When filming Geoff Lawton’s “Food Forest” DVD we went to film a forest system that had been abandoned for about 10 years at Tagari in Northern NSW Australia. Originally designed by Permaculture founder Bill Mollison, Tagari was a transformed dairy farm that under Geoff Lawton’s subsequent management was transformed into a series of dams and interconnecting swales, ponds canals in a food forest system that was abandoned suddenly and left to manage on its own without human activity.

When we revisited Tagari Farm it was like stepping into a forgotten wilderness. The grass had grown right up to your waist. Paths were impossible to find. The camera crew nearly stepped on a deadly brown snake sunning itself in the stillness. The old farm buildings were slowly being swallowed back by the wilderness. Ivy had burst through the windows. The doors were wrapped by its fingers and it had spilled into the rooms enveloping the floors and slowly with the help of white ants was reducing the place back to the elements.

It literally looked like a jungle. Having Geoff Lawton explain what you were looking at was necessary to understand the interconnections of the Food Forest system. Cutting through the tall grass we made our way into the cooler over growth. Inside the Food Forest – the grass stopped growing due to the shade. It was much quieter and cooler. Looking around at the canopy of trees above him you could see Geoff remembering all the plants he had planted years before. They had grown to maturity.

Geoff Lawton with a Jak Fruit at Tagari Farm

A lot of the trees look insignificant to me. Because they are not bearing fruit at the time of the year so you tend to dismiss them. But that would be missing the point that this system produces food throughout the entire year – constantly. There was coffee grown wild on the forest floor. The coffee beans had started to self seed. My wife Jane picked up a few plants to take home with us as the canopy was too dense – too dark for these little plants to survive. Geoff pointed out some custard apples that were in season growing well out of reach. But closer to the ground students were picking up scores of passion-fruit that were spilling over the undergrowth.

This Food Forest was really a vertical garden with a number of levels to it. From the bottom tubers under the ground like Yacón to the climbing perennials, Pioneer species, Nitrogen fixing Legumes, coffee trees and smaller fruit and nut trees, larger pawpaw trees and up through the various layers of Mango and Jak Fruit, to the mighty shade trees, this food forest was an ever changing garden canopy that was left to its own devices and left to run riot.

Tagari Farm (click for larger view)

There were over 43 bodies of water on this property said to be able to support 20,000 fish. Not that you could see them now. You could hear the water running in the background nearby. A thick canopy of weeds covered the dams. There were silver perch stocked originally and the fish were breeding and still thriving. Geoff remarked recently that he caught a heap of them on just a baited hook with a little bread. The fish were so easy to catch because they have not seen any humans for quite some time. There was also meant to be a chinampa canal growing here somewhere.

It was strange to see this place look so desolate. It was meant to be a teaching facility and was extensively planted with a living system of forestry including, timber, bee forage, animal forage, 60 species of timber and food bamboo, plus a food forest fruit system of over 300 mangoes. And now it was just a lost settlement.

You can see this all revealed in Geoff Lawton’s Food Forest DVD. It has a long 20 minute introduction of what a food forest system is and then focuses on how to build one on a swale system so that the plants have an endless supply of moisture to grow through their succession. We see the Food Forest system mature from one day to 6 months, two years, six years and finish up on this lost Permaculture food forest at Tagari farm.