Nanabush Food Forest Stories

Reading Mark Shepherd’s book called “Restoration Agriculture: Real-World Permaculture for Farmers” is very motivational. Our focus is on perennial woody plants (like fruit and nut trees). It is a pleasure to read a well-worded argument for why this is a good idea.

One of the challenges of ‘urban farming’ is that there seems to be great feeding pressure, possibly due to the distance between edible green spaces. A lot of animals live within city limits, and when they find a patch of succulent food, they make short work of it. Got to give it to the grackles, they are smart birds! They figured out that the haskap berries were ready for harvest at our basecamp food forest and cleaned us out! We managed to harvest some for ourselves, but the rest were gone within a day. The hungry birds then turned their...

Our vines are growing, and loaded up with some lovely little green gems. The Kolomitka kiwi plant is a very long-lived woody scrambling vine and creeper, which ultimately grows to 8–10 m. Kolomikta is the hardiest species in the genus, at least down to about -40°C in winter, albeit somewhat susceptible to late spring frosts. The plant was collected by Charles Maries in Sapporo, on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, in 1878, and sent to his patrons, Veitch Nurseries, who introduced it into Western horticulture.