3 tips from NZ’s top food foresters

ROBERT AND ROBYN GUYTON are the custodians and creators of this green Riverton revelry. Their property is home to the South Island’s most established food forest, with over 480 productive trees, shrubs, and other plants mingling in symbiotic bliss with natives, birds, and insects. It includes 90+ heritage apple varieties, more than 30 other fruit and nut trees, berries, eight sorts of rhubarb, and 50 different herbs.

Tip 1: Follow nature’s lead

The first step is to stop using chemicals.

“Let the edges grow wild and put vegetables in your

flower garden,” says Robyn. “Learn to love the plants that grow voluntarily and find out what they’re good for.

“Add some layers of every height and depth and replace ornamental exotics with edible or native plants. Lawns, straight lines, and unproductive gardens are so last century.”

Tip 2: Let your soil keep its clothes on

If you dig weeds out of your lawn or poison them, they’ll keep growing back because the soil might need something.

“Dock, for example, brings iron,” says Robyn. “If you let it rot down on site, it’ll give the soil all the iron it needs. Nature doesn’t want bare soil because the sun beats down on it and takes away some of its nutrients, and rain washes them away. Nature just wants (the soil) to be covered.”

Tip 3: Go at it wholeheartedly

Robert says even after 25 years, he’s still adding plants, and somehow, there’s always a place for them.

“Rather than having to clear a big area and have it as fruit trees and grass, we discovered you could do everything in there,” says Robert. “You could grow all your herbs, berries, and vines, plus have your native canopy still in place.

“We thought that was perfect, and it is.”