Food Forests on a Budget, part 2
Supermarkets, garden centres and plant nurseries
For your convenience, an index for this series.
In part 1 of this series, I talked about what I think is a common journey that aspiring food foresters end up treading.
In this post (part 2) I talk about sourcing plants from supermarkets, garden centres and plant nurseries.
We see a food forest dream, pursue it, and fall face first into the hard packed soil of budgetary reality. I myself have followed this path, and I’ll share my thoughts about the matter in hopes it will help fellow travellers.
I’ve had the privilege of helping a friend begin a small 4 square metre bed in her front garden. She’s not a food forester, and will probably never be one, and she had a tight budget. She also has young children, with specific food preferences - we’ve all been there in one shape or another. So I was up against a rock and a hard place: budget and food preferences. This, and other events, made me reconsider my initial preconceptions about food forestry.
If you took a random person from the street and offered them a bletted Medlar, they’d think you were high. What I gradually realised was that you have to lead people gently toward unusual edible foods. If you prepare the ground in front of them by offering a home grown Apple, and then a home grown raspberry, you can earn their trust and have them follow you down the garden path towards that bletted Medlar.
Sourcing solutions
Whilst your average food forester would have a lower opinion of “mass manufactured” plants, that is precisely where I am going to suggest you look. Like the random person from the street, I am hoping I have built enough trust with you that you follow me down this dark alleyway…
Let’s back this up, and then narrow it back down.
We’re trying to create a garden, so where do we find the cheapest plants? In my area, this is supermarkets and garden centres (and plant nurseries) in the winter.
Supermarkets
Why choose supermarkets? The people who are responsible for stocking supermarkets have a sense of what their shoppers want - in the winter, they will roll out felled Christmas trees (some kind of Spruce or Fir, maybe) and Poinsettia (Euphorbia pulcherrima) and the like, and they will be cheaper than anyone else. They need to beat their rival supermarket chains, and in the process will obliterate the home grown, independent store. They have different clientele, and guess what, these people are the average guys off the street! This is where we swoop in to identify the edible plants that we can use for our food forestry purposes. I often find myself on my phone, standing in front of a trolley of plants, researching the edibility of various plants that were only meant to be sold for (mostly) ornamental purposes.
Plants that I have found and bought from places like Lidl, Tesco and Aldi (the closest supermarkets to me) include
Fuchsias
Very often, you’ll get a some kind of “fun” mix pack. You’ll just be given a genus (Fuchsia), some obscure care symbols and off you go to the self checkout. You’ll be rolling the dice with whether the fuchsia will fruit, but in general, if you avoid double-flowered varieties (look at the picture on the label - if it has one) you’ll at least be in for a chance.
Hostas
This is similar to Fuchsias. Your average person doesn’t care about edibility so you just don’t know if the Hosta you’re getting is very bitter. The leaves can help with choosing the right supermarket Hosta for your situation though. Variegated versions are less shade tolerant than green varieties. I recently bought two reduced price Hostas at Lidl (yes, I even rolled the dice on the Hostas not being bought in the first week) and all label said was “Funkie mix” - this isn’t helpful if “Funkie” is referring to the Latin synonym of Hosta (Funkia).
Berry bushes
This includes plants like raspberries, blackberries, strawberries, gooseberries. These can come in two forms, bare root in the autumn, winter and very early spring, or potted at other times. I would advise avoiding the potted plants because they are much more expensive. For some reason, the labels on these tend to have the actual cultivar. I have picked up some “Hinnonmaki Red” gooseberries, “Titania” blackcurrants and others.
Fruit trees
Bare root fruit trees also tend to be available, and also have their cultivars listed. In the UK, common apples include Jonagold, Braeburn, Golden Delicious. Common pears include the ever-present Conference. Victoria plums of course are available, and some popular cherry variety I can’t remember. Just research the cultivar before you decide to take them. For example, the Jonagold apple is self sterile and cannot pollinate other trees, so require a second different cultivar to help. Apple trees are heavily dependent on temperatures being below a certain amount for a certain amount of time, so factor that in - it’s not like the supermarket stock buyers care.
Once you’ve decided on the you need to choose which one to take home.
You can stack your chances of transplant survival by choosing the most vigorous looking specimens from the display (likely the ones which have been watered the most by a shop assistant because they’re closest to the front). In general, I would avoid multiple specimens in one point as they’re already resource starved enough.
If you’re feeling brave, you can lift the plant up by the leaves to check whether it is root bound.
The soil in these supermarket plants is often inferior quality, and will easily become hydrophobic if not regularly watered. They’ll basically be barren of any soil biota. It’s up to you to decide whether you can save the plants. If you choose to proceed, when you get the plant home, immerse the pot in water for several hours to thoroughly hydrate the soil before thinking about planting out.
If you’re feeling extra lucky but think the particular plant is too expensive, come back in a week and see if it’s been discounted (but not dead!).
