CHRISTINA CHUNG: THE LAYERED EDIBLE GARDEN
This episode of Big Blend Radio’s GARDEN GOSSIP show features food gardening pro Christina Chung, who discusses her new book “The Layered Edible Garden: A Beginner’s Guide to Creating a Productive Food Garden Layer by Layer,” that comes out on Feb. 6, 2024 through Cool Springs Press.
Say goodbye to long, straight rows of vegetable plants lined up and waiting for attacks from pests and diseases, and say hello to an interplanted polyculture paradise, filled with layers of edible plants that outcompete weeds, share resources, