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Using the Plants For A Future plant database search for Food Forest design

The PFAF database search now has a new glossary item that allows you to search for food forest/forest garden plants quickly and easily from the pfaf.org homepage.

The search includes over 1000 plants commonly used in temperate food forests.

If you are using Dave Jacke's book Edible Forest Gardens or Martin Crawford's book Creating a Forest Garden: Working With Nature to Grow Edible Crops to design your food forest we already have 95% of the plants they include. Responsive image

Selecting food forest plants

Option. You can close one or more of the sections if you want to.

Food Forest Plant Selection

1. Scroll down the homepage until you reach the section 'Special Uses'.

2. Select the item 'Food Forest'. At the moment you can only select one item, so for example, you cannot also choose 'Nitrogen Fixer'. We hope to improve this soon.

Food Forest Plant choice

3. To narrow down your search for plants, you can also use the properties section. For example, you may only want shrubs or trees and have a size in mind.

Food Forest Plant Properties

Towards the top of the database search, you can also choose the edible and medicinal rating, which is from Minor (1) to Great (5).

Food Forest edible and medicinal

The search button is at the bottom of the table. You can also reset your plant search here

Food Forest edible and medicinal search

The database is handy for designing perennial permaculture gardens, forest gardens and food forest guilds.

You may also want to use the visual reference pages at Food Forest Plants

Now available: PLANTS FOR YOUR FOOD FOREST: 500 Plants for Temperate Food Forests and Permaculture Gardens.

An important new book from PFAF. It focuses on the attributes of plants suitable for food forests, what each can contribute to a food forest ecosystem, including carbon sequestration, and the kinds of foods they yield. The book suggests that community and small-scale food forests can provide a real alternative to intensive industrialised agriculture, and help to combat the many inter-related environmental crises that threaten the very future of life on Earth.

Read More

FOOD FOREST PLANTS

 

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