Our Native Forests Teach Us Food Forest Design (What I Learned in The Siuslaw Nat’l Forest)

If we want to design more resilient, self-sustaining food forests and permaculture systems, what can our own native forests teach us about abundance and resilience?

Today we're hiking in the Siuslaw National Forest, and I'm gleaning what I can from this awesome ecosystem so I can improve my little food forest design back at home.

One big observation: thriving forests are full of dead trees. Let's dig a little deeper into the lesson, there.

Books I recommend taking when hiking in the woods (affiliate links which support me, but feel free to use your local library):

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[permiebird]

We like to use logs and branches as bed edging. As they break down, we just push the remains of the last log into the bed, and lay a new one in its place.

[plurnagaoithe]

I love the idea of using old wood in the garden. Another layer you could add with that would be to inoculate your logs with mushroom spores, though I know you’ve already grown some.

[ecocentrichomestead]

I was wondering if I wanted to use some knotty stumps or a cleaner, longer lasting thing (flat stones or brick) for a retaining wall. Watching this video made me decide stumps.
They'll be much more beneficial. And I could inoculate them with edible mushrooms.

[kerrymoore]

This is really interesting since our rural property is basically covered in downed trees and logs. We had to take down many of them due to climate-change caused insect damage and damage from the 2019 blizzard. You can only cut so much firewood, and there are still a lot of logs around, not to mention the many naturally downed trees out in the forested part of the land. It's expensive and labor intensive to move all the logs, and I wonder now if leaving them to nurture new vegetation might be a better path. One thing which concerns us is fire risk, since leaving a safe buffer zone around the house is so important in the case of wildfire.

[powerlinebotany]

There’s a channel I love (which absolutely may not be everyone’s cup of tea) called Crime Pays but Botany Doesn’t and one of the episodes is about deserts in Chile where all the plants and lichens thrive on water from fog.

Now when I’m in a lichen and moss filled mountain forest here, or a Spanish moss filled forest in Florida, I think about how much water those epiphytic plants and lichens are pulling out of the air and/or retaining. I’m not sure how this can inform our gardening, but it’s a detail I can’t look away from now.

[sarahcornell]

What on earth is that mushroom at 4:57?! It looks like a corncob pipe.

[angelfromtheotherside]

Another wonderfully thought out great video! ❤

[Rox_and_Fields]

Gorgeous! Has your family hiked Falls Creek Falls, in WA? I am slowly adding ferns into my yard. I love how well they thrive here.

[LittleSpaceCase]

Probably my biggest criticism of permaculture is how often plants native to peoples own ecoregions are ignored. Many channels even encourage the planting of invasive species to perform jobs in the garden that native species can handle just fine...and with a huge benefit to biodiversity. I live in the PNW and the coast salish people have never needed to import invasive tree species to have thriving food forests!

A few non-native species are no problem of course, but overall More emphasis needs to be on learning from local ecosystems and replicating the efficiency of those systems.

[bensabelhaus]

Those red ones are whortleberries ;) I don't usually see huckleberry on nurse logs, but always whortleberries. It's a type of "blue berry / huckleberry" but like black cap raspberry, I like to specify the special ones :) It's a different flavor than it's sisters. Unlike black cap raspberry though, it's not far superior lol With whortleberries is less disappointing when you expect a huckleberry lol

[steverudder]

When is the best time of the year for searching for the RED Huckleberry?
It's a bucket list thing for me.😊 Thanks.

[GeordieMilne]

Love your videos as always, but curious & sorry be being nosy but why is your daughter wearing a covid mask in the forest with her family? was she testing positive?