Creating a Forest Garden: Working with Nature to Grow Edible Crops Hardcover – Illustrated, April 13, 2010

Overall, I am loving this book. I’ve bought quite a few now by Martin Crawford (maybe all of the ones that he’s written…?) and always find them super useful and well written.My one critique (and the reason for the four stars instead of five) is that Crawford writes this book with the bias that the soil you’re working with is acidic. He doesn’t provide any cautionary tales about using wood ash (something that makes your soil more alkaline) but instead throughout all of Ch 6, keeps talking about using wood ash, as if it were just a given that you’d do so. He also talks about how you’ll need to lime your soil every year. 🤦🏻‍♀️I live in Idaho and we have very alkaline soil here. (Potatoes love alkaline soil! If your area is well known for growing potatoes, you don’t even need to test it to know: Your soil is alkaline). I made the mistake of adding wood ash to my soil when I was first gardening bc of sources of information like this, that just blithely recommended it without any caveats. Our annual veggies were super stunted that year and we got almost no food from the garden.Books need to be careful about giving out this kind of advice, without some serious caveats to make it clear that some of these suggestions are only good for acidic soils. I learned this the hard way. 😞Other than Crawford’s blind spot towards soil that isn’t exactly like his, this book was amazing. Learning lots, as I have with all of his books. Two huge thumbs up.

Many times have I bought a book on gardening, permaculture, or homesteading and skimmed through it and then left it to collect dust on the shelf. But THIS oh my, what a very well laid out, informative and intriguing book! I can't put it down! This is helping me tremendously in planning my food forest! Martin Crawford you ROCK! Thank you! thank you! thank you!!

A lot of good info, well researched. Didn't care for the climate change section, I'm a denier. Otherwise, good book.

My wife and I are in the process of coverting our backyard into a food forest. We had picked up another book about the subject. And I was very disappointed on the lay of the book. Info was all over the place, it really did not have great structure on displaying the information. However, this book is great! The lay of the pages are very useful, full of pictures and graphs and my favorite the plant list that helps the reader choose the right plant for their forest situation. It also gives examples of small backyard to larger fields, which helps me now but also in the future. It is a very helpful book for pure beginners. A must read in the subject!

This book contains so much information, love it!

The book does a pretty good job of listing the parts of a forest garden, and giving recommendations for plants for each (and has a good reference section on a wide variety of plants). I learned about a lot of plants I'd never even heard of, which is always a plus. My only real complaint is that some of the full page glossy pictures are VERY poor quality (low contrast, practically black and white). I'm not sure if its a printing error in my version or not (most of the small pictures look very nice). The problem pictures are almost exclusively the large views of the author's forest garden. Obviously I did not purchase this book for the pictures, but when friends and family ask me what a forest garden is, it is frustrating to not have any decent pictures to show.

This was a bit of a splurge for me; having known Martin Crawford's name for years, I was really looking forward to seeing his work in print. I must say that the actual book is a bit of a disappointment. I knew that it would be aimed at a UK audience, so that's not a strike against it. In fact, it joins wonderful works by Patrick Whitefield and John Seymour to round out the picture of British forest gardening. But despite the beautiful photography, the book is neither as practical nor as detailed as Gaia's Garden or Edible Forest Gardens. This book adds very little to what they have already contributed, with the exception of a thoughtful consideration of global climate change and its presumed effect on forest gardening, and a chapter on fungi.More damning, the text is full of typos, and several of the photographs are misplaced and mislabeled. A picture illustrating Oregon grape is actually some sort of currant, for example. Discussions of design are general to the point of frustration; the section on water use says, in essence, "in a drought you'll use more than you think" and then spends two pages on irrigation methods. Again, it's possible that a British climate requires less thought about water than the southeastern U.S., but that sort of generality pervades the book. Save your money for Jacke and Toensmeier.

This is by far my favorite gardening book...EVER. It has been not only inspiring like a lot of other good books but is so well organized that it is a reference that I find myself going back to time after time. The only thing I would warn any potential purchaser is that the author hails from England so some of the climate points are specific to his region of the world. Other than that this is in my humble opinion the absolute best book on substainable methods of gardening. It gives such a great breakdown of so many different drought tolerant plants, there light and watering requirements and of a forest garden as a whole.

