Decade in Reflection Part One: Forest Garden Farm
/In honor of our ten year anniversary, we’re taking a trip down memory lane in a new multi part series. Through archival photos and retrospective writings, we’ll revisit forest gardening, water management, plant medicine, and other pursuits we’ve explored over the last ten years at Fields Without Fences with the kind of nuance and cosmic humor that only hindsight provides.
Memory forms in a relational context, and looking back on the past ten years, it becomes difficult to parse apart one moment in time from all that came before it, and all that happened after. In this regard, these reflections do not follow a strictly linear presentation, or timeline of the farm. They are not a list of perceived achievements or failures, but travel instead the way memory does in the mind’s eye, layering and folding in on itself, constantly reconfiguring itself into a cohesive narrative.
I once heard someone say, the past does not generate the present, it streams out behind it. What is, at any given moment, is determined by the position of the observer at present. Spooky action at a distance…
Past and present, as it turns out, is a bit of a to and fro.
Circa 2013, Johann & Lindsay, fields without fences, Frenchtown, NJ. Photo by Sean Walsh.
In the Beginning
Our area is well known for its muck soil. And though we were surprised to learn just how far the actual soil deviated from the “silt loam, prime agricultural” classification listed on the USDA soil survey - ask, and anyone will tell you, it’s wet around here. Here at the top of the plateau cliffside, four hundred feet above the Delaware River in the valley below, the soil is muck, thick as a brick, and stinking of stagnant water.
When we set out to farm this land ten years ago, the earth was compacted clay subsoil, tough enough to crack a plow, and soggy enough to swallow the back end of a tractor. There was a time before that when this cliffside was thick with old oak and hickory trees, enough to build a mill, and send each one sailing down the Delaware. There was a time when the dark forest soil silted off the freshly turned farm fields. A time earlier when indigenous people lived in camps by the creek and planted seeds in this cliffside. And a time further back still, when clay minerals settled on the bottom of an ancient body of water, and formed the sedimentary rock that the land grew upon.
In this way, the land is a mutable process, wholly dependent upon circumstance and relationship.
After several failed attempts to work our fields by traditional methods, we were interested to know what happened to the missing topsoil, why this old farm land seemed unfarmable, and if it was possible to restore this land and produce a viable agricultural yield in the process. These curiosities, circumstantial as they were, eventually led us to forest gardening.
Forest gardening is a style of planting, and practice of tending, that combines plants of different sizes and structures into complementary polycultures, inspired by nature’s tendency to fill in all ecological niches with diverse abundance. Forest gardens are a popular technique in permaculture, and the practice of forest tending has roots in some of the earliest and longest-lived horticultural relationships humans have engaged in across the world, and likely within this cliffside some time ago.
May 11th, 2012, Johann Rinkens & Jeremy Pearson, Bull’s Island, Stockton, NJ
At the start of our first season, the farm was more of an experiment we were feeling our way through as we went along. Our exhausted old plot wanted to become something, and we needed perspective on the future by way of the past. What had this land been, and what would it eventually become?
On this mild spring day in early May, we drove with our friend Jeremy down the cliffside to the banks of the river where the tallest, thickest trees grew. On the trails at Bull’s Island we found ferns and nettles, admired the tall tulip poplars, and crushed young spicebush leaves between our fingers, inhaling the bright citrus scent. When I snapped this photo we had come to the end of the island, and paused on the rocky banks to skip stones on the water. It was there that we came upon a curious collection of rare butternuts, husked and gathered, arranged neatly in a pile on a sunny rock, perfectly cured.
The island was filled with food and medicine; perennial vegetables, medicinal herbs, berry brambles, and a canopy of nut trees. Our afternoon at Bull’s Island (and many others that followed), would help us form the basis for our crop list, and inspire us to begin to shape a vision for a multi-strata agroforestry system informed by our local ecotype. That fall, after a summer of earthworks, pond building, and bed forming we planted persimmons, pawpaws, and nut trees, alongside elderberries, blackberries, raspberries, currants, and gooseberries, to grow above native wildflowers, medicinal herbs, and perennial vegetables.
