Making an Enchanted Forest with Dani Baker
Do you daydream about retiring to a beautiful piece of land that you can steward and become a full-time farmer? A life free from the constant need to check emails and phone calls. A life where your meetings are held outdoors, and your colleagues are plants, animals, and insects.
It’s easy to romanticize this dream, and we know that the bucolic dream isn’t that simple. You can work yourself to the bone from sun up to sun down in your vegetable patch. And you’re not even remotely close to being done. There is the whole other side of cash flow planning, marketing, management, and more. But what if there is a way to drastically reduce the time you need to achieve this dream? To create a perennial food forest that works for both you and the land.
That’s why it was fun to speak with Dani Baker, author of the book “The Home Scale Forest Garden: How To Plan, Plant, and Tend a Resilient Edible Landscape” on The Regenerative Real Estate Podcast. Dani was able to accomplish her dream of moving to an island and becoming a farmer after she retired, but found herself working long hours in her market garden. Everything changed, though, when she learned about permaculture. She began to educate herself on ecology and the symbiotic relationships that plants, bugs, and fungi can have. She became captivated by the concept of a perennial food forest that didn’t require so much of her time and energy.
Dani is also a great example of an enterprising and creative person that wants to help educate and inspire others. She does this by creating special opportunities for people to visit her farm, Cross Island Farm, for education and events. You’ll also find that her writing is both easily digestible and actionable for those that are also on the journey to creating life-giving, abundant, and ecologically rich gardens, farms, and landscapes.
“The Home-Scale Forest Garden: How to Plan, Plant, and Tend a Resilient Edible Landscape”
When market gardener Dani Baker attended a permaculture workshop at her local Cooperative Extension office in upstate New York, she was inspired by its message of working with nature to create a thriving edible garden ecosystem. She immediately launched a new experiment she dubbed the “Enchanted Edible Forest.” In The Home-Scale Forest Garden, Baker shares what she learned as she became a forest gardener, providing a practical, in-depth guide to creating a beautiful, bountiful edible landscape at any scale―from a few dozen square feet to an acre or more.
