Imagine a yard where trees are dripping with fresh fruits and ripening nuts, shrubs are packed with delicious berries, and every other plant is a medicinal herb, culinary spice, or beautiful edible flower. Tubers and root crops are abundant underfoot, gourmet mushrooms sprout in the shade, and hardy kiwi vines fruit over a shaded trellis.
Fruit trees, bushes and vines bring the joy and flavor of fresh picked fully ripe fruit home. Whether it is one or two fruit trees or a small food forest every landscape should be graced with hanging fruit. Food Forests take the mini orchard beyond just fruit.
Stroll in the Food Forest
A food forest is not growing food in a forest but rather like a forest. It imitates the natural ecology and pattern of a forest where multiple species grow together intimately and symbiotically. We take this pattern and plant the species we need for food, fiber, fodder, and medicines. So instead of just sticking the pear tree out in the lawn to defend itself in a sea of grass with marauding weed whackers we create an extended mulch circle that we plant with useful and beautiful perennials that also support the pear. Leave it at one or space a few of these oasis’s about 15 feet apart and in time you’ll be weaving through a food forest with your wheelbarrow stacking up the harvest!
Ecologia works with a cornucopia of uncommon fruit trees, bushes , vines, cane fruits, nuts, perennial vegetables and mushrooms that are selected for beauty, abundance, and easy of care.
– Brigitte Fortin, Myersville, MD
Welcome to the Orchard
