The initial intention for our food forest was to start slow, plant some tuberous and hardy plants so they would aerate the heavy compacted clay soil and bring as much organic matter as possible.
The plans got a bit disrupted after a friend texted me with a once in a life time opportunity. A friend of hers was closing their business and were looking for someone to take on everything, which included:
After thinking about it for 30 seconds, I decided to take the opportunity. It was one of those inflection point moments where your future will change a lot depending on your answer.
I could have kept going slow, learning bit by bit and planting known trees and plants or… just, learn fast, fail fast, sweat a lot and get very tired for the next few months.
And oh boy, was I tired. When things started arriving I realised it was definitely too much, I had to ask help from friends to carry some of the huge trees which needed 3-4 people. The first days were full of anxiety and stress trying to see where to put the trees, make sure they would stay alive and identifying all of them. Luckily this all happened during rainy season so watering was not needed.
Within two weeks, we had all the big trees in rows, shading each other and the small plants below. We didn’t plant them, we just buried them with soil, rice husks and grass to ensure their roots would stay cool and protected while slowly we started planting one by one.
The next couple of months we spent planning and planting each tree one by one. A lot of them went through the stress of dropping all the leaves but most of them are showing new shoots already which is reassuring. With the initial plan, I thought it would take me a year or more to fill the whole planting while with this… we just did it in 2 months, and I still have trees to plant!
Through this experience I had to research about many trees I never heard about before and while documenting them, I realised this knowledge would be something nice to share to other people so decided to build a plant wiki so anyone can explore and learn the plants and trees we have here at Cocomanu!