June 17th, 2016, Lindsay Napolitano (author), Frenchtown, NJ. A hike into one of the forested canyons of this cliffside for inspiration.
Circa 2012, Notes. There were no existing ag plans for a forest garden farm, in early 2012 we were experimenting with possible field layouts and projected yields.
May 23rd, 2013, Center Field, fields without fences, Frenchtown, NJ. Early establishment perspective of Center Field. The tree tubes contain primarily pawpaw and persimmon. Berry shrubs are planted in between, and a mixed seeding of herbs and vegetables comprise the groundcover. Pathways are in young clover and ryegrass.
July 27th, 2018, Center Field, fields without fences, Frenchtown, NJ. Mature establishment perspective of Center Field. Five feet tall Elderberry and High Bush Cranberry inhabit the shrub layer. Persimmon trees are in the 20 feet range while pawpaw growth is considerably slower. Brown-eyed susan, garlic chives, wild strawberries, and wild lettuce spill into the grass pathways from the understory.
Succession & Disturbance
Forest gardening is a process, and as with most things, wherever you are, you begin where you're at.
Transitioning our exhausted farm fields into old growth forest is a pursuit outside the scope of one human lifetime. Most of our interactions with this landscape, these years farming here, would inhabit the space between, in the morphological unfolding of ecological succession.
Ecological succession is an umbrella term for the environmental changes that will unfold over time. Broadly speaking, here in the northeast, bare ground will first flush with annual herbaceous plants, quickly followed by, and overlapping with perennial grasses and wildflowers. The changes in soil type that develop in tandem with this shift will make it possible for early succession woody species like shrubs and brambles to emerge. Overtime, the shrubs will cluster and spread, shading out the grasses, and soon trees will erupt from the earth until they form a canopy that eventually dapples the sky.
Of course, as with most things, succession can be a winding path, set back by disturbance, re-routed by novel circumstances. Ecological disturbance plays a pronounced role in shaping both the architecture and trajectory of ecosystems and can be biological or nonbiological in origin. It can take the form of heavy winds sweeping away patches of forest, and in turn, opening up more light for brambles to re-emerge and gain ground. It can look like a herd of bison, or be shaped like a plow or spade, turning fresh soil in their wake for annual seeds to start anew.
Disturbance has taken a myriad of forms on the farm. It has looked like strategic mowing, weeding, chopping, pruning, and thinning. Disturbance has come unexpectedly on the heels of a strong storm, a sustained drought, or a once every seventeen years mass resurrection of cicadas. It has also been driven by market forces. As crops fall out of favor with the restaurant crowd, prices drop to unsustainable levels, or product sales slow - we’ve removed plants from the field, added new ones, and set the dynamics of the ecology on a new course.
A multiverse of futures are possible on any given patch of land.
In this way, the forest garden farm is more process than place, guided by succession, and shaped by disturbance. For the purposes of maintaining specific crops, we’ll engage in periodic disturbance to maintain optimal conditions for growth, and thus remain in a holding pattern of succession to a certain extent. From an ecological perspective, we are maintaining a shrub swamp ecology and the corresponding composition of species, with elderberry as the dominant crop - and we will be in this pattern for the foreseeable future of the farm. But where the shrubs are dominant for crop production purposes, there are also proximal species of fruit and nut trees growing alongside casting faint dappled shade, creating a robust edge ecology.
July 11th, 2013, Johann Rinkens & Jamie Bright, fields without fences, Frenchtown, NJ.
By the early spring of 2013, we had our trees and shrubs and a few tiny perennial herbs planted in newly formed raised beds across three acres. It all looked so underwhelming, tiny plugs, mostly empty tree tubes, and a disconcerting amount of bare soil.
Inspired by the work of Masanobu Fukuoka, we poured old vegetable seeds accumulated from Johann’s time as an annual vegetable grower into a big sack, and walked the fields scattering them into the empty beds like a mixed cover crop.
