Forest Garden
Walnuts, Heart nuts, and Hazelnuts form the basis of our forest gardens. We under-plant with medicinal herbs as well as nitrogen-fixing plants, culinary and tea herbs, flowers and various small fruits. This is a grand experiment that allows us to play with coppicing our hazelnuts and the cherry, ash and maple that formed the forest before we cleared for our nut and fruit crops.
The forest garden is a project that seeks to mimic how food grows in the wild. It includes a planting of hazel nuts although it's separate from our nut grove that is only nuts. Our forest garden consists of hazel nuts that we may manage by coppicing sometimes to harvest pole wood for various projects such as garden stakes, arbor building materials, etc.
This hillside forest garden is partly a terraced area and partly a bulldozed stump and brush pile that was planted with various trees and is being overtaken by wild blackberries and elder. We have various fruits from Italian musk strawberries to honey berry and also