From all the inputs you’ll need to establish your food forest, there is one that could break the bank more than any other.
I’m talking about the sheer amount of plants you’ll need in order to grow your perennial permaculture paradise.
The $$ numbers can be brutal when you do some math on the plants required.
Let’s say you need to plant a few lemon balm patches as part of the guilds around your apple trees. You want to add some aromatic plants to confuse the pests.
For each patch like that, you’ll need, let’s say, six lemon balm (trans)plants.
I’m not sure how much a lemon balm plant costs in your neck of the woods, but let’s say it’s $5. That comes to $30 for one patch. And you need at least ten like this for your ten apple trees – $300.
It turns out that you might need to work all day at your job just to buy lemon balms for your guilds.
I said the numbers can be brutal.
That’s why, in his book Creating a Forest Garden, Martin Crawford recommends having an on-site nursery bed where you can propagate your own herbaceous perennials.
On my micro-farm, I’ve implemented Martin’s advice and developed a system to generate transplants of comfrey, mint, and lemon balm on demand. The whole setup takes 5m2 (50 ft2) of space, and each year, I make myself a hundred or so plants.
Mind you, I’m not an expert on plant propagation, and on most days, on average, I get just 1h to work on my farm. Still, I produce at least some of the plants I need for my food forest. My ethos is: simplify but get results!
I explain my system and yearly workflow in this video:
In summary, in my permaculture nursery, I use a simple, low-cost setup to propagate herbaceous perennials like comfrey, mint, and lemon balm.
My system revolves around growing “mother plants” in containers, which then I divide or use for cuttings to produce new plants.
I start by filling large containers with quality soil and planting the mother plants—some, like comfrey, I forage from the wild, while others like mint and lemon balm come from my existing garden stock.
Once the plants have grown for a full season, I propagate them in the fall. For comfrey, I take root cuttings—small sections of the root that will sprout into new plants. For mint and lemon balm, I divide the established plants and transfer them into smaller individual pots. Typically, I prepare around 20 pots of each, letting them root and develop through the fall and into the next growing season.
I keep the potted cuttings in a shaded, protected area and water as necessary. These young plants don’t require much sun but do need shelter and consistent moisture to establish strong roots.
Once they’re well-rooted, and have grown into a strong (trans)plant I can then transplant them into the food forest at any time of year, although I prefer fall for planting, as it gives them time to settle in before the next growing season.
This system is very easy to scale—whenever I want to expand, I simply add more containers for new mother plants. It’s a simple, regenerative approach to growing a steady supply of perennial plants for the garden or food forest!
All right, I hope you found this permaculture nursery tip helpful and that it inspired you to implement something similar on your own land.
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Talk soon,
-Willliam
