Kiwis for Locavores: Permaculture at Food Forest Farm

Have you ever felt bad about (or judged for) buying a pineapple in North America? That pineapple traveled a long way, and ate up a lot of carbon just so we could eat it back. And why should we buy that pineapple when we have apples year-round? And if you turn those summer strawberries and raspberries into jam, you’re set for the freeze, right?

But pineapples are great. And fresh fruit that isn’t an apple after a few months of no fruit but apples in winter makes my heart sing. I’d rather spend the rest of my life without a car and never again eating red meat than return to the days when red delicious apples were the only summer fruit, like growing up in Newfoundland 20 years ago. Even then we got a once-a-winter shipment of Florida oranges and grapefruit when the swim team sold them as a fundraiser, and they came in huge cases that we stored in the cold room downstairs for a few months to get us through the worst of the season. So even then we were bringing in not local, because we could, and because without it food was bland and gloomy.

Should we do everything because we can? Maybe not. I won’t eat pineapple every day, but I also love mangoes. And dates. And lychees. And none of those things grow well here in Quebec or most of North America.

But do you know what does grow well here in late October? Perennial Arctic kiwi! Black walnuts! Paw paws! Persimmons! Ground nuts. French Sorrel. Anise hissop. And tons of other greens besides the well-known kale, collards and chards.

And the best part is that, like rhubarb and asparagus, once you have these things in your garden they keep coming back. They’re perennials, not annuals, so you don’t need to replant them every year. So to Eric Toensmeier and Jonathan Bates of the Holyoke Edible Forest Garden (the Food Forest Farm is Jonathan’s plant nursery business) in Massachusetts, perennial vegetables as part of food forest gardens and permaculture gardens are the lazy man’s (lazy person’s?) road to good eating. They can also be for the gardener who has better things to do with their time than plant, weed, and improve soil.

The trick is to find duos and trios of plants that are stack-able and then cover the ground with greens that don’t allow weeds to grow. And animals like certain breeds of chickens and geese can help reduce weeds and pests and add nutrients to your soil if you have a fence to contain them to certain areas (they like to tear some things up, so you need to research the breed and what they like to eat). You want some nitrogen fixers in there to feed the soil and the plants, and you’ll want to find varieties of plants that are hearty enough to survive the cold. Hence the kiwi. Kiwi aren’t just fuzzy fruit the size of an egg. Some of them look like green olives and grow on trellises like grapes:

Which is why when my perennial gardening workshop group stepped around the back of Eric and Jonathan’s home we found ourselves under beautiful trellises of juicy green fruit.

That was after the banana leaves in the front (yellow because the frost got them last week – no bananas, but the leaves are prized in southeast Asian cooking for steaming fish, meat and vegetables),

the mango-sized pawpaws along the fence (a vanilla custard version of a cherimoya with none of the acidity),

the American persimmons (smaller than the Asian versions we see at markets this time of year. There’s a tiny petroleum-like flavour to them that only comes after the ambrosial vanilla-sugar sweetness). The perennial version of the wasabi root, and the edible (and most likely bitter) greens I’d never seen before but would happily stuff in soup.

Did I tell you how the kiwi tastes? When they get ripe and start to soften like a persimmon and all their starch has become sugar, they’re like tangy, chewy, sweet as sugar juicy mouthfuls with texture from the seeds and pulp and a slightly astringent finish. Better than grapes by a long shot. More flavour than lychees. Up there with perfect peaches, but as if the experience of eating an entire peach was condensed into a single bite.

It took a vice to crack the garden’s black walnuts and butternuts (not squash). Apparently hazel trees (that give hazelnuts), chestnuts and almonds are also popular perennial crops, but they didn’t have any of those in their backyard garden.

We saw an unfruiting almond tree and hazel at Tripple Brook Farms the next day, where we also tried some kinds of American persimmons that were the shape of the harder, apple-like Asian variety, though they had the soft, falling apart juiciness of the Asian Hachiyas.

The reason this ground cover, low shade-loving vegetable, medium height plant, and sun-loving tree stacking system works is because plants like to work together. Sometimes. Sometimes they like to strangle each other, wrapping vines around a giant trunk and felling huge trees as a result. And sometimes their root systems play dirty and turn into weeds, like bamboo that needs a strong barrier to keep it from taking over.The idea of the perennial edible garden is to have all these different plants in balance. It’s a complete circle that includes both plants and animals that do some of most of your work for you. Actually, they do what they were born to do, so it really wasn’t your work in the first place. You can do it without animals, but you’ll have less free time, and fewer eggs for breakfast.

So why aren’t we growing more sustainable kiwi? Well, it’s hard to get the seeds. Most of these perennial plants are ancient and seem to be mostly forgotten. There are perennial versions of a lot of plants including potatoes that grow in the air, not the ground (see Eric and Jonathan’s complete list of plants they sell), but why would we want them when we can grow one single type of tomato that everyone wants for their salad? In fact, regular gardens of annual crops are more productive than perennial gardens. So while they’re labour-intensive, they produce more food. There’s no crop rotation with perennial gardens, but for the most part the point is that the soil should stay healthy enough to keep producing well thanks to the biodiversity in the soil system. You hear stories of people with a lone fruit tree in their backyard that gives them more fruit than they know what to do with. What a luxury that seems. But that’s the whole concept of perennial gardening. You do nothing but harvest.

And Jonathan and Eric’s backyard garden also has a subtropical greenhouse with a triple layer of insulation. In it they grow other heat and humidity-loving perennials and house their aquaponics and hydroponics systems.

They grow cresses and greens in one giant recycling bin-like apparatus, crawfish in a second, and tilapia (all vegetarian fish) in the third.

There are lots of mistakes to make in this type of gardening, but that’s why Jonathan and Eric give workshops, do phone consults and know a slew of recent permaculture grads just itching to design and plant permaculture gardens and farms. All these herbs we’ve never seen before like sweet licorice-flavoured anise hissop and expensive spices like saffron are low maintenance crops are waiting to be grown. Unfortunately, it’s often a long term investment, since fruit trees and some other plants can take awhile to grow and produce fruit, but there are others with fast returns,

such as the Arctic kiwi again! Miracle fruit? Officially, no. One of those already exists. But delicious? Officially, yes.

Read more about Perennial Vegetables in Eric’s appropriately named book. Leave a comment below if you want to get in touch with anyone else about permaculture, where to study it, where to find a landscaper, where to find a perennial vegetable farmer, and where to find Arctic kiwi.