Creating a Forest Garden: Working with Nature to Grow Edible Crops

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!

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!!

This is an amazing book about forest gardening in Northwestern Europe. It is beautifully illustrated, contains information on hundreds of plants and gives practical information about the process of designing, planting and maintaining a forest garden, background information and even information on the cooking and processing of the food from the garden. Without any doubt the best book on the topic. Although I don't have (yet) a real forest garden, I have used information from the book to transform part of my garden. I must admit I have read some chapters at least 5 times, which I do only with my favourite books. It contains so much useful information and the line drawings illustrate all the principles and results.

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.

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 is a beautiful book. There is information here that relates directly to the long term planning needed to "build" a forest garden from scratch. The information is presented in clear terms with simple illustrations showing relationships within a garden both above and below ground - this could be a handbook for beginning any new garden and especially for intensive planting. The photos are superb and inspiring.

This is the best and most complete forest garden book I’ve ever bought, had bought some others but this one really helped me go through the design process which I was stucked.

I’m so excited to plan my homestead with this book. It’s beautiful, practical and full of useful information. I’m installing blueberry bushes this week and using this resource!

Ein wirklich gutes Buch, das nicht nur viele Tabellen mit Pflanzen enthält (Standort, Nutzung, etc.), sondern vor allem eine ganz neue - arbeitssparende, umweltfreundlichere, klimaangepasstere - Gartengestaltung vorstellt. Es werden zum Beispiel Pflanzen gezeigt, die zumindest ich noch nicht kannte, die gute Früchte haben und gleichzeitig andere Pflanzen düngen. Dazu gibt es Tipps zum Design in puncto Baumhöhe, Sonne, Wasser... Ein super Buch und nur zu empfehlen. Die englischen und lateinischen Pflanzennamen sind übrigens mit dem Handy mühelos zu übersetzen. Allerdings: Man sollte alle Pflanzen per Internet gegenchecken. Manche sind invasiv, andere schmecken wohl eher nicht so toll wie versprochen. Mein Hauptfeind ist die indische Scheinerdbeere. Das geht gar nicht.... Aber trotzdem ein super Ansatz

It's a big book. Half of it is devoted to describing how to design each layer in a forest garden, the other half is a very detailed plant catalog. I enjoy reading it and referring to it over and over.

Very informative.

Martin Crawford is a giant and his book is a must-read before starting a forest garden. His practical notions and tips will save you a lot of money and waste of time. A little bit expensive, but the book is worth the money.

Excellent livre (en anglais), c'est l'Encyclopédie en la matière, incroyablement complet. Les noms latins, cités systématiquement, rendent le livre accessible à des français anglophones. Seul la qualité de la reliure laissé un peu à désirer, les pages s'effondrent déjà par rapport à la couverture.