Name: How to design a low maintenance, high yield, biodiverse rich forest garden (home or farm scale)
Start: 2025-09-27T10:00:00+01:00
End: 2025-09-28T18:00:00+01:00
Location: Edible Landscapes London in Finsbury Park

How to design a low maintenance, high yield, biodiverse rich forest garden (home or farm scale)

This is a comprehensive stand alone introduction course to making food forests
Saturday 27th September 2025 How to design a forest garden
Saturday 28th September 2025 Putting the theory into practice
Edible Landscapes, Finsbury Park, London
Imagine your garden or community space looking as lovely as a woodland edge. Imagine that on top of looking wonderfully wild, it produces an abundance of nutrient dense food and will ultimately need very little digging, weeding, manual watering or pest control - all in harmony with animals and other beings (eco friendly and vegan). This is ‘an edible forest garden’.

Forest gardening is a way of growing food where nature does most of the work for you. Modelled on natural woodland, crops are grown in different layers from high and medium sized canopy to roots, ground cover and climbers. And its not just food and medicine you will get from the forest garden, there are many more yields.

Through careful planning plants are chosen which have beneficial effects on each other, attract beneficial insects and create a healthy biodiverse rich system that maintains its own fertility. Once established, your main task will be harvesting!

====== WHAT TO EXPECT =======
This workshop gives you the tools you need to design your own forest garden.
You will learn about the basics of designing a forest garden. You will get to understand
- How to select the right plants for your environment
- Where to place them to ensure they thrive
- How to ensure you have the right nutrients cycling to ensure good crops
- History of forest gardening
- Why make a food forest
- Layout of a forest garden
- Multifunctional pathways
- Creating abundance and resilience
- Low maintenance food growing
- Patterns in nature for forest gardens
- Understanding and maximising edge

====== COURSE COSTS ======

We want this course to be accessible to all and are therefore working in a conscious contribution system, inviting you to pay what you can afford towards meeting the needs of the facilitator(s). We therefore invite those who can pay more to help those who cannot afford as much.
Please contact us if you have any questions about this.
Suggested contributions of between £50 and £200 (ideal contribution £140)
If you cannot afford this then PLEASE get in touch and we will work something out that is mutually beneficial.

====== REGISTRATION ======
To register for this course, please click on the ticket section below and fill in the form (make sure you hit the submit button, after which you will get an email confirmation). If you do not get an email confirmation, have any difficulty filling it in or have any questions please feel free to contact Rakesh
https://tinyurl.com/FGFin2025

====== THE VENUE ======
EDIBLE LANDSCAPES LONDON is a not-for-profit community education project, with our roots in the Transition movement. We specialise in forest gardens – also known as ‘food forests’ – a food growing design system that observes natural ecosystems, involving a variety of perennial plants and trees. We recognise that this knowledge is deeply rooted in the practices of indigenous cultures, ways of working harmoniously with the land that have been cultivated by humans over thousands of years.

====== LEAD FACILITATOR ======
Rakesh "Rootsman Rak"
Rakesh Rootsman Rak believes, “True sustainability begins with self-empowerment and community resilience.” A permaculture designer, teacher, forest gardener and reggae DJ, Rakesh has taught over 700 courses since 2009, spanning continents, climates and cultures. Forest gardening lies at the heart of his work—demonstrating how food, medicine, and wildlife can thrive in harmony through layered, regenerative systems rooted in nature’s intelligence.
Drawing on ancestral wisdom from his Indian heritage, Rakesh’s teachings are grounded in regenerative principles passed down through generations. As a non-white educator in a field often dominated by Western voices, he offers a much-needed perspective that re-centres traditional knowledge and lived experience.
His experience with dyslexia also shapes his teaching, encouraging intuitive thinking and challenging conventional education. He supports communities—particularly eco-villages—in developing strong, inclusive governance using tools like sociocracy, compassionate communication, and group coherence strategies. His approach reduces conflict by promoting deep listening, clarity, and collective decision-making.
Rakesh is co-founder of Children and Youth in Permaculture and a champion of accessible, intergenerational learning. Whether planting edible forests or spinning conscious reggae, he brings joy, depth, and a holistic vision to the movement for ecological justice, resilience, and reconnection.

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