Belle Vie Food Forest
Farming and Climate Change
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Belle Vie Farm has long struggled with how to envision farming in the age of global warming and climate change. We recognize that field farming, especially without expensive equipment, will be increasingly challenging as our planet heats up. As we wrestled with how to integrate our desire to grow food for ourselves and our community with the reality of our climate crisis, we came to believe that some form of agroforestry is the most effective means of creating a sustainable agricultural vision. Food forests are a kind of agroforestry in that they combine trees with other kinds of farm products. Food forests generally have seven layers: an overstory and understory, and shrub, herb, root, ground cover and vine layers.
Food Forests
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Beginning in 2022, we planted a multitude of fruit trees and bushes as our overstory (canopy), understory and shrub layer. These include the following trees:
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American Persimmon
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Fuyu Persimmon
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Black Beauty Mulberry
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Stella Cherry
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Montmorency Cherry
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Peach
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Pomegranate
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Katy Apricot
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Blue Damson Plum
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Crimson Goji Berry
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Fire Cracker Goji Berry
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Blueberry
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Fig
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Kiwi
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We believe our farm may have, at one time, been home to a persimmon orchard. For the first year, we noticed lots of hard knot-like roots that we kept trying to remove from the soil. One day, we realized that whatever was growing was very hardy! It turns out the roots were American Persimmon tree roots. We currently have several of these old persimmon trees that fruit each year, but prior to our purchase of the farm, they had already grown to heights that make accessing their fruit extremely challenging.
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Wildflowers, Cut Flowers, and Honeybees
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We are also making use of our 25 acres of forest by choosing shade-loving wildflowers to cultivate: Bleeding Hearts, Bloodroot and Astilbe. We grow cut flowers as well. To support the growth of our trees and plants, we also keep honeybees on our farm.
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Manure
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To bring our farm full circle, we work hard to make use of everything we can - even manure! Our rabbits' dropping are an excellent fertilizer for our trees and plants, and it does not have to be composted before using on most fruits trees/vegetable plants. Our donkey manure is plentiful, and we use it composted in our food forest. This allows us to integrate all of the seemingly separate parts of our farmland: the forest, pasture, and food forest.
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Want to learn more about food forests? Check out these websites:
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Bee Better Naturally - Food Forest in Raleigh, NC
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