Food forest plans in Southeast Alaska
I’ve always been interested in natural ecosystems and sustainable, healthy, affordable foods. In Southeast Alaska, we get most of our food off a weekly barge. (Jeff didn’t even know bananas were supposed to be yellow until he moved to Arizona from Prince of Wales Island for college.) However, Southeast Alaska has lush, temperate rainforests and lots of native edibles. There is little information about cultivating food forests in this climate, but I think it has a high potential, so my project for this Spring is to get started establishing a small food forest on a corner of the lot that Jeff and I recently purchased.
We will also be putting together a short video series to show our progress. This first video shows what our lot looks like and describes our plans:
Part 1 - What is a food forest?
In short, a food forest is what it sounds like - a variety of perennial and annual edibles planted together to reproduce natural functions that are found in a forest such as soil maintenance, nutrient and water retention and biological production.
You may have heard of companion planting where you plant complementary plants together in the garden. The classic example I learned as a kid in Massachusetts was the three sisters gardening method of planting corn, beans and squash together. Each plant provides a useful food in its own right and also provides a function that allows all three to thrive - the corn provides a place for beans to climb up, the beans fix nitrogen in the soil and the squash provides ground cover to shade out unwanted weeds.
Goals
I think it’s also worth establishing our goals and priorities up front so that when we are faced with decisions we can evaluate trade offs against our own personal goals for our property:
1) Produce foods that we like to eat – I’m going to start off trying to grow things we want to eat. If we end up having to add other plants to support or replace some of these, that’s ok, but we might as well start with ideal food choices.
2) Create a closed, balanced ecosystem – I don’t want to have to add much additional nutrients or organic matter and I’d like to support insects that are natural pollinators and pest predators so we don’t have to manually remove pests or pollinate. It would also be great if we can figure out a way to limit deer and bear foraging naturally, but we might end up using an electric fence.
3) Require as little work/maintenance as possible – We will have to put in work up front to improve the soils, establish desirable plants, and “help” the succession of plant communities in the direction we want, but hopefully when we have our “mature” food forest (ideally this will be around year 5), it will require limited weeding, soil preparation, seeding etc.
First steps
We are also limited this year because I’ve got a temporary soil scientist job on Prince of Wales so I’ll be planting everything I can by mid April and then coming back in September, checking on the progress, and likely making some changes and additional soil amendments to improve the area for the following year. So the goals this year are:
1) get our trees and maybe a few bushes established
2) build the soil with mulch producing, N fixing, and nutrient retaining plants
3) Document everything so that we can figure out what works and what doesn’t and improve for next year
This is what the food forest area looks like at the start - basically just fill material including rock, stumps, and some soil scraped off when the gravel building pad was put in place with some grasses, mosses and alders growing over it all.
Part 2: What to plant?
Food forests utilize companion planting principles to the extreme. There are 6 different plant layers to include- trees, shrubs, herbaceous plants, ground covers, roots and vines. Additionally, each grouping of plants should aim to include as many functions as possible including
nitrogen fixers - enhance the soil by transforming atmospheric N2 into plant available nitrogen
nutrient accumulators - help retain nutrients in the soil or pull nutrients from deeper soil layers
mulchers - provide organic matter to build the soil
suppressors - cover the ground to prevent weed invasion and water loss
repellors - repel pests like insects or deer
attractors - support helpful insects like pollinators and pest predators.
How are we designing our food forest?
Largely by trial and error. While my interest in understanding natural ecosystems has inspired me to attempt planting our own little food forest in Southeast Alaska, this will largely be an uncontrolled, unreplicable (read scientifically invalid) experiment. Google searches will suggest many food forest plants that perform various functions (For cold regions, I really enjoy the explanations and food forest tours from Keith, at Canadian Permaculture Legacy), but it’s impossible to really know what will work for us until we start planting.
In Ketchikan based on winter lows, we are somewhere in USDA zone 6 or 7, but summers are cool and wet, which limits fruit ripening. Additionally, weather conditions can vary considerably in Ketchikan. Sometimes winter storms will drop 8 inches of snow south of town and 2 inches of snow north of town. Or it will be snowing at our apartment 300ft above sea level, but if we drive down to the coast it is raining. We are fortunate to have good drainage and southern exposure on our lot, so I’m optimistic about our growing conditions, but we also have heavy deer and bear pressure because we are located in a newly developed neighborhood bordering public land with lots of good forage.
Additionally, while I don’t have a problem with planting non-native plants, as long as they are known to stay contained in gardens, many common food forest plants such as Mullein, Siberian pea plants, chokecherries, and lots of traditional cover crops are considered noxious invasives in Alaska. I think it’s worth doing the research on each plant we plan to grow to ensure we do not contribute to future problems and be cautious when we introduce non-native plants. With that caveat, we will be planting many non-native plants because native berries are so widely available, I don’t see much value in cultivating them when we can already easily access them. I’m much more excited about things like apples, raspberries, strawberries and asparagus. Furthermore, lots of food forests in the lower 48 begin with large inputs of manure, compost, mulch, straw etc. and hundreds of plants in their first year. While you can take that route if you have the money and time, we will be working in a relatively small area to keep the project manageable, with mostly local, island found inputs to keep the project affordable.
Basic ecological knowledge can certainly be useful, but as with most things in life, there is no perfect formula for establishing a food forest. Natural plant communities establish in different climates, soils, and topography with varying levels of human interference all around the globe. If you understand the basic idea, I think the next step is to figure out what works for you and your particular piece of land by getting out there and trying. We will certainly not get everything right the first few years, but hopefully each iteration will be better than the last.
Our lot is 0.67 acres and I’ve drawn up this plan as a starting point for our food forest area, but I’m expecting that we’ll deviate from this depending on what ends up working well for us.
We are not looking to definitively show the best system of establishing and maintaining a food forest, but rather to document our thought process and experiences so that others might pick up useful ideas. Also, while researching food forests I found I was intimidated by the upfront costs, material inputs and work involved, but I’m hoping that progressively establishing a small food forest doesn’t have to be cost or work prohibitive in a rural community. I’ll post an update in April with a planting post and video to document everything that gets planted this spring and we’ll follow that up in the fall to report back on what worked and what can be improved.
