What makes native food forest special? By William Kirst, Executive Director
One of the truly amazing aspects of living in the southern lower peninsula of Michigan is our surprisingly diverse and beautiful ecosystems. Within rather short stretches one can go from dry, sandy, sparsely-treed oak barrens to lush and verdant sedge dominated fens, from beech and sugar maple forests with stunning displays of spring ephemeral wildflower to conifer swamp dominated by white cedar. Among these ecosystem types reside two that are especially pertinent to the topic of food forests: oak savannas and oak-hickory woodlands.
In many ways you could consider these the original food forests of the Great Lakes region. The importance of the food that comes from the two dominant species here, oaks and hickories, can not be overstated. The fruit of each species, acorns and nuts, respectively, were primary sources of nutrition for indigenous peoples. Acorns were ground into a flour and eaten as a porridge or bread and hickory nuts were boiled into a sweet and fatty milk, among many other uses for both.
Black Raspberries are the easiest to grow of our native berries. You should definitely have a patch growing somewhere near you if you don’t currently. They’re delicious, nutritious, beautiful, fairly magical and mostly not as thorny as roses…
That’s just two tree genuses. There are so many more. How about Tilia leaves, Juneberries, Hazelnuts, Currants, Raspberries, Blueberries, Paw Paw among other woody species? How about Alliums, Tradescantia, Groundnuts, Sunchokes, Violets, Milkweeds, Cattails? SO MUCH FOOD.
Now all that food, while being clearly delicious for us, is also delicious to so many other animals. And guess what? Yup, you know it. Those animals are the MOST nutritious foods from the food forest. Deer, Bear, Moose, Bison (seriously, Bison used to live in Michigan), Beavers and Rabbits, Geese, Duck, Turkey, Swans, Turtles and Fish for days. The ecosystems were simply so incredibly productive that food was literally all around.
The communities living here cultivated what the colonists saw as ‘wild’ land, saving and selecting for the most productive trees and the bushes with the sweetest fruits. In doing so, they also cultivated the abundance of animals around them. Are deer a problem in your garden? Maybe it’s time to consider them a nutritious part of your garden…
So the thing that makes native food forests so special is that they simply ARE our forests. They provide for all of life, not just human. Thus, they fully support us, mind, body and soul. Mind as we learn the other beings around us and how they work. Body as their giving of their lives supports our living. And Soul as we connect through our Mind and Body to every other living being around us.
Recommended Reading:
Changes in the Land by William Cronon
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann
