It’s often said that Planting is 10%. Maintenance is 90%. And certainly a food forest grows not by chance, but by the cut of a blade and the return of light. 🌳  Maintenance is at the heart of syntropic agroforestry. The ongoing disturbance and renewal, drive the growth. 

The time taken to plant is very small in comparison to the ongoing practice of being the human in nature as nature, creating the disturbance and bringing about the growth pulse.

It was a wonderful opportunity to be able to work with a system that has had minimal annual maintenance since its establishment about three years ago. After some exploration and agreement on how to proceed we jumped in and cut back the edge support species, to let in more light.

This is the beginning of Spring, so the productive trees will now be better able to work their photosynthetic magic. After this first intervention, we could clearly see the diversity and density of productive trees in the system. We followed this by pruning away deadwood in the productive trees, and dropping the height of one or two, for ease of harvesting.

After lunch people gathered an abundance of plant material for propagation and use in their own installations. 

Since the training day, I’ve been sent pictures of one of the design ideas for a syntropic agroforestry installation and one of the participants shared photos of the framework of her future system, set out with rows of support species. 

My sense was that everybody felt this was a very satisfying way to spend a day. Hands on and rewarding.

To join the planting day on Oct 12th, register here:

Event Registration