Jim Gale on the benefits of growing your own food

Jim Gale, who was previously on my radio show, heads up Food Forest Abundance, an organisation that helps people design and grow food forests.

A food forest is basically an agricultural system or method that integrates people with natural surroundings via highly efficient self-sustaining ecosystems. To make it simpler, a food forest is a garden in which food is grown.

A food forest, also called a forest garden, is a diverse planting of edible plants that attempts to mimic the ecosystems and patterns found in nature. Food forests are three dimensional designs, with life extending in all directions – up, down, and out. Generally, we recognize seven layers of a forest garden – the overstory, the understory, the shrub layer, the herbaceous layer, the root layer, the ground cover layer, and the vine layer.

Animals are included

Permaculture is not a sneaky globalist attempt to trick people into going vegan and eating ze bugz. Including animals, from chickens to goats to whatever else, is fundamental to a flourishing food garden because it adds diversity.

And I’m not referring to the woke, politicised hijacking of diversity. I’m referring to actual diversity. Jim explained, in the following conversation, why diversity of plant and animal life matters and how it reduces destruction caused by insects and birds and so on.

It makes sense.

If my garden only has tomatoes and I have an invasion of bugs that like tomatoes, then my whole garden is in trouble. But if tomatoes only make up a small part of my garden, then my whole garden is not in trouble. Chickens (and other birds) love bugs and so the ecosystem’s cogs starts turning.

My conversations with Tim Noakes, about diet and nutrition, go hand in hand with my conversations with Jim.