fruit drought.
I first planted hibiscus because it is a reliable, low-maintenance crop. Over a blooming period spanning more than four months, it yields continuously. It is wonderfully versatile: stir-fry it, scramble it with eggs, simmer it in soups, or cook it into porridges—it pairs well with everything.
Later, I discovered it can be eaten raw. Taking the definition that “fruit is the part of the plant meant for fresh eating,” hibiscus flowers taste delightfully crisp and clean when consumed uncooked, quickly earning a spot in the first tier of Woren Valley’s homegrown fruit supply.
For a true foodie, merely being “edible” falls short; it has to actually “taste good.”
Hibiscus not only serves as a direct substitute for fresh fruit, but it also pairs exceptionally well with cold-infused roselle jam. As an annual herb, roselle was the first species to achieve self-sufficiency at Woren Valley. Its calyces are preserved into a cold-set jam that is delicious, though I dare not eat it in large quantities. The light-sugar, original-recipe version is too tart and can make your teeth ache if overindulged, while the sweeter batches risk becoming cloying. With the addition of hibiscus, pairing it with roselle jam strikes the perfect balance of sweet and sour, each complementing the other’s strengths. This year’s new addition of shiso and waxberry jam offers yet another companion for the hibiscus, doubling the joy.
The bayberry trees I purchased were already mature, producing fruit in their second year. However, the harvesting window is short, lasting barely a week. This is their third year of bearing fruit, and more than half the crop from the two trees has been lost to rot.
Bayberries are intensely sour; just a few will make your jaw ache, limiting you to a small handful a day while you watch the rest spoil and feel helpless. It wasn’t until the very end of this year’s bayberry season that I finally found the perfect way to use them: blending them with shiso leaves to make a juice.
No water is needed—I simply blend the bayberries and shiso together. A single kilogram yields a cup of completely additive-free juice that disappears in one go. Bayberry season peaks in mid-May, right when Fujian begins to bake; bayberry and shiso make a brilliant cooling drink. My blender has variable speeds, so after a bit of trial and error I found the perfect setting: fast enough to extract the juice from the flesh without crushing the seeds. Once blended, I separate the seeds to feed to the chickens, then sweeten the shiso-bayberry pulp with sugar to ferment into wine. The remaining pulp after fermentation becomes a cold-set jam. Spreading shiso-bayberry jam on hibiscus petals with a hint of passion fruit is simply sublime.
Another homegrown treat that truly shines when paired with others is the jícama. While both jícama and sweet potatoes are cultivated for their underground tubers, they are entirely different plants. Known locally as white yam, it is actually a legume. Its seeds are flat and resemble small broad beans, slightly larger than soybeans but smaller than peanuts. It blooms with blue-purple flowers that look much like hyacinth bean blossoms.
This leguminous tuber is wonderfully crisp, juicy, and faintly sweet. As well as eating it on its own, it works brilliantly in mixed fruit salads. Chop the jícama into large chunks, toss with the cold-set shiso-bayberry jam, stir in a few spoonfuls of passion fruit pulp, and chill in the fridge for two hours. The result is utterly delicious.
IV. Animals in the Food Forest
I’ve tried growing several varieties of yam. The first was a local cultivar, “Da Shu“, also known as foot-board yam. It yields heavily, has a fluffy, mealy texture, and both the white-skinned and purple-skinned types are delicious. Its only drawback is that it cannot overwinter; a single frost will cause it to rot in the ground. The downside of overwintering Da Shu is that it must be dug up, but the upside is that it keeps far better than taro, which means even my rather unfussy storage methods work a treat.
True yams, however, are frost-hardy. Both white-skinned and red-skinned varieties fare perfectly well. You can dig them up as needed throughout the winter, enjoying them right up until May. The yams send up new shoots right in the ground, and their flavour and texture remain virtually unchanged after sprouting.
As things stand, the greatest challenge with yam-like crops isn’t planting them, but harvesting them. “In a mature food forest system, humanity’s primary task is harvesting” sounds deceptively straightforward, but yams tell a different story. The more vigorously they grow, the deeper they burrow underground. To make matters worse, these plants are exceedingly delicate: they bruise at the slightest touch and snap if you pull too hard. In my first year, unaware of their temperament, I enlisted a full arsenal of tools to dig up the Da Shu yams, eventually ending up kneeling on the ground in sheer reverence.
Later, following a friend’s advice, I tried planting them inside woven sacks filled with soil, so I could simply slice open the bag at harvest time. However, the yams seemed quite unhappy confined like that and produced only miniature roots. If any expert readers have clever tricks for getting along with yams, I’d be most grateful to hear them.
Yams grow as vines, and this vigorous, wrapping habit makes them unsuitable for intercropping with most other plants. They pair best with ducks. Worried that planting them inside the duck shelter would invite feathered mischief, I planted a ring around the outside instead. Once the leafy vines climb up, they bask in unobstructed sunlight, while simultaneously providing shade for the ducks below. The duck droppings fertilise the yams in return—a neat symbiotic relationship that showcases another facet of the food forest ecosystem.
The very first task each morning here at Evil Valley is letting the ducks out. The moment I open the gate, this gaggle of flat-billed friends hurries out, flapping their wings as they dash into the pond, while I busy myself collecting duck eggs.
The second daily morning ritual is a circuit of the garden. Patrolling in the early light is an absolute joy; it brings a tune to my lips. Lately, I’ve been humming, “You’ll turn the mountain, behold the boundless blue sky, and see birds soaring past the sea.” Meanwhile, the ducks in the pond waddle up the dam, attempting to hop over the net in front of them. I startled myself with the lyrics: I dare not let the ducks hear it. If this lot ever manages to stage a jailbreak, I’ll be in for it.
From there, a relentlessly busy day begins: planting this, harvesting that, pulling endless weeds, catching apple snails by the bucketful (the notorious paddy-killer apple snail happens to be the ducks’ favourite snack), and plenty of quiet daydreaming. The final task each evening is rounding up the ducks, herding the feathered crew back to their shelter after a day of revelry in the pond. You simply cannot leave them out overnight, or the eggs will end up in the water. Here’s an obscure piece of trivia: ducks lay eggs at night, typically very close to dawn. Source of this knowledge: I wake naturally just after five, open the gate before six, and ninety per cent of the eggs I collect are still warm.
On reflection, my relationship with this little farm is much the same. This land sustains me; in turn, I sow and reap within it, weeding and pruning the food forest, and using a dry toilet to return my own contributions as fertiliser. The life upon this land nourishes me, and I give back to the soil. My very presence becomes part of the food forest’s web.
*Editor’s note: Grandma Kouzi’s next piece, titled “Amidst the Fields: From Unease and Guilt to Peace of Mind”, will explore this theme further.
Edited by: Xiao Dan