The Mediterranean Food Forest

Building a Mediterranean Food Forest is about creating an enduring natural food ecosystem that regenerates perpetually. This is exactly what we want our food forest to become; a low maintenance abundance of fruit, vegetables, legumes, nuts, berries and herbs that are sustenance for us but also for animals and pollinator insects, year after year, naturally and vibrantly. It will certainly lead to our growing appreciation of plant-rich food.

When the Mediterranean Food Forest becomes productive, we should see an eruption of trees providing olives, walnuts, pine nuts, mulberry, persimmon, loquat, fig, apple, pecan, peach, Mallorquin plums, cherry, pomegranate, apricot, pear, guava, quince, mandarins, and pistachio. 

The herbaceous and shrub layers should include the likes of thyme, rosemary, lavender, sage, oregano, artichoke, grapes, fennel, nettles, fava beans, passion fruit, aloes, capers, Jerusalem artichokes, onions, lemongrass, myrtle, sesame, green chard, English broom, hibiscus, arboreal alfalfa, plumbago, lantana and caña brava. 

Growing the forest will come in two phases, pioneer and secondary, and the food forest will start to come into maturity from year seven.

Permallorca is helping us structure the project. The Mediterranean Food Forest will be a forest-like system of canopy, sub-canopy, shrub and herbaceous layers in which vitality and nutrients come through photosynthesis and living soils, where wildlife and nutrient dense plants are our primary pest control, where soil captures and holds water like a sponge, and where high plant diversity contributes to soil nutrition and regeneration.

Most important in the arid Mediterranean climate is restoring the soils ability to capture and store rain water as well as capturing the nightly dew that rolls in off the sea. However, the starting point is bare fields and baked, compacted, nutrient deficient soils after a century of plowing and offtake. We are building the soil structure over the coming years through dense and diverse cover cropping, lots of roots in the soil, NO bare soils or fallow seasonal periods, no chemicals such as pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and fertilizers to destabilize the developing microbiome, and some responsible irrigation in the first few years until established.

To build the soils we are also planting fast growing chop’n’drop trees that over the next three to seven years will grow rapidly and be pruned regularly to feed biomass to the soil and provide shade and fix nitrogen. These trees tend to be the likes of ash, poplars, alder and acacias or their ilk; fast growing, lots of biomass and often nitrogen fixing. The first years will also see spreading old hay and rows of diverse cover crops between young trees in order to put a layer of armor on the soil against sun, cold, wind erosion and pelting rain in order to protect the soil structure and microbiome. Cover crops will also add biomass to the soil, to feed carbon, nitrogen and other nutrients to the living, thriving biology in the soil and to help the soil capture and store water.