Naivety like that can be a virtue. To our surprise, the seeds germinated in orchestrated succession. The early lettuces and brassicas created microclimates for the summer crops whose germination followed. Every weekend we would set up our tent at the farmers market with our herbal products, some foraged wild edibles, and a relentless parade of vegetables grown from that single day we walked the fields and scattered seeds to the wind.
Abundance like that can be a curse. There weren’t enough buyers for all the produce, and we couldn’t keep up with the harvest. The lettuces grew so thick, they eventually began to crowd the young trees and shrubs. Harvest days were long and disorganized, sorting through a sea of vegetation for onions and ripe tomatoes. We recruited help from friends with some frequency. Our friend Jaimie was in the area playing a show and spent the night with us. I snapped this photograph the following day when he helped harvest vegetables in the thick humid high summer morning air. There was so much everywhere, and most of the time it felt overwhelming, but from where I was standing that morning, the world looked beautifully simple in its chaotic complexity.
May 13th, 2015, Yoni Wolf, Southwest Field, fields without fences, Frenchtown, NJ. Our farm dog, just a pup here, runs down an aisle in the young forest garden. Behind her a row of seaberry are reaching fruiting maturity. In front, perennial herbs in the understory, yarrow and oregano are flush. A young grafted pawpaw is still staked to a post.
November 6th, 2013, Chris Turse & Johann Rinkens, High Tunnel, fields without fences, Frenchtown, NJ. Going into the fall of 2013, our friend asked to use our newly constructed high tunnel for some winter vegetable growing. Amazingly, a few of these annual vegetables have been self seeding for nine years now in our high tunnel, and persist to this day.
April 18th, 2021, High Tunnel, fields without fences, Frenchtown, NJ. Early spring in between the high tunnel beds, mustard and kale from the 2013 season grow, and flower, and seed again in this regularly ‘disturbed’ pathway.
May 11th, 2017, Southeast Field, fields without fences, Frenchtown, NJ. The fields are organized as transitional places where plants of varying types grow next to one another. Hedges, edges, and transitional spaces between ecotypes make for diverse habitats for plants and animals, and produce diverse yields as a wide range of species commingle.
Layered Yields
We began with selling annual vegetables and herbs at farmers markets, and specialty vegetables to restaurants. As our medicinal herbs flushed we started building our herbal product line. By the third season our berry crops; elderberry, aronia, currants, raspberries, blackberries, and beach plums were fruiting. When the persimmon trees began to bear, we were harvesting dozens and dozens of crops in a complex multistrata agroforestry system.
Working in an edge ecology field schematic, we could harvest in four dimensional space. With trees perched above shrubs and herbaceous crops growing along the ground below, our fields were producing horizontally, vertically, and across the fully arched span of the raised bed. And in the herbaceous layer, we were also harvesting across time. Beginning in early spring, precocious medicinal plants, wild edibles, and herbs would emerge to flower, then recede into the background as an entirely new species grew in its place over the course of the summer.
Of course, the forest garden has yields beyond what we harvest. In the winter, naked shrubs house egg sacs and stuck seeds in their branches, and untold insects turn in the earth below. The first bumble bees are bobbing and hovering around tree blossoms in early spring, while the red-breasted robins dart from perch to ground and back again, meticulously working the earth. All summer the catbird lives in the elder shrub, and shouts from the elder shrub, and gleans the first ripe berries for its efforts. Seeds fall, leaves rot, possum’s scurry, and a regal blue heron regularly visits the ponds. Each interaction builds the complexity of the ecosystem, and out of those interactions, new behavioral and material structures emerge.
Begin noticing the unquantified yields of the forest garden, and a dim fog may set in out on the edges of human understanding. I have found that there is nothing left to do at this impasse but surrender to the unknowing.
