Product Description

This comprehensive two-volume book constitutes an in-depth course in ecological garden design. Written in a passionate, clear, and engaging style, it integrates the vision and ecology of forest gardening with practical design, establishment, and management strategies. While Edible Forest Gardens was written as an integrated whole, each volume can stand alone as valuable learning tools and references.

Volume One begins with an overview of the ecological and cultural context for forest gardening in modern North America. It also lays out a holistic vision that guides the study of forest ecology that follows. This ecological exploration forms the bulk of Volume One, and offers clear and specific direction for forest garden design and management. Three forest garden case studies ground the concepts discussed in the book and bring them life. Volume One concludes with colorful descriptions of forest gardening's "Top 100" species, and useful listings of information and organizational resources.

Volume Two focuses all of its attention on effective design and practice. It organizes the ecological strategies from Volume One in a way that is accessible to gardeners and designers. It offers a unique 'pattern language' for forest garden design, and provides detailed advice for how to design, prepare the site for, plant, and maintain your forest garden. Volume Two also includes a unique Plant Species Matrix and several associated appendices which offer a wide-ranging catalog of the ecology, uses, and ecosystem functions of the best temperate-climate forest garden plants, and a few edible mushrooms, from around the world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #34233 in Books
• Published on: 2005-11-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 2
• Binding: Hardcover
• 1068 pages

From the Publisher
"...this book will define the intellectual territory of its subject for at least a generation...Dave Jacke has knit an indigenous practice at once ancient and renascent with the mainstream of scientific exploration. He has given us legitimacy – and by us I mean all the ecological agricultural explorers of the epoch – and a cogency that will now be impossible to denigrate or diminish...An excellent and essential reference, brilliantly conceived and passionately written, Edible Forest Gardens should be on every permaculturist's reading list for the year ahead." --Peter Bane Publisher, The Permaculture Activist magazine

"...But the book I will be keeping by me for the seasons ahead... is Edible Forest Gardens by Dave Jacke with Eric Toensmeier. In its way this book--the first of two volumes--is a sequel to the wonderful Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture (1929) by J. Russell Smith.... Edible Forest Gardens offers a vision of the garden that reaches well beneath its aesthetic surface and into its ecological depths. It reminds us that whatever gardens are an oasis from, they can never be an oasis from the natural world or our own underlying economic needs." --Verlyn Klinkenborg The New York Times Book Review June 5, 2005

About the Author
Dave Jacke has been a student of ecology and design since the 1970s, and has run his own ecological design firm—Dynamics Ecological Design—since 1984. Dave is an engaging and passionate teacher of ecological design and permaculture, and a meticulous designer. He has consulted on, designed, built, and planted landscapes, homes, farms, and communities in the many parts of the United States, as well as overseas, but mainly in the Northeast. A cofounder of Land Trust at Gap Mountain in Jaffrey, NH, he homesteaded there for a number of years. He holds a B.A. in Environmental Studies from Simon's Rock College and a M.A. in Landscape Design from the Conway School of Landscape Design.

Eric Toensmeier calls himself a "socially engaged plant geek." He has spent much of his adult life exploring edible and otherwise useful plants and how they can be used in designed ecosystems. Eric has worked as a small farm trainer at the New England Small Farm Institute and currently manages the Tierra de Oportunidades new farmer program of Nuestras Raíces in Holyoke, MA. There he is designing and installing a permaculture landscape in concert with immigrant farmers who are starting farm-based enterprises in an urban context. Eric is a graduate and former faculty member of the Institute for Social Ecology in Plainfield, VT.

Customer Reviews

Excellent for anyone hoping to get a handle on sustainable agriculture
As a graduate of a Permaculture Design Course, organic farm worker and someone generally interested in virtually all aspect of sustainable ag, I found this book incredible. Now, I've only read the first one (about to start on volume number 2), but the quality of information in the first volume in outstanding. Volume 1 is concerned with the theory behind forest gardening, but with a keen eye towards using that information in the second volume (which includes detailed information on actually creating a forest garden). David Jacke does a great job of covering everything from invasive plants to forest succession to what a guild is and how to build one to underground microbes and why we should care about them. Full of informative figures, graphs and sidebars, this book does an excellent job of filling a niche that has been otherwise missed by many permaculture and sustainable ag books - what to do in the more temperate, rainy parts of the world. I'd recommend this book over Patrick Whitfield's great book if you live in the U.S. because it suggests a variety of plants native to the U.S. and has a larger number of useful species for people who live in the U.S. and are dealing with colder temperatures than those seen in Britain. Overall, I'd recommend this book to anyone with the slightest interest in creating an edible landscape on a piece of property.

Permaculture Tour-de-force!
If you are a home gardener who has ever stopped to wonder whether permaculture was useful to you, you need to read these books. If you are an intermediate to advanced permaculturist, you will revel in these books. If you want to understand how a single individual with a garden can make the world a better place, you need to read these books.

Jacke and Toensmeier lay out an incredible vision in Volume I for the potential that permaculture holds for gardeners in the northern US. And they lead the reader through an eye-opening education in the scientific theory which supports that vision. In Volume II, they walk the reader through the process of creating their own unique vision for the reader's own permaculture design. Then they lay out, step by step, how to progress from vision to reality.

Along the way, they range from the theoretical to the highly practical, from how many miles of fungal strands are in a teaspoon of soil from the forest floor, to exactly how to plant a tree so that it not only survives but thrives. And they do it in a voice which is both learned and whimsical, enthusiastic and serious -- and downright fun.

I'm buying a second set of these books. I need to keep one set with me as I build my garden; I learn new things every time I turn the page, knowledge I need on a "how to" level. But I need a second set, so that I can lend it to my friends who would get tremendous insight from reading these books...my order for my second set is going in today!

Full disclosure: I am a very pleased client of Dave Jacke's design practice.

Great mix of theory and practical! Very thorough!
I bought the books to understand the practical aspects of building a forest garden on my 2 acre land. I started reading the vol 2 because that seemed to contain the practical advice. However, soon after, I became convinced that vol 1 can not be ignored. Now I have read vol 1 and am truly in awe of the authors' clarity of thinking and organizing the vast amounts of material and data. The theory is clear and up-to-date with vast recent scientific knowledge- a rare combination indeed.
My only advice to a beginning reader would be to read the last part (conclusion) of vol 1 before and in between the various chapters in order to maintain motivation and interest in the overly theoretical- but necessarily so- parts of vol 1. That chapter really ties the theory together with your reasons of going into such details as are presented.I found in that chapter my "aha" moment.
Thanks to the authors for these wonderful and helpful books. Are worth their weight in gold- or rich moist forest humus!