so this is an example of the seven layers of the forest garden in our garden but you've got trees you've got shrubs herbs ground covers roots and climbers and they're all edible medicinal or useful in some ways we also apart from food medicines we also grow plants for pollinators to up the productivity nitrogen fixers plants for structure so I'll come to that in a minute so this is a picture that mr. Burnett will recognize I'll give you a little bit of a credit there because grand drew it and I take that with I hope goodwill and his license so just explaining how how your your filling all of the niches from from the climax cama canopy all the way down and of course you know in a tropical forest you can cram it all in together so that you're totally you know you've got everything almost stacked on the vertical underneath each other and and that's kind of when you start you think all that's going to be the ideal I I'm going to do that I'm going to have every niche full there'll be no room for any you know weed species I don't want but it doesn't work like that instead we had to forget all about Kerala and Belize and all these scrummy warm subtropical or even Australia you know we had to forget about all that marvelous what Stefan gaya would call permaculture porn all right there is some porn in my garden and that's what I want to share with you it's like how can we have permaculture porn in the cool temperate climate we can but only a little bit so so this is Martin Crawford Martin Crawford is from the agroforestry research trust in Devon he is absolute world authority on all the seven you know species of plants for all those seven niches from the top canopy right down to the root systems he's researched in exhaustively for over 25 years he's really remarkable and then he has plant nursery so he's been really influential for us so and I was very happy to see that you know we'd been seeing him every five years or something and as our garden grew and developed over time I was really happy to see that we'd had ideas that we thought that were our ideas and we went and saw that he'd done the same thing because of course there are patterns in nature and and it's our job to interpret those patterns and then planting those kind of guilds or ways that replicate natural patterns so you know we're all doing it so this is ground zero so we didn't when we bought a house we didn't have a big garden we had a bit of a paved yard which is how we bought it because it was cheaper and so Tim had this dream that we would acquire up to here and that we write in badger the landowner until eventually they surrendered and and let him buy a part of the field as a garden extension and we managed that in 1994 and I just want you to know that this underneath sort of rustic Edel was a totally plowed out field that hedge lied was that higher because it had lost that much topsoil we're on flint and chalk so it was all subsoil and and then hard chalk you dig down in some places that far six inches that or more and you'd get a white bony in almost you know sometimes you'd have to use a pickaxe to plant a tree and the it had you know it was arable crops every what year never rested and then intensive use of chemical fertilizer to keep the system going and this is what it looks for imagine imagine green lush that's exactly the same place in about 2008 2009 so that's 14 years any and every year the biodiversity increases and increases and so do the yields third of an acre not 0.26 hectares I believe for Europeans and so how do we do it we used to scale on a grid paper with an overlay which we learnt from Max Linda ger how to design on paper it's very resilient for when we have power down no computers and we thought right we're going to select all the trees that we want to plant and we're going to calculate their canopy relative to the scale of the the template app at the point of their greatest maturity and then we're going to plot them out with blue TAC it's very sophisticated and actually what's really useful we're doing it so so you'll see that there's a kind of great big bit in the middle that hasn't got trees in it which is very different to how Graham's garden is and this is for a reason that I will elaborate on so we so we had this soil that was like you know a wound and the first thing we did which we covered that wound with a dressing with a bandage and it's real ecosystem repair this we took the most native wild flower species mix that we could find relatively local to us and we just sewed it we sewed an annual mix mixed with perennials and the other thing we did was around all the outside we planted Hampshire so local to our County our region Hampshire native species mix because there was just net once that NPK that fertilizer had leached out of the soil there was nothing there to feed the trees so we couldn't plant anything that would have a need for very much food and then we started planting and of course you know we wanted to fit everything in so at a big planting bit day we got barrel of beer we invited all our friends said hey you know we've got a tea fruit nut cheese please come and plant them with us and but before Tim had gone out and he'd got his grid and he'd put bamboos in where every single tree was going so he was very methodical and he he had a plan and each tree was plotted out according to the canopy mature stage and it was all on a grid of baler twine any of you Brits hear the the beautiful free resource in our community Bailey twine that ties up straw and he spent two weeks um wandering around fiddling with bamboo and I was thinking what what's he doing and actually he what he was doing was imagining walking underneath the canopy when it was mature and realizing that it'd be walking rather garden like this because this is the most fundamental mistake that people make in forest gardens they think oh yes I want apricot I want Walmart I want Apple I want shrubs cram them in and of course if you do that you spend an awful lot of time pruning you have no proper you don't get the canopy in the Sun of each tree you you get diseases you get too many branches that rub and can cause problems for the tree you know generally it's a recipe for an unhealthy garden and and you have to in a cool temperate climate you have to give the space you can't replicate the jungle in quite the same way okay so stacking in space and time so here you got exactly as you suggested we've got pears and mendler Turkish mendler a walnut tree and they're all mixed up underneath with comfrey and joste berry and the mixed hedge which is native species mixed with edibles as well so there's some quite robust trees like wild plum produce Mount Meru Balam elderberry and we've we've had success with growing damson in hedgerows and allowing it to go to standard and wild service tree as well and then underneath one of the best things we've found is gooseberries because they can't they still fruit in low light so in the earlier times while these little sticks are you know growing and we've marched the ground and then weave in filled with as many different currents as possible so we like these successional cropping species and we're trying to achieve that with things like apple so we have about 20 variety of Apple and they start cropping around you lie and go late into the year and some of them are not as sweet and tasty but they store really well so one apple tree we have is called Hambledon design and Hambledon excuse my french Hambledon is on the village next to us and dizzle is two years and the reason why this apple tree was popular until refrigeration became fashionable is it stored not just for one winter but for two in the right conditions so if you had a failure with your crops the next year for any reason like a late hard Frost that killed the the fruit you would have at least something in the store and I would recommend to all of you plant one apple tree at least that is local to your village or your your area in wherever you live in cool temperate climes because you know it's so important that you know that apple tree was local to you traditionally for very good reason you