Tend the garden, shape the garden, and also let the garden shape you, I remind myself. Yield in the way the strawberry leaves do when they grow thin and recede in summer, only to grow green again come fall. Yield in the way two trees will work and weave a path toward the sun around one another. Yield in the way plants crawl and creep, and find the path of least resistance is full of opportunity. Diversity in the garden does not persist in spite of proximity to one another, but because of proximity to one another. The world is constantly forming itself into being, shaping its walls on the world pressing up against it. And when you really and truly look for the edges of things, they blur into one another.
August 3rd, 2015, Johann Rinkens, fields without fences, Frenchtown, NJ.
For several years we sold mixed edible flowers to restaurants from New York to Philadelphia through our local distributor. The harvests would begin in early spring with the first tree blossoms and stretch until the first frost bit the wildflower blooms. There is always something blossoming in the forest garden.
On this day in early August it was white anise hyssop, spearmint, skirret, and oregano flowers. We started in the sweet pocket of the morning, after the dew had dried but before the sun was high, and walked the fields with flat woven baskets, collecting flowers one by one. The air was fragrant and perfumed with the smell of sweet mint.
These flower harvests linger in my memory, next to root harvesting in cold muck, or repeatedly puncturing my fingers to pluck seaberries from their adjacent thorns. For all the moments of discomfort working the fields, the years have also been filled with sun-kissed day dreams that felt so relaxed and natural, I could hardly tell where I ended and the garden began.
I had returned with my last harvest basket drunk off my time with the flower fairies. I set down my basket and picked up my camera as Johann arranged the last few clamshells for packing.
September 13th, 2013, Ottsville Farmers Market, Ottsville, PA. Mixed vegetables produced off of our early establishment ‘covercrop’ seeding. We were still gleaning vegetables from that one seeding in early spring, and bringing them to market with our wild edibles and herbal products.
October 10th, 2016, Persimmon harvest, fields without fences, Frenchtown, NJ. First American persimmon harvest.
July 27th, 2018, Southeast Field, fields without fences, Frenchtown, NJ. In this detailed photo from the forest garden understory we see spring crops overlapping with summer crops. Asparagus and garlic have gone to seed while anise hyssop and lemon balm are in flower, and young self seeding kale has recently germinated. Plants flush and recede in their own timelines, creating complimentary opportunities for interplanting.
May 3rd, 2018, Southwest Field, fields without fences, Frenchtown, NJ. In early spring oregano and yarrow emerge in the understory below the flowering ‘Pink Champagne’ currants. They will both find their niche as the yarrow grows upward in a ‘clumping’ structure, and the oregano ‘crawls’ around it horizontally.
The Nature of Relationship
There have been many iterations of our management approach in the forest garden over the last ten years. The seasons between 2013 and 2017 were characterized by an intensive approach that included harvesting, weeding, planting, and chopping and dropping on a near daily basis. During this time period we were supplying restaurants, wholesale accounts, and growing to create our value added herbal product line. It felt like perennial market gardening, or spin farming, in its intensity of interaction.
All of this vigorous activity is a form of disturbance, and a level of disturbance that I ultimately feel in retrospect was at odds with what the shrub and tree layer required (more of a seasonal approach to ‘disturbance’ activities). Around 2018, spirit and circumstance conspired to shift our management strategies further afield to a more feral iteration. As our consulting work beyond the field expanded, our energies were being split in too many directions, and we adapted a partitioned approach: Johann would oversee and manage off-site projects, and I would oversee and manage the operation of the farm. Then, in 2018, I broke my foot and was laid up for the spring while the fields grew with abandon. When I returned to work, eager as I was, I started doing less and less. Something had changed. My interventions and interactions were more strategic, and less frequent, with a better understanding of when to guide, and when to be guided by the garden. I developed a set of low tech (and precisely timed) management strategies that enabled me to work the farm with comparatively minimal effort. By the start of the 2020 season, I announced we would no longer be weeding the fields, ever.
