Plants For A Future Appeal

We continue to pursue our ‘Plants to save the planet’ project, which began five years ago. We have achieved the targets we set ourselves to align our database with strategies being implemented elsewhere for ‘carbon sequestration’ and for designing ‘carbon farming’ and ‘food forests’: agroecosystems of perennial plants. We added 700 plants for mainly tropical conditions from an important source book by Eric Toensmeier ^[1] and many more temperate plants from Dave Jacke’s book on Edible Forest Gardens^[2]. We also added indicators to highlight plants which are good for Carbon Farming, Carbon Sequestration and inclusion in a Food Forest, and extended the search facilities to access these new terms. 

This development work enabled us to produce an easy-to-use reference book Plants For Your Food Forest, a guide to choosing plants to meet your own objectives, to fulfil your own Food Forest design. This book was published in July 2021 and has been well received. Work is now underway to extend our coverage of useful plants suitable for tropical and sub-tropical conditions, and to introduce more usage categories throughout the database. This year we hope to be able to produce a companion book on plants for tropical Food Forests.

Our overall aim is to help raise awareness and promote the concepts of Food Forests and Carbon Farming by providing a free comprehensive information source to decision makers and influencers on land use at all levels. We think this is an important area of focus for PFAF because Food Forests and complementary locally-based enterprises could be an important element in starting to bring about the widespread changes in lifestyle now urgently needed to confront the worldwide ecological crisis. We need to move away from globalised commerce, damaging intensive industrialised agriculture, switch from meat and dairy to plant-based foods, and encourage local communities and businesses that support the common good. Getting involved with a food forest project is one way to be part of the fight-back against the global emergency that cannot be ignored any longer.

PFAF employs someone who is both a specialist in plant information and in technical aspects of database and website design and development. There is also a need to look after the day-to-day operation of the database and website, without which it would quickly become inoperative or unstable. Previous experience has shown that this can’t be done properly by unpaid volunteers, no matter how skilled or committed they are. 

We get some income by selling our books, and from online advertising, but they are unpredictable and together they produced less than half of what we needed last year. Given the 'alternative' nature of our operation, there is no realistic prospect of obtaining grant funding to meet our on-going costs. We have always managed to do a lot with very little money, and all PFAF’s management and admin tasks are done on a voluntary basis, but we still need a regular flow of donations from our individual users and supporters. Any surplus income not required for everyday expenses will go towards our long-held ambition to be able to help people get their Food Forest project started by awarding them ‘seed funding’.

Please give what you can to keep Plants For A Future properly funded at this crucial time for the future of the planet.

Make a Donation Directly to PFAF: By donating to PFAF, you can help support and expand our activities and get the information across to a wider audience. If you would like to donate to support the ongoing work and development of our website you can make a donation using your prefer currency. Note: Once you click a button below you will be able to make a donation in your own currency using a debit or credit card (or PayPal)
By cheque (UK Only) to 9 Priory Park Road, Dawlish, Devon EX7 9LX, UK). Please make your donation cheque payable to Plants For A Future   Direct Bank Transfer  If you would like to Donate using a Direct Bank Transfer UK  Sterling account Bank name: The co-operative bank Bank Address: P.O. Box 250, Delf House, Southwey, Skelmersdale WN8 6WT Account name: Plants For A Future  Account number: 65744369 (this is essential) Bank Sort code: 08-92-99   INTERNATIONAL Please provide the following to your bank:   Beneficiary Account name: Plants For A Future Bank Name: The Co-operative Bank SWIFT/BIC: CPBKGB22 IBAN: GB87CPBK08929965744369

^[1] Eric Toensmeier, The Carbon Farming Solution: A Global Toolkit of Perennial Crops and Regenerative Agriculture Practices for Climate Change Mitigation and Food Securit (Vermont: Chelsea Green, 2016)

^[2] Dave Jacke, Edible Forest Gardens: Ecological Design and Practice for Temperate Climate Permaculture (Vermont: Chelsea Green, 2005)