Plant collecting is my favourite method of stocking my food forest; it’s slow, and requires patience, persistence and passion - a great anti-pattern to today’s instant culture.
After this, we talked about some very practical ways in which someone can begin stocking their food forest. This is keyed towards your average person off the street, who doesn’t know anyone in real life with a food forest, and has a limited budget. In reality, this involves strategies involving supermarkets, garden centres and plant nurseries. We ended on some ethical and philosophical considerations about this method of beginning a food forest.
In this post (part 3), we will talk about free (no money) methods in which you can stock your fledgling forest
If you feel uncomfortable with using (faceless) supermarkets and (slightly less faceless) garden centres to kick start your food forest, or if you have tried those methods but want more, there are a few other ways to source your plants. Here we’ll talk about my favourite method.
Plant Collecting
There’s a rich tradition of plant collection, or if you want the more exciting term, plant hunting, going back hundreds of years and more, from all cultures and countries.
Plant collecting is nothing more than taking a plant for whatever reason from somewhere else, and cultivating it in a different place.
When I collect plants, I have a sense of adventure and connection back to adventurers of times past, when people knew less but had to work a lot harder to know more.
Frank Kingdon-Ward, just one example of a multitude of plant explorers stretching back into the murky past, and forward still into the future. Credit to UniverCityCulture
Frank Kingdon-Ward is just one example of a multitude of plant explorers. He deserves a substack post (series) just on the work he has done, and he’s not even the most famous one. As well as being a botanist, he’s served as a spy in the 1930s, flirted briefly with a political life and ran a plant nursery side business!
Plant collecting is my favourite method of stocking my food forest; it’s slow, and requires patience, persistence and passion - a great anti-pattern to today’s instant culture.
I think there are several “schools of thought” to plant collecting. In this post, I will outline my favourite method, which I call the “plant collecting stroll”. I might talk about the other methods in later posts.
Wherever you live, observe the plant life around you. I find this grounding experience anyway as it encourages me to live in the immediate present. Do this whenever you can, whilst driving, walking to the local store, or on longer walks. This sounds simple enough, but let me describe the many different ways I can walk around my neighbourhood to demonstrate:
Just a stroll
I walk around my neighbourhood for some exercise.
Appreciative stroll
I walk around my neighbourhood and admire a large tree in my neighbour’s front garden.
Plant collecting stroll
I walk around the neighbourhood. I remember that there’s that large crabapple tree (some type of tree in the Malus family, not M. domestica) in the front garden of the house down the road. They’ve never been picked before; I know this because I remember from two years past that they just hang there until rotten. I take a nibble from one that is hanging over the public street and discover that though it is sour, it is surprisingly palatable so I save the seed in my pocket. Maybe I can discover a nice new variety.
There’s lots of pineappleweed (Matricaria discoidea) growing wild in the cracks of the badly maintained tarmac roads and pavements. I can smell the pungent pineapple aroma when I’m nearby. It’s easy to collect some maturing seed heads for sowing in the cracks of my patio. My research shows me that they make a good herbal tea.
Pineappleweed, where the flowers have become fasciated
A bit later, I notice a flowering quince (Chaenomeles japonica) on a council owned flower bed. I’m excited because it is an unusual plant for the local authorities to plant, and so it’s probably a wild seedling that’s established from a nearby garden. I discover that the quince has quite a few large fruits, the size of half my fist and remarkably few thorns. I take several cuttings from a Swiss army knife that I have handy sometimes.
Wild escape of Japanese Quince!
I start returning home, and check on the Darwin’s Barberry (Berberis darwinii) hedge that someone has planted in front of their house. Their house is on the corner of a road. Every year, all the barberries just fall to the ground or rot. It’s too busy for any birds to pick them, and most British people have been taught from a young age not to eat “random” berries from the wild. I’ve tried a few of the berries before, they’re quite tart - mellower and so tastier when dried. I contemplate germinating some seeds.
Darwin’s Barberry, fruiting profusely
A bit further down the road, just at the corner of the road where my house is, there’s an untidy fence line between two houses that no-one seems to bother with. There’s a beautiful flowering currant (Ribes sanguineum) here, which produces delicious fruit (contrary to some mediocre reports). Next to the flowering currant is an unidentified wild rampant bramble (Rubus sp) which pokes out into the public foot path every year. Below those two fruiting bushes is a Tormentil (Potentilla erecta) which is making a run for it through a hole in the fence line. I might take some seeds from this plant in the autumn. I pause to look at Tormentil and of course I am reminded of my Silverweed Domestication efforts. There are many herbal properties associated with this unassuming “weed”, and I might write a deep dive post about it one day.
Gorgeous Red-flowering currant blooms
A few houses away from my home, I notice some ornamental iceplant (Sedum sp.). This plant is pretty ubiquitous in British gardens - the closest we have to a naturalised succulent and edible to boot! Some people don’t like the aftertaste, but I am fine with it.
I would be remiss to point out that I am a huge advocate of iNaturalist - it’s a project that lets you collaboratively identify plants and animals. If I’m on a walk (and I have my phone on me) and find some wildlife I don’t know, I take a picture and use the iNaturalist machine learning algorithm to help me identify it. Other more knowledgeable people in the community then can confirm what the algorithm thinks. I think iNaturalist is good that I’ll likely devote a whole substack entry to it.
Many types of strolling
I hope it’s clear to my readers what I’m trying to demonstrate. Keen observation can transform a mundane walk into a deep world of interest where you can feel connected to the past, present and future, whilst simultaneously helping you to stock your food forest with species that are already adapted to your local climate.
Just be careful not to practice plant hunting too much when operating heavy machinery!
In the next post of this series, we will explore yet more methods to obtain plant samples for your food forest.
This really is how to do it. Might I also add strawberry runners are exceptionally easy to acquire, and hardwood cuttings taken in late winter can be stuck in soil for an iffy cloning procedure come spring.
(Just keep in mind that if anything easily reachable from the sidewalk it's technically* free game.)
Yes I love a good plant collecting/foraging walk. I'm in subtropical Queensland AU so I come across Surinam cherries, pink peppercorn, guavas, native figs, mulberries and the like quite commonly but occasionally you find the street planting of a grumichama, black sapote, Jamaican cherry, mango, icecream bean or white rose apple that actually tastes like Turkish delight. Those are quite special and very rewarding. I have a personal map I save on my Google maps of locations I find things with seasonality and accessibility details that I update from year to year.
The only problem is once you train your mind to recognise plants it's hard to switch it off! I don't myself always plant collecting/foraging on some level.
This really is how to do it. Might I also add strawberry runners are exceptionally easy to acquire, and hardwood cuttings taken in late winter can be stuck in soil for an iffy cloning procedure come spring.
(Just keep in mind that if anything easily reachable from the sidewalk it's technically* free game.)
*I do not know if this is true
Yes I love a good plant collecting/foraging walk. I'm in subtropical Queensland AU so I come across Surinam cherries, pink peppercorn, guavas, native figs, mulberries and the like quite commonly but occasionally you find the street planting of a grumichama, black sapote, Jamaican cherry, mango, icecream bean or white rose apple that actually tastes like Turkish delight. Those are quite special and very rewarding. I have a personal map I save on my Google maps of locations I find things with seasonality and accessibility details that I update from year to year.
The only problem is once you train your mind to recognise plants it's hard to switch it off! I don't myself always plant collecting/foraging on some level.