Over the years, we have received questions about the forest garden perhaps better suited for appliances. Does it take care of itself? Does it work? Does it make money? It does whatever you want it to do, provided you are willing to engage in the type of interaction and relationship that supports that pursuit. Producing a diverse crop list and supplying diverse markets requires a certain intensity of engagement that “rewilding” does not. Those are two ways of forest gardening as a practice, and there of course exists a wide spectrum of interaction in between worthy of exploration. We’ve found it helpful to return to the permaculture principle of “observe and interact” to understand what type of relationship is complementary to us and the ecology. Site specific to the present moment of reflection, it shapeshifts.
September 30th, 2014, Center Field, fields without fences, Frenchtown, NJ. An early succession view of Center Field flush with herbaceous plants. Stakes and tubes still stand as placeholders for future trees. The existing old trees by the house are dying ash trees that will eventually come down along with all the desiccated ash trees in the region.
June 11th, 2022, Center Field, fields without fences, Frenchtown, NJ.
In all honesty, I rarely find myself alone in the forest garden these days. On this rare occasion, I had a couple hours to work uninterrupted while someone else was caring for my son. I was walking around with a notebook a bit disoriented. We had moved off the property, and Johann’s mother had moved into the cottage two years ago; I had stopped keeping up with regular work tasks during my pregnancy over a year earlier; the garden had grown in new and unfamiliar ways. I was standing at a crossroad in Center Field when I snapped a photo looking toward the old house and carriage apartment where I had lived for nearly a decade.
I kept writing down things to do, and then crossing them out in a strange scribble of a task list. Looking over my notes from these infrequent assessments over the last year, there are mostly questions, ‘dig out comfrey and helianthus?’ Most of these questions have been answered by time… no, we won’t get to that this season.
The forest garden farm is different without me, and I’m different without it. In the long stretches of absence from one another, we grow, and change, and become something new, that though familiar, requires a moment of adjustment when we are within reach of one another again. That’s the nature of a long term relationship, to return to and tend to, something that will constantly change shape.
All intimacy is not lost. On the far back edge of Southwest Field, there is a running serviceberry, tucked under a beach plum midway down row nine, and it should be fruiting now… is a thought I had on this day. I could still tell you where every plant is on that 10 acre plot blindfolded. There is a muscle memory embedded deep in the recesses of my mind, even if I dream less about plants, and more about my baby now. And someday soon (too soon), my son will grow, and my days will likely be filled with plants again. It’s the nature of change.
May 25th, 2016, Lindsay Napolitano (author), Southeast Field, fields without fences, Frenchtown, NJ. We originally planted European elderberry in our production rows, and American elderberry in our peripheral plantings. European elderberry flower is preferred by chefs for its unique quality of fragrance. Here I am doing an assessment for an upcoming flower harvest.
July 13th, 2021, Southwest Field, fields without fences, Frenchtown, NJ. Since 2019 we have been slowly transitioning our field plantings to American elderberry varieties to scale up our berry sales and for use in our Elderberry Elixir.
July 18th, 2022, Roan Rinkens, fields without fences, Frenchtown, NJ. Berry picking.
July 26th, 2017, Center Field, fields without fences, Frenchtown, NJ. The forest garden is always fruiting and flowering. A honey bee nuzzles into a marshmallow flower while the blackberries ripen.
Evolution
For the first couple years, when we had just started the farm and people would ask what we grow, I’d joke, ‘we mostly cultivate patience.’ Perennials are like that, they take time to grow and mature the way a wave builds to a crest.
We are planting a new forest garden this year; ride the tide of succession - peaks necessitate valleys, we remind ourselves. With a second farm location, our acreage has increased from ten acres to a total of forty five, and the additional land to manage has required a reconfiguring of our relationship to the farms. In that regard, we are reorienting from an intensive management approach, to a broad-acre approach - and that shift in dynamics will bring with it the next evolution of fields without fences.
The world reveals itself in pattern language. Though the seasons are never quite the same, they retain a rhythm and rhyme with one another, so when we look around, we can locate ourselves each spring. There is a cyclical quality to succession, but the spurs and changes are what turn it into a spiral - the shape the world takes as it grows.
Authored by Lindsay Napolitano, 2022
Photos by Lindsay Napolitano & Johann Rinkens
