Why the Fernmount Food Forest can look overgrown at times.

The percentage of nursery and soil improving trees and shrubs can be as high as 95% when a food forest is first established, gradually reducing as food bearing trees and plants mature. This excellent, recent video clearly describes the layers of planting: canopy; understory, bushes and shrubs; herbaceous; and root layers.

The Fernmount Food Forest is not an overgrown garden but a food forest with structured layers where the 'chop and drop' of soil improving trees and shrubs is practised, especially after the Autumnal rains.

Misty Morning

 This piece from Permaculture Online perfectly describes the Fernmount Food Forest plantings.

"For designed food forests, the plants change from climate to climate. In the subtropics, tamarillo functions as an understory, and also within this layer are productive trees, such as feijoa, guava, and citrus. Taro, coco yam, and cassava are root yields. There are also large herbs, like bananas. The food forest would also include large support species—ice cream bean, tipuana tipu, casuarina—that support the forest by cycling nutrients, as well as understory support trees, a la acacia, leucaena, cassia, and albizzia. Most of these support species will eventually give way to large, productive species: rose apples, mulberries, jackfruit, bunya pine, pecan, and mango. The system remains very stable when all the layers are occupied." Permaculture Online



Clearing the layers of a food forest would mean extensive work and effort would be required to prevent a fast overgrowing by weedy species as well eliminating food yield.
 

Misty Morning

Tree Dahlia in the distance beyond the Bloodwood

Main garden path with self sown Tree Ferns. Note the Shrub layers.

After the rain

Villa Franca Lemon overhangs a path. The lemon is an understory tree.

The 'canopy' layers are easy to see from above.

Here are some pics of the food forest floor showing recent and past mulching that will over time feed the soil and meanwhile provides insect and fungi habitat.

A Blue Java Banana with fresh mulch. Note the climbing Yam Bean, a root crop.

A White Dragon Fruit with Grevillia mulch

A Red Dragon Fruit with various mulches. The Albizzia in the foreground is a 'cut and drop' mulch tree.

Older leaf mulch under an Ivory Curl native habitat tree.

Old and fresh mulch, not small or pretty but effective.

Pecan, a canopy tree

Native Tamarind, a canopy tree

Fast-growing Tamarillo, a food producing shrub, fruit abundantly for a year or two.

A Persimmon is a shrub layer when small, understory when mature

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