For the first time in my life, this evening, I heard about food forests, on the evening news and I was fascinated. Since my earliest childhood, in South Africa, a country blessed with good weather, fertile soil and natural abundance, I have watched human beings struggling to produce food.
The contrast was shocking; on the one hand this wonderful land where really food grew naturally, most of the people were starving, while the minority worked hard to create food artificially.
Actually the artificial way of producing food is what made it so expensive that most people couldn't afford to buy it and few of them thought of harvesting the natural food of the earth.
Well actually that became ever more difficult because of using the land to artificially produce food, make roads, cars, and what not.
Now this item on the news told us that there is a movement afoot all over the world, including Israel to go back to harvesting the natural foods of the earth.
This means that a piece of land, however small or big, will not be used for producing one type of food only, according to what the people want and will buy, but that each piece of land will be planted with whatever grows best there.
You produce what the land is designed to produce, according to climate, type of soil and available resources.
So on one piece of land you could have different kinds of fruit trees, diifferent kinds of herbs, berries, grains, leaves, flowers, whatever the soil will sustain and it will all be edible.
It will be your food store, right next to your house. It will be a food garden, a food forest.
Brilliant idea, now I'd like to visit one of these.
Here is a link to a site that tells you how you can plant your own food forest.