Land per person with Forest Gardening

"if you want stodge, leaves some open areas on the south for honest veg" is brilliant, quote of the month and very wise. It really doesn't have to be one or the other, we can have a diversity of crops & techniques 🙂

Jake

A useful table.

However, you ought to allow for the shells, halve these values per
hectare.

I don't want to overdo it on the spuds, but they are rather
remarkable, if you include the skins. Of course they are mostly
water, unlike nuts, but they still give you a lot. Here are values
for the edible parts in kg per hectare

16.00

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Energy

Carbs

Protein

Fat

Chestnuts

2663

563

38

25

Potatoes

29200

6800

800

80

Happy to argue the toss if you find any further data.

Bottom line is, Forest Gardens excellent, jolly good fun, but if you
want stodge, leave some open areas on the south for honest veg.

Practical productivity and inputs are fascinating, A subject I'd love to explore more :) Here's an image of the slideshow, showing calorific values of crops

Hello, thank you very much for this! I'm taking a listen to the livestream now. I can't get the link to the slides to function but no matter as I can see them on the video :) . It's a good point about self-sufficiency, obviously its a very multi-dimensional issue and figures are more useful in theory than in practice perhaps!

It's a very interesting question. I put together some rough calculations in a livestream I did last year, may be useful:

• The Productive Forest Garden slideshow

• Video recording of livestream

There's a lot of questions surrounding self-sufficiency, I don't believe it's as simple "it's a good thing", really depends on the context. You need to take into account people's circumstance, desires, knowledge, skills and, very importantly, time and resources.

Hi Richard, thank you for sharing that. I will have a look into it, very valuable information for him to have logged so carefully! Many thanks, Hannah

Dear Hannah, Martin will have referred to Graham Bells garden just in Scotland. Graham is one of the few people to have detailed yields and has sent me his spreadsheet of data (its looks very impressive - but would be interested to compare to allotment yields). It would be best to contact him directly via Graham Bell/ red shed to ask him this very question. Otherwise to my knowledge these is little data out there on FG yield to substantiate the statements of very high productivity. I think we collectively have more to do on this, but its meticulous and detailed work, so thanks to Graham for his attention to detail.

Hi Jude, that is super useful, even without the location it is great to have ball park figures and even without the reference I know MC is a trusted source. I would love to go on that course, holding off to go in person as I think it will be more valuable. It could be my search engine skills or it could be my search engine as Startpage is secure but not always turning up the best results Thank you for sharing those statistics! BW, Hannah

Hi Hannah. I'm a beginner forest gardener - but I asked same
question on a tour of Martin Crawford's forest garden in Devon
last summer. Of course it depends where the garden is. He
mentioned two studies that looked at productivity (sorry, I don't
have references; and figures are just from my scribbled notes!):
one study in Scottish borders, 1 hectare needed to feed 4 people;
another study (he didn't say where, or I didn't catch it...) 1
hectare fed 6-10 people.

It's strange nothing showing up on search engines. Maybe ask
Martin (Agroforestry Research Trust) for references...

BW, Jude

Hannah, thank you so much! What a rich resources and pertinent information. A whole wealth of knowledge out there, thank you for putting me in touch with it! Too true about the multiple benefits as well. Kind regards, Hannah.