Growing Food Hidden In The Forest

Rick Austin has not planted a garden in years, yet he plops 3 to 6 gallons of fresh-picked fruit and vegetables every day onto the kitchen counter for preparing or storing.

Often, Austin’s gathering binges prompt his wife to say, “Stop! I can’t keep up with you,” as she readies the harvest for dehydrating, canning or eating.

Outside their Appalachian off-grid home in North Carolina, the Austin’s carved out a completely natural, perpetual garden spot from the mature oak and pine forest. With the help of a hired bulldozer, in one afternoon they cleared a half acre right down to rock and red clay – the kind that turns to brick in hot, dry weather.

The Austins sold the hardwood, milled the pine for building materials and used the brush and rotted logs to construct berms for hillside terraces. Then, after all available soil was pushed into place, they began planting.

No straight, even, meticulously groomed rows of beans, corn and onions designate the area as a garden plot, however. In fact, whether from a distance or nearly atop the vegetation, it is almost impossible to realize a garden exists there at all. Which is precisely the idea, Austin, an author, told me when I called to inquire about his book, Secret Garden of Survival – How to Grow a Camouflaged Food Forest.

Rather than following traditional, modern plans that rely on planting annuals in Army-formation-style rows or boxy raised beds, the Austins instead mimicked nature and harvesting methods thousands of years old. Before modern agriculture and the invention of mechanized farm machinery, most of mankind foraged for food.

“Studies of native indigenous people around the world, people who have lived off the land for generations without electricity, without refrigeration, without commercial agriculture, and without pesticides and insecticides,” Austin said, “showed that these people have lived primarily on perennials as opposed to annuals such as your typical grocery store vegetables.”

In a future world where there is potentially no electricity, refrigeration, supermarkets, seed stores, fertilizers, pesticides and feed stores, it makes sense to look at people who have managed to live successfully for generations without these conveniences, he said.

As hunter/gatherers, people did not spend time planting and tending crops. They didn’t plant in rows. They didn’t plant year after year, didn’t weed, didn’t fertilize and didn’t water plants. Yet humans managed to survive for thousands of years this way.

“Straight rows are a haven for bugs,” Austin said, explaining why his produce grows in concentric circles, or guilds. At the center of each guild is a fruit tree draped in grape vines. Out from there, progressively shorter circles are formed of bushy plants, herbs and groundcover.

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