5 Steps to Designing your Cold Climate Food Forest
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Food Forest Tips
My Pear Tree Guild
If you’ve been following me for awhile, you know how much I love food forest systems. While growing tomatoes, peas, squash and other annual edibles is rewarding (and delicious!), there is a different feeling that you get from designing and planting a perennial ecosystem of plants. When I plant things in my food forest, I’ve
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How to Plant a Bare Root Fruit Tree
If you’ve taken any of my classes or I’ve consulted with you on your site, you may already know that I most often recommend planting bare root fruit trees to establish your food forest. Bare root trees and shrubs are typically 2 years old and come with, you guessed it, bare roots. So they are
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Top 3 Tips for Fruit Tree Pruning
In my video today, I talk with Caiseal Orsini from Hillside Nursery about her Top 3 Tips for pruning fruit trees. Caiseal is a certified arborist and co-owner of a Bozeman-based nursery which specializes in trees, shrubs and drought tolerant plants. When we plant fruit trees, it’s important to commit to their pruning and care
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Top 4 Most Effective Groundcovers in a Food Forest
Harvest season is now in full swing on the homestead and I am so grateful. The other day, I dug up all my garlic, harvested fava beans, and am enjoying broccoli, zucchinis, basil and cucumbers from the garden. Meanwhile, the tomatoes are starting to ripen, the winter squash plants are sprawling, and the peppers are loving these hot
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My apple tree guild
When we first moved to our property, there was a mature apple tree already in the backyard. Not only was a excited about having an immediate source of fruit but I was eager to make the apple tree less lonely. Surrounded by grass and not much else, I set to work on creating an apple
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Two Common Mistakes in Planting Food Forests and How to Prevent Them
As I like to teach to my students and clients, we are always striving to create the most resilient site possible. One that will respond to adverse conditions, which, in our case, can be anything from late frosts, to hail, to hot and dry summers. This question of resilience always brings me back to the
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Tour of our Food Forest!
With the climate crisis and biodiversity loss, if there was ever a time to plant more trees, grow more food, and become more self-reliant, it is now. I am feeling this urgency more and more every day. It’s time for action. Taking what small steps you can to build your resilience, to increase your skills,
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Growing Grapes in Cold Climates
I distinctly remember planting my bare root grape vines in late April, 4 years ago, with a couple volunteers, Tim and Carli. It was their first day helping out and I felt kind of bad about the task I had chosen. Rather than giving them an uplifting experience of planting seeds in a backyard garden,
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5 Great Berries to Grow in Cold Climates
There is nothing quite like homegrown fruit. For me, the practice of wandering through my garden plucking tomatoes off the vine is an exercise in gratitude. Being able to add plums or raspberries to my daily harvest adds another dimension to my experience as a gardener. While it’s true that our cold climate doesn’t allow
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