A tropical and sub-tropical food forest is a cornucopia of luscious food, thriving by drawing carbon from the atmosphere to support trees, shrubs, herbaceous plants, and climbers that produce fruits, seeds, oils, greens, flowers, drinks, and herbs. There are thousands of known food plants that thrive in hot climate zones, discovered and improved from time immemorial, before the Agricultural Revolution brought about deforestation and land degradation to provide grains to feed city-states. Our human ancestors were gatherers and gardeners; we may well have evolved large brains to store and share knowledge of where nutritious plants were found and how to modify the environment to encourage them.
Most books about food forests or forest gardens concentrate on design principles or on case studies. The focus of this book is the plants, their characteristics and personalities, what they have to offer a food forest ecosystem, as well as what kinds of foods they can yield.
This book contains details of 250+ plants selected for a mix of growing conditions, plant size and structure, food types, and contributions to a tropical food forest ecosystem. They are arranged in sections corresponding to their key characteristics and the forest layer in which they will be used: Trees, Shrubs, Cacti, Bamboos, Climbers, Bulbs, Herbaceous Perennials, Ferns. Each section has a quick-reference table of its edibility characteristics and other details, including size and whether it is nitrogen-fixing.
Further details of these and other plants suitable for tropical and sub-tropical conditions can be found in the PFAF Plants Database, which can be accessed free of charge at pfaf.org
