Recap: What is a food forest?
A food forest is a forest like plantation, farm or garden, that has been specifically designed to be productive (providing food) but copying nature as much as possible. The result is a resilient, low input garden where little water or pesticides and fertilizers needed.
The Mallorcan Food Forest or Fruit Forest
On the Island of Mallorca we have a Mediterranean climate. This means we have relatively hot summers with very little to no rain.
The vegetation needs to be drought tolerant and happy with high temperatures (above 40 degrees). Hence, a food forest design for Spain needs to be equipped with as many local / Mediterranean plants as possible. Mediterranean permaculture plant guilds are perfect to establish units of plants (mostly shrubs & trees) that support each other, give shade, provide nutrients and promote a healthy soil equilibrium. While some people call it a “fruit forest”, it is really more precise to call it a food forest, because many different “food” elements come out of a food forest on Mallorca, like for example: Tee / Infusion leaves. See here for a little sample of our Mediterranean Food Forest plant list.
Are there any food forests on Mallorca?
Yes, there are. And we are proud to call many of them our joint projects with customers. It is true that Mallorca used to be a beautiful green island, covered in natural forests. The forests gave way historically first to the Romans, as they cut the trees for timber in order to build their boats. Later the land was exploited more and more with agricultural monoculture fields. The practice of leaving fields bare, tilling and monoculture plantations has degraded our land and left us with less fertile top soil. Sadly, this is still mostly the case.
Here are some links to food forest projects on Mallorca. No all of them are our own projects: Concrete Photos, Link to References…
Design principles we apply in the food forest on Mallorca:
In detail we write about our design principles in this article: “permaculture food forest design”. In short: We plan our food forests in four dimension (time being the fourth dimension) and according to permaculture food forest design, syntropic food forest design, promoting soil live, creating spaces for humans to live in harmony with nature.
