Plants for Your Food Forest

500 Plants for Temperate Food Forests and Permaculture Gardens.

An important new book from PFAF. It focuses on the attributes of plants suitable for food forests, what each can contribute to a food forest ecosystem, including carbon sequestration, and the kinds of foods they yield. The book suggests that community and small-scale food forests can provide a real alternative to intensive industrialised agriculture, and help to combat the many inter-related environmental crises that threaten the very future of life on Earth.

PFAF’s primary objective is to maintain and improve our free online database of information on edible and useful plants, especially perennials. In recent years, in response to the global environmental crisis and increasing interest in alternatives to intensive industrialised agriculture and commercial plantations, we have extended the database to include more plants likely to be used in community and small-scale food forests, carbon farming, and carbon sequestration projects. Plants for your Food Forest: 500 Plants for Temperate Food Forests and Permaculture Gardens has drawn on this development work. The choice of what to grow in a food forest is challenging. It is not simply a matter of deciding what would be good to eat, and planting the corresponding food plants in beds alongside rows or patches of woodland. There is an increasing number of books about food forests, woodland gardening and carbon farming, but most concentrate on design principles and concepts. The focus here is on the plants, their characteristics and personalities, what they have to offer a food forest ecosystem, and what kinds of foods they can provide. We have selected over 500 plants that provide a mix of different growing conditions, plant size and structure, type of food, and role within a food forest ecosystem. There is also a quick-reference table of the key characteristics. The featured plants are arranged in sections corresponding to Forest Layer: Shrubs, Groundcover Shrubs, Trees, Herbaceous Plants, Herbaceous Groundcover Plants, Running Bamboos, Bulbs, Climbers.

Plants for your Food Forest is a compact and easy-to-use guide to choosing plants to meet your own objectives, to fulfill your own food forest design. Buying this book also provides PFAF with revenue to support our on-going efforts to make our plants database available free of charge and to continue to extend and improve the information it contains.