I like to think of this process like re-homing a battery farm chicken. You’re doing the plants a favour as they’ll be binned soon anyway. You might as well save one and give it a good home as part of your burgeoning food forest.
Garden Centres and Plant Nurseries
I would actually suggest you avoid garden centres and plant nurseries until autumn. The temptation always for me is to buy a plant, but here’s a better way. Visit in autumn and note down any plants of interest. Come back in the middle of winter and pick these up at vastly reduced prices. The stockists will have fresh new plants arriving in spring and will be looking to shift their “old” plants - this is where you come in. I’ve nabbed plants like fuchsias, lungwort and blackberries that are basically pots of dirt and decaying leaves on point of sale - they grew back happily the following spring. If you do want to visit these places, always check out the reduced section for any edible treats!
Plant nurseries and garden centres cater to our green fingered cousins anyway, so there will be more variety but at higher prices. Take advantage of this.
Other Stores
As you go about your modern world, keep your eyes peeled for plants in general. Think about where most people go shopping, and see if there are useful plants there, tucked away in a sterile shady corner.
General Advice
Not everyone lives in cold temperate climate, but the general themes in this post apply. Observe and act in a way that maximises your benefit - in this case, your food forest. Be familiar with what the cheapest plants are in your area and what they can be used for. Be familiar with what your plot of land needs, and see where the intersection is.
If you need a lot of biomass to improve the soil quality of your food forest, then consider something prolific (carefully!), like false Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus inserta). This particular plant produces copious amounts of biomass which if you cut back regularly will produce plenty of mulch. There’s plenty of species that do this, but in my area, false Virginia creeper is cheaply available as a decorative garden plant, so I would go for that. Carefully managed Apple Mint is another example, though you will need to let the cut stems dry so they don’t spontaneously root when used as mulch.
Another example would be using the widely available primrose which in my area flowers in the winter as a source of colour and pollination in time of scarcity in my back garden food forest. These are frequently available at Lidl at a cut price.
You might discover fringe edible species when you’re stood in front of the plants section in your supermarket - it’s how I discovered that the Gingko Tree had so many uses (thanks ASDA superstore), and that Hydrangeas have some edible species, like Hydrangea anomala (thanks, my local garden centre), and that you can make jelly from the fruit of the popular ornamental Firethorn.
In a way, this efficient use of resources coupled with observation is really exercising many of the 12 principles of permaculture. They’re definitely not just gardening principles.
Compromise for Promised Lands
So you’ve followed me down this dark alleyway, and I’ve not stolen your kidney (yet). What are we doing here? I guess the intersection of the promised food forest and real life is not tidy. It’s frayed at the edges and full of ethical compromises. Counter culture movements like regenerative agriculture (which food forestry is just a sub type) don’t exist in a vacuum, they are embedded in the world and slowly transform it. Appeasements and compromises always have to be made. We might not agree with how supermarkets stock mass produced fruit trees for sale, but we can certainly take advantage of it and try and transform the consumer need from the inside in our own little way.
Back to my friend whose front garden bed I helped plant. We went through a list of fruits her children liked, and that she liked, and splurged slightly on a Black Turkey fig - a very popular British fig cultivar. My friend also really liked cherry blossoms, so we found a Morello Cherry. These formed the canopy layer of a small food forest patch. Underneath these we planted some bare root raspberry canes which formed a small shrub layer, and underneath these we planted strawberries because her children love them. We talked a bit about sheet mulching and wood chip and she decided to buy some dyed wood chip from the supermarket because she liked the look of it. We collected some cardboard sheets and laid them down on the soil. She also hates Horsetail Fern and we discussed their role in the ecosystem at length. This is a topic close to my heart as Horsetail is endemic to the neighbourhood and severely misunderstood..
She’s been pulling them up now and laying the green parts down as nutrient rich mulch. Around the strawberries I’ve given her a rooted cutting of the vigorous Apple Mint, which we’ll use to crowd out any unwanted weeds.
And that’s it. A very simple design; three distinct layers but most importantly, it was cheap enough to afford and easy to source, for example, in a weekly grocery shop. You might not agree with dyed wood mulch, but your average person has no clue where to get natural mulch from. And the look of your garden is important too!
This type of design can be replicated on nearly every front garden in the UK. If you’re reading this in a cold temperate climate, you can probably plant some variant of this design in a free weekend in your front garden. If you had a neighbour with a disused front garden, you could probably make a good friend by turning their front garden into a budget food forest. Later on, when they’ve tasted their first home grown fig, they might ask about other edible plants they can grow to eat. What about that gap over there, between the fig and cherry, they might ask? What can we put there? And you might lend them a copy of “Creating a Forest Garden” or “A Food Forest In Your Garden” … Well, it might happen!
Final Thoughts
In the next post of this series, I will talk about other ways in which I have obtained useful plants for my food forest, and the thought processes and ethics involved.
Until then.
Love the analogy of supermarket plants as battery chickens in need of rehabilitation.