Occultation: How Our Zone 4 Quebec Food Forest Began
Our Quebec Zone 4 food forest is currently (2024 winter) made up of a few disconnected (soon to be connected) yet close areas including fruit trees, a potager garden beside the house, and a second large garden further from the house where we grow the food that doesn’t need as much attention.
This post will show how it has gone from a meadow to now an abundant garden with growing fruit trees, raspberry, blackberry, and haskap bushes, so many dahlias, and a LOT of food!
Year three of one of our Forest Garden areas which in time will all be connected to each other. There are fruit trees, berries, annuals, herbs and perenials here all creating a diverse system that provides for itself, the pollinators and gives us a lot of food!
It all started with a vision and this space
This is on the second plot of land beside our house where we are building the retreat centre. The vision is to create a diverse food forest that will span both pieces of land. At the time of writing this post, we have been building this dream for 3 years.
As you can see from the photo below, this was a meadow when we arrived. In the 1800s this land was farmed and had animals including horses and cows. We don’t know all the details of course - this is what we have gathered.
In 2021 when we arrived it had been mowed during all the growing seasons before we arrived so it was still a meadow. We let it grow wild the first year to see what was there. It is mostly native plants such as black-eyed Susans, goldenrods a plenty, yarrow, asters, raspberries, pussytoes, blue-eyed grass, and so much more.
This photo was taken in the first week when we moved in. The snow was still melting. By 2023, this space will look like the first photo in this post.
Occultation of the Food Forest Space | 2021
We watched the land from March until late-August and chose to lay out a plan to create one of the food-gardens that fall so the sun and nature could work their magic. We measured out a rectangle-ish space and laid out a huge sillage tarp over the space. I mowed the area and left the clippings there and we put the tarp on top.
This practice is known as “occultation”. The black tarp adds to the process by holding the heat from the sun and starving the plants of sun and oxygen. Below the surface, the insects and worms work to munch and eat the decomposing plants - and there’s so much more going on that I don’t understand.
Building Soil and Working with What’s There | Spring 2022
When we pulled back the tarp the next spring it revealed beautiful soil and it was actually quite beautiful and rich - perhaps the cows of days gone by are part of that. It was about 18 inches of rich dark brown soil before I came to clay!
I set out rows and topped them with compost and soil I ordered locally but looking back, I don’t think we needed to add that soil. The benefit of this was that it meant the planting rows were raised. I filled the paths with wood chips from our arborist chips (due to a storm that spring - so it all worked out beautifully).
The abundance of a diverse food forest
The benefit of adding wood chips to the pathways is that over the year they will break down and create more soil, interconnectedness through funguses and wood chips hold lots of water even when it gets really hot (not that it did that summer though!).
The vision at this time included planting fruit trees around and in this garden as the years go on (which we did the next year). I added native perennial flowers such as Scarlet Bee Balm, Grey Headed Coneflower, Anise Hyssop, and more around the edges so they could begin working their magic and spreading too.
Slowly but surely the garden grew and expanded into a beautiful, magical place by August! The food abundance was huge and my flower dreams came true too! My daughter learned how to make the most beautiful arrangements from Erin Benzakien’s (Floret) books.
The garden was already a place to come to, settle in, and just sit with the birds and pollinators. The connection of all is undeniable when we sit in nature.
As for the harvest, we canned and preserved what we could and froze the rest.
Planting more Fruit Trees & a Lesson from the Deer| 2023
In a nutshell, we lost a huge amount of food to deer in ONE NIGHT in the fall of 2022. As it will still be many years before our hedgerows are grown, we decided to invest in a deer fence around the large garden - so you will see that in the photos.
2023 was all about expanding the fruit trees (more apples, pears, cherries, and alders for nitrogen) and creating more hedgerows of native plants and fruit bushes like raspberries, blackberries, aronia berries, native high-bush cranberries and of course, more haskaps! I planted more purple coneflower, more New Jersey Tea (it did not fare well), more cutleaf sunflowers etc. We continued with the annual veggies and had more success with lettuces and greens which re-seeded themselves for us from last year!
I had tried to propagate elderberries and high-bush cranberries (they grow wild here easily) and my dog ate them all over the winter - so that one didn’t work out. With the spring storms, we again had free wood chips to work with!
I added more dahlias - yup. I added more sunflowers for picking and planting saved seeds meant even more interesting zinnias emerging!
A large focus on Expanded Fruit Tree Guilds in 2023
We added more woodchips and expanded the guilds around the fruit trees all growing season. I added native wild onions, lead plant (a native nitrogen fixer), herbs, coneflowers, lavender, rhubarb and more. The diversity of these guilds will support the whole system - attracting beneficial insects, deterring or confusing others and as always, accumulating nutrients from deep below the soil (dynamic accumulators) - adding colour and beauty!
Stay tuned for another post on Fruit Tree Guilds in the future!
What’s coming to the Forest Garden in 2024?
Not a Khaki Campbell but a baby duck. We will be getting seven of these little ones to start.
More fruit trees and more plants to enrich the fruit tree guilds. We have 3 loads of wood chips to spread and this year I am taking the whole summer off website design so I can focus solely on the forest garden and food preservation (and I have a dream of building a root cellar). I’ve also purchased some zinnia seeds from Floret that I can’t wait to see!
Most exciting is we are adding DUCKS to our system this year! Khaki Campbells to be exact! Stay tuned for that adventure!
Join us for the next workshop or event here! We’d love to see you!
Are you ready to learn about Food Forests and how Permaculture can help your garden?
Graham of P3 Permaculture is offering his next permaculture design certificate course which begins March 11, 2024! Learn how you can support your garden so it sustains itself, learn how you can set things up so you don’t need to water as much, and learn how diversity in your garden = a stronger healthier harvest!
Learning permaculture principles will give you actionable steps and an understanding that will expand and impact all aspects of your gardening, food forest or urban growing experience - no matter what size or level of experience you are at!
