I have four broad Permaculture Goals:
1. Walnut Grove
2. Forest Garden
3. Ruth Stout meets Sepp annual garden
4. Nut forest with the primary goal of topping out hogs and a secondary goal of perhaps providing some good squirrel hunting
I have posted extensively about the forest garden and the walnut grove and a bit about some of the things going on with annuals. However, there has been relatively little information about the nut forest. Since my thoughts have been running that way as of late, I will organize them here and see what happens over time.
In late Winter 2010, my father and I planted ten Dunstan chestnuts that we placed in a double row spaced 50' apart on a perfect north-South axis and 80' apart on a perfect east-west axis. A skunk dug one up and even though it greened up and lived for awhile, it ultimately suffered the same fate as the skunk.
Today, I ordered a replacement along with two more from Chestnut Hill Nursery.
These twelve trees will form the core from which the rest of the nut forest will radiate from.
My intentions are to use the same principles used to layout a food forest for the layout of the nut forest, the differences being that:
- instead of concentrating my efforts on the perennials that have a direct benefit to a human, the goal is to select nut trees that primarily benefit hogs and/or wildlife.
- the scale will be far grander.
The Dunstans represent the core. Those trees on the short list to be included in the canopy layer include:
- shagbark hickory
- hickory
- swamp chestnut oak
- white oak
- red oak
- sawtooth oak
- water oak
- beech
For the low tree layer:
- chinquapins
- filberts perhaps
- maybe some shade tolerant fruit trees
- (Anyone know of any shade tolerant trees that produces something a hog will eat?)
This will be a great opportunity to make extensive use of vines like scuppernongs, muscadines, grapes, kiwis, etc.
I don't see much opportunity for having a shrub layer, herbaceous layer or root layer as hogs would likely annihilate such in short order but I am open to suggestions.
If the new Dunstans and the chinquapins are placed this year, I'll consider it a success and will use the next year to research, gather and germinate the seeds and go all out next winter on bringing this thing to a higher level of fruition.
As I write this, I've had a revelation - I don't know that anyone has ever adapted forest gardening to keeping pigs in the temperate zone. Maybe one day I'll be as famous as Robert Hart. Even if I'm not, if forest gardening for hogs is successful, I'll certainly eat better than he did.