A Bit About My Home

I have the great good fortune of living in the Holyoke Edible Forest Garden.  I moved here in the summer of 2007, when the garden was well underway, having been designed and maintained by my husband, Jonathan Bates, and our housemate, Eric Toensmeier (with help from many, many people, including members of the Western Massachusetts Permaculture Guild).  This is the mission they developed:

"Our urban forest garden is an intensively managed backyard foraging paradise, a megadiverse living ark of useful and multifunctional plants from our own bioregion and around the world. The forest garden is the unifying element of a larger permaculture design for food production, wildlife habitat, and social spaces that encompasses the entire property."

This is what the place looked like in the beginning, 2004:

Looks like your regular urban lot, and well, it is.  (Or should I say it was.)

Here's the same view, taken in 2008:

And a similar view in the summer of 2010 (note the persimmon tree on the left, the lotuses in the water garden, and the hardy kiwi arbor - three of my favorite things in the garden):

It's from this urban back (and front) yard that I get most of the things I write about in this blog.  It is a delight to live here.  May this blog inspire the creation of gardens like this in all places!  Food Forests For All!