This book has an incredible wealth of information on temperate-climate perennials: most importantly, Crawford's advice comes from his experience of actually growing these things, not from searching stuff on the Internet. There are details in here that you probably wouldn't find elsewhere, and several plants I'd never heard of despite having done extensive research on the subject myself.The book specifically relates to growing in the South of England, but the general principles, and many of the plants, should be relevant to other countries at a similar latitude.Worth pointing out that Crawford's other book on perennials is mainly a duplication (in summary form) of the information here. If you're wondering which one to buy and don't want to get both, this one is probably the best choice.

This is an amazing resource for anyone starting a forest garden. The writing is clear, precise, yet enjoyable, packed with useful information on hundreds of obscure plants. I loved reading about how to plan the garden, planning the use of windbreaks, nitrogen fixers, dynamic accumulators and different slopes. It breaks things down in a very sensible way and makes it feel doable without concealing the challenges involved.Forest gardening as described here makes an interesting contrast to traditional permaculture methods and I would recommend reading about those separately. It might make sense to mix strategies from both depending on location and situation. Integrating livestock/pets can solve some troubling issues and save a lot of work, but there's no discussion of it in this book. Likewise there's no mention of strategies like hugelkultur, creating heat traps, ponds etc. which can really help with productivity and diversity. But this isn't a criticism - the book is fantastic, hugely informative in its focus and detail, and I find myself flipping through it obsessively every spare moment.

I gave in to temptation and ordered the new Creating a Forest Garden book by Martin Crawford. I actually really like it, but it's definitely aimed not so much to the permie market but to the UK gardeners market. It's a nice bigish, glossyish book full of colour photos and lovely silky paper, obviously designed with christmas presents in mind, and I'm certain that pretty well *any* keen gardener in Britain would love to own it. And bearing that in mind, I think it's going to be highly effective in promoting the idea of forest gardening within the UK.The plants listed seem to be chosen mostly for warmer parts of UK and include things that I would never even have considered in Wales but discount things that need really hot summers, so it's not a perfect guide for me now I'm in Portugal even though the winter temperatures here aren't much different to the warmer bits of Britain. The book is very nicely written and presented, nothing too technical and not preachy in any way, just presenting the information you need to design and plant up a nice forest garden and make you feel nice and glowy inside because your new garden style is also 'green'. There were loads of native plants included, to the extent that reading it was a bit like taking a virtual tour back to the UK and I went all nostalgic remembering days spent collecting samples and seed from hedgerows and persuading them to grow in my old garden. I even managed to figure out a few which would also grow here, hopefully, so there's a few seeds on order now.I find it hard to read anything 'heavy' these days but this book was really easy and I read it cover to cover in one day and then went through all the plants again happily making lists and then hitting ebay for seed supplies.Is it the definitive book on forest gardening? Well, I could actually afford this one, just, wheras I never managed to scrape the money together for Edible Forest Gardens so I can't compare, but I suspect that it's going to be the definitive guide for the UK, and being a Brit myself, I can see that most Brits would believe that would also make it *the* definitive guide. We are a little insular after all.

The book is quite comprehensive and detailed in terms of trees, plants, descriptions, their benefits, etc. However, this is written in a reference format. eg. if you know what plant you like you can look up the benefits. Or if you need windbrake you need to plant trees like this.But I was expecting to include practical examples of a forest garden, eg. put this X plant here, next to this Y tree, then plant this Z tree here because they complement each other, then 2m away plant some veg..... supported by a picture and several options to switch specific trees/ plants.

One of my treasured possessions. I own this book in Kindle and Hardback. It is an inspiration and 'how to' guide on establishing your own Forest Garden. After reading this book, I planned and planted over 100 trees at my 2 acre property in Northern France. The project is far from finished but these things take years to get to maturity. This is a book I will be referring to in years to come and I have already learnt so much from it.Forests were the supermarkets of olden day mankind, using natures way to build self sustaining resource generating living organisms such as trees, bushes, vines, herbs, and obtaining fruit, nuts, dyes, string/clothing, poles, firewood, turpentine, soaps and so on is a logical step in a world that is out of step with sustainability.Buy it! Plan it and do it, the world is waiting for your improvement on any scale.