I previously wrote an anti-lawn poem about the evils of suburban lawns. I kid you not, monoculture grass lawns are super bad for the environment. But do you know what is super good for the environment, and your tummy? Berries are an excellent choice to start turning your lawn into a food forest.
Many suburbanites are against fruit trees and shrubs because of the birds that are attracted to the fruit. All I have to say is, how out of tune with nature can you possibly be to think that fruits and birds are bad? I get that maybe you don’t want birds to poop on your precious lawn, porch, or wherever. However, farmers have been protecting fruit from birds for centuries. You can figure it out just like your forefathers and mother did and plant berries in reasonable location for a food forest.
Benefits of Growing Berries
I digress. The point of this post is that berries are tasty, relatively easy to grow, and f**king expensive at the grocery store. This is especially true if you buy organic berries. Another often overlooked benefit of growing berries for a food forest is that there are many types beyond what you could buy at a grocery store or farmers market. The reason that they aren’t sold in stores is because the berries don’t store well for the long transportation and sale logistics required for the industrial food system.
But guess what? If you grow berries yourself, that long period of storage doesn’t matter! At least, not nearly as much because when you’re first starting out, you won’t have huge harvests. You won’t need to figure out what to do with a bounty of fruit. When you do eventually get a large bounty of fruit after a few years, just share the fruit with friends, family, neighbors, or food banks. Or make jellies and jams, pies, or freeze the berries while they’re ripe. Growing berries for a food forest can be very rewarding not just for yourself, but also for your community.
Many Terms with Similar Qualities
So, what do berries have to do with Agroforestry, Permaculture, Food Forests, and Edible Landscapes? Well, since berries typically grow on shrubs that are a few to several feet tall, the plants won’t take up nearly as much room as a fruit tree, even a dwarf one. Not only that, but since berries are much smaller fruits than things like apples, pears, pomegranates, and peaches, losing a few berries to the birds is not really a big deal. If you let the birds eat your crop for a year or two, they will spread the seeds far and wide across the forest. This means more fruit for you and them as the years go on.
It seems that many people who grow berries want to have a few plants in a few specific spots in their yard or garden. While that’s not a bad thing, I think it’s better to let the animals do their jobs and plant new plants for you. If those plants get in the way of other beneficial plants, then sure, pull them up. Otherwise, I think we should learn to allow a little more chaos in our gardens. This method of natural propagation aligns well with evolutionary adaptations required for growing berries for a food forest for the long haul.
A Nod to Chaotic Gardening
Nature is not a simple system, in fact, it is highly chaotic. If you’re really into math (I’m an old-ish mechanical engineer, so I’ve forgotten more math than most people have learned), then you know that chaotic systems are defined as being systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions. By extension, small perturbations to the system can cause drastic effects. So, plant a berry shrub, let the birds eat the produce, and see where new plants grow. There are some drawbacks to this with plants that don’t grow true to type from seed, since the qualities of the new plant would be a crapshoot. That crapshoot goes the other way too, since you could end up with a plant that has better qualities than the original. This unpredictability can be exciting when managing berries for a food forest.
There are also a lot of native berry plants in the USA. If you want to keep your garden native, but still produce fruits for humans, then berries are the way to go. For example, elderberries are native to my area (Maryland, USA), and though they can’t be eaten raw, they can make a good pie or can be used to make wine, or even the flowers can be fried and eaten. Sheepberry a.k.a. Nannyberry is a larger fruit and is edible, and I bet you’ve never heard of it.
So Many Variations of Berries
There are numerous varieties of blueberries, and they are technically native to North America. However, most cultivars are named, and some native plant enthusiasts don’t like named cultivars. I personally don’t care about how the cultivar was selected. I don’t think the pollinators and birds that frequent the plant would care or be harmed in any way from a named cultivar vs. a wild cultivar. Plus, as a permasteader, I’m trying to reduce effort whenever possible.
Many of the named cultivars are much higher yielding. They require the same level of effort as wild cultivars. That’s why planting blueberries and other berries for a food forest is an excellent choice because, well, you have a lot of choices.