Creating our Permaculture Food Forest Garden

We have lived in rented accommodation all our married life – all twenty years as I write this in March, 2021 – and all we’ve longed for is a place of our own to grow a food forest garden. Renting makes it impossible to feel settled and secure and I’ve just played half-heartedly at trying to be self-sufficient. We’ve learned over the years that you can be booted out of rented housing at the drop of a hat and putting all the effort into building a permaculture garden that you could have to leave with a month’s notice is too much for me.

The whole idea of a permaculture-based food forest garden is that it requires years’ of building up to create a year round source of food and haven for nature. But, as I motor into my 60s and with my husband and I never likely to have the money to buy our own property with enough land to provide food for us, it looks like we’re destined to stay renting.

Saying that, we are lucky in as much that our rented 17th Century, much dilapidated, farmhouse sits on a plot of around a third of an acre. Most of that land is unusable as it has outbuildings that are pretty derelict and uncared for, and much of the old farmyard area of the garden comprises hardcore, cobbles, broken glass and old rubbish just below the surface of the ground. The back garden is a large chunk of grass, plagued with moles with yet more broken glass that is thrown up in every mole hill! We also have a teeny paddock of about two thirds of an acre where we keep our two alpacas and one old llama. We have converted an old brick built shed in our front garden/old farmyard for five chickens who have just learned to lay.

So, after the lock downs this last year, I realised that we need, rather urgently, to make more of our garden and become as self-sufficient as we can. I really fear food shortages in the coming months/years because I believe that these lock downs are going to become habitual now that our government knows that it can control us like this. There is a lot that I fear for our world’s future which I won’t lay out here, but it does involve me realising that we all need to learn how to grow our own food.

I have been experimenting with, and learning lots about, perennial vegetables and do grow annual veg in my raised beds. And now I want to share my new venture with the rest of the world – that of really making the effort to turn what land we have here into a food forest, for as long as we are here. If we get chucked out, that is a hurdle we will have to jump at the time. Right now, we are running out of time. I shall log my efforts across the months starting January 2021, when I decided it’s time to knuckle down. I know I shall make lots of mistakes but by logging everything here, in my blog, I can share those mistakes and hopefully learn better ways of doing things!