Gardening

This concludes the tour of the Charleston Food Forest. (See Part 1: Right Front. Part 2: Right Back, Part 3: Left Back.)


Blueberry bushes often turn red or purple in fall.




This is black chokecherry.




French sorrel is a salad plant with arrowhead leaves and a bright, lemony flavor. Older leaves may be cooked like spinach.




This sign marks a goumi bush. This nitrogen-fixing plant produces small red berries with a sweet-tart flavor.




Groundnut vines grow up this trellis. As a legume, it fixes nitrogen and thus grows well even in poor soil. Small tubers range from almond to potato size (depending on age, so let them grow) and form on long thin roots like beads on a string.




This sign marks a saskatoon serviceberry. It produces a fruit very much like a blueberry. But unless someone throws a net over it the moment the fruit starts to turn pink -- nevermind purple to black when it's actually ripe -- humans will never get a chance at it. The birds will eat them all first. Mine's a good 12-15 feet tall and I'm lucky to get a few. Short of netting, the only solution is predator saturation (as with my mulberries) and one tree isn't enough. I planted more but nothing else has fruited yet.




This sign marks a patch of creeping thyme, but the stuff is all over the place. That's okay because, in addition to being edible (all thymes are edible, some are just preferred for culinary uses) it also tolerates a significant amout of foot traffic.




Creeping thyme forms low, dense mats of tiny leaves.




This sign marks a rhubarb patch. I didn't see any leaves, and they are huge things that stay green late into the year, so I suspect it didn't survive. While rhubarb is among the few perennial crops that remain somewhat popular today, it's also very easy to kill by overharvesting.




This sign marks a lingonberry patch. I saw no sign of them either. I've tried to grow them with no success. They probably would've done better clustered with blueberries under an everygreen. Lingonberries produce tiny red fruit similar to cranberries but with a more complex flavor.




This sign marks a sea kale plant inside the same cage as the lingonberries.




This sea kale plant has bluish leaves. Many kales remain edible through fall, sometimes into winter, depending on the weather. I've seen them still alive with snow all over them.




This serviceberry bush grows inside a cage of chicken wire. So I guess you could just net the top of that to keep birds out.




Red clover is blooming late. It may or may not have been planted on purpose, but in any case, has culinary and medicinal uses.




This sign marks an apple tree, and the smaller sign says it's a Gala. While apples fit well into permaculture, I consider the cultivar a poor choice. Why? Modern cultivars require a massive program of spraying agrochemicals from green tip stage to shortly before harvest at 10-21 day intervals. Without that, you have little chance of getting usable fruit. Heirloom apples, particularly russets, were much better equipped to take care of themselves and also more likely to breed true or close enough to work. Here are some ideas on growing apples without spraying.




This sign marks a skirret patch. Skirrets are what people ate before modern carrots became popular, another classic old-garden perennial vegetable. Each crown puts out a mess of finger-size roots. They have a thin fibrous core that needs to be pulled out.




This sign marks a nodding onion patch. I didn't see any, but I think these are warm-season ephemerals, so they may just be dormant. This native allium produces showy pink flowers in addition to edible parts.




This sign marks a hazelnut bush.




This hazelnut bush is still mostly green. They bear nuts in late summer to fall. If there were any, they've probably been devoured by now -- squirrels love them. But I'm curious if they're any bigger than the bean-sized ones that my bush produces.




This sign marks the lavender plants that line the entrance / exit path.




The lavender plants are growing about knee-high.




And here's the welcome sign again, on the way out. It makes a very useful landmark.