Edible Landscape & Food Forests

"We can solve all the world's problems in a Food Forest Garden"

Geoff Lawton

Conventional landscaping is usually associated with the use of ornamental plants, mostly chosen for their aesthetics. Beauty is mostly preferred over productivity and functions such as aiding to the increase of local biodiversity or providing food for the pollinators, are usually ignored. What we end up with most of the times, are gardens with big stretches of water and chemical input-thirsty lawns, featuring non-indigenous bushes, shrubs and trees that many times require more water and resources than the endemic species do.

In Permaculture Designs Cyprus we believe that your garden, yard or landscape should be combining both:

Beauty and Productivity in one go!

What is Edible Landscaping?

Edible Landscape is a planting system that combines crop-yielding, ornamental plants and supportive species all together. Edible Landscaping finds it's roots back to the ancient Babylonian and Egyptian gardens when highly aesthetic landscapes were created while providing people with all their basic needs: food, fodder, timber, shelter and medicinal uses.

This system utilizes a diversity of gardening techniques, working with edible fruit and vegetable bearing plants, culinary and medicinal herbs along with edible flowers in order to set up a high yielding, multi faceted garden.

Edible landscape designs are depended on your location and climate, featuring different species according to each case. The layout and combination of fruits, vegetables, herbs, shrubs, bushes, vines or ground cover will vary but will always aim for the same goal: Contribute to the creation of an attractive landscape while helping feed you and your family.

What is a Food Forest?

Would you like a highly diverse and productive system that doesn't take much of your time for maintenance?

If the answers is yes, then a Food Forest is probably your best choice!

A Food Forest is a human made forest that mimics a the balanced ecosystem of a forest, designed with a diversity of plants, animals and fungi and aiming to provide maximum food with minimum care.

A Food Forest is a seven layered polyculture system based on the principles of natural forest systems. The basic layers that comprise a food forest are:

Canopy: Tall-tree layer
Low-tree layer: Smaller fruit or nut trees
Shrub Layer: Fruit bearing bushes
Herbaceous layer: Herbs and perennial vegetables
Roots Layer: Rizhosphere or underground featuring tubers and root plants
Ground cover layer: Horizontally spread of edible and non edible plants
Vertical Layer: Vines and climbers

"Plant an edible forest garden

on your land,

and reap the benefits

of permaculture

in the years to come!"

Gabriel

A Food Forest is designed and built to mimic a real forest. With forests being home to approximately 50-90% of global land living biodiversity, it’s easy to understand that this could be the most resilient, productive and diverse system to produce food with.

“What makes a forest system so diverse, resilient and productive?”

someone may ask. The answer is simple and gets down to one word: SYNERGY. Through enhanced biodiversity and synergistic relationships between all hosted species balanced and high yielding results can be achieved.