Food Forest Design & Care for Cities and Suburbs

Course details

You can build a permaculture food forest at your home, for a neighborhood, or as part of a city!

Food forests, or edible forest gardens, are life-filled places that provide

• food for people
• habitat for wildlife
• carbon sequestering
• biodiversity
• natural soil building
• beauty and tranquility
• host of other benefits

This workshop covers the basics of designing, planting, and maintaining a many-layered woodland forest garden full of fruit and nut trees, perennial and annual vegetables, and flowers.

In this class Toby Hemenway gives you both the theory behind food forests and a wealth of practical information, including which plants to use, where to start, and what to expect as your food forest grows and evolves.

Toby Hemenway comes to permaculture with a strong science background. He is skilled at delivering complicated scientific topics to people who may not have a science background. In this course he explains the ecology behind a healthy, productive food forest or edible garden.

As a pattern specialist, Toby explores a variety of design strategies and techniques for you to use as you design your food forest. As he explores permaculture with you Toby explains the importance, application, and usefulness of the 14 Permaculture Principles. He also demystifies the sometimes confusing topic of guilds. He helps you understand what guilds are and shows you three ways you can design by guild as you create your own food forest.

Permaculture may be one of the most misunderstood terms out there. From this class you will gain a thorough understanding of what permaculture is, how it came to be, what it does, and most importantly what you can do with permaculture. Toby Hemenway clearly explains how you can apply permaculture to all aspects of your life as you strive to create regenerative systems. He will both inform and inspire! Upon completion you will hold the knowledge you need to create a food forest garden that will yield the results you want.

About Toby Hemenway

Toby Hemenway is the author of Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, which was awarded the Nautilus Gold Medal in 2011, was named by the Washington Post as one of the ten best gardening books of 2010, and for the last eight years has been the best-selling permaculture book in the world. Toby has been an adjunct professor at Portland State University, Scholar-in-Residence at Pacific University, and has taught over sixty 72-hour permaculture design courses. He has presented lectures and workshops at major sustainability conferences such as Bioneers, SolFest, and EcoFarm, and at Duke University, Tufts University, University of Minnesota, University of Delaware and many other educational venues. His writing has appeared in magazines such as Natural Home, Whole Earth Review, and American Gardener. He has contributed book chapters for WorldWatch Institute and to several publications on ecological design. Visit Toby’s website – The Center for Pattern Literacy.

After obtaining a degree in biology from Tufts University, Toby worked for many years as a researcher in genetics and immunology, first in academic laboratories including Harvard and the University of Washington in Seattle, and then at Immunex, a major medical biotech company. At about the time he was growing dissatisfied with the direction biotechnology was taking, he discovered permaculture, a design approach based on ecological principles that creates sustainable landscapes, homes, and workplaces. A career change followed, and Toby and his wife, Kiel, spent ten years creating a rural permaculture site in southern Oregon. He was the editor of Permaculture Activist, a journal of ecological design and sustainable culture, from 1999 to 2004. He moved to Portland, Oregon in 2004, and spent six years developing urban sustainability resources there. Toby and his wife now live in Sebastopol, California.