A little about our Food Forest

Welcome. We hope you have a chance to visit the Green Wave House and the food forest, we call Rancho Passion, someday. That is the best way to truly understand what it is that we are doing here.

A food forest is what it sounds like. Planting denser than say an orchard, trying to mimick a forest yet optimize it for the planter's eating and medicinal desires. At Green Wave House, we attempt to follow the permaculture principles, ethics, as well as the ideas that come from our extended permaculture community.

This post is meant mostly to prepare your mind for what you will experience when you do get here. As in Nature, everything has a purpose.

Here's some of our favorite permaculture guiding quotes and concepts:

This is a quote from a Steven Brooks talk at Envision festival a few years back. He often has great quotes or one liners although this one he repeated from a Jamaican permaculture friend of his. So, this quote could also be "If you plant right, all you do is reap". And reap what? The food and medicine you wish to have in your life. But there is also something more and it segways into another great one-liner concept from Steven Brooks.

Steven says we should be trying to maximize our hammock time, meaning, if we plan or plant right we can also potentially have more time to relax. Steve Brooks is a big fan of planting perennial plants (vs. annuals). This means he thinks we should plant that which has a longer life than just one season. This will free up time from having to replant and all that is entailed in the planting of annuals such as the remediating of the soil, starting seedlings in the nursery, and transplanting them a few times. If we design the planting so Nature does most of the work for us, we will have more time for the hammock but also more general peace of mind that we are food secure (not reliant on outside systems).

In permaculture, we work with 5 zones. That's at least how we were taught. Zone 1 is what you want close by. This would definitely be medicine. I often tell people to have aloe very close to the house (especially kitchen) for burns. Zone 1 and 2 would be food. Zone 3 might be things you don't want as close to the house such as compost and chickens. Both can be a little stinky and both may attract wildlife too close to the house otherwise. Zone 4 is what we think of as the boundary zone. Planting with our wildlife neighbors in mind either to distract them with food they like or perhaps plants such as agave that may dissuade them from coming in. Zone 5 is Nature as She is. It's where we go for inspiration and lessons.

This is part of planning right. We have a lot of plants in the food forest that are grown as support to the food and medicine plants. Most of our support plants have flowers and help pollinators (birds, bees, etc.) or add nitrogen back to the soil. Though we may allow them to grow to maturity, we also grow them to prune back. What we cut we place on the soil to help build or rebuild it. Placing leaves and branches on the ground can be called mulch. It helps protect the soil from the Sun (killing beneficial microorganisms) and the Rain (erosion) while also helping to retain mositure (not have it evaporate immediately and also keeping the soil cooler). The process of pruning for this purpose is colloquiolly called "chop and drop".

This plays into maximizing hammock time. Anytime we go outside to tend to the land, we look for the best use of our time. We are always on the lookout for opportunities. We need to trim a tree back because it's shading a food tree? Will the chop and drop be best used as mulch around the plants we pruned or somewhere else? This would only be one of countless examples. Let's say we are watering. For instance, most of our property is on drip irrigation so we reduce time and also conserve water. It's a question always running in the background of our mind as we walk the property to tend it.

Every week we go Live on Facebook to talk about our weekly work and insights here at Green Wave House and Rancho Passion. You can also check out our 2 year catalog of Farm Talk Fridays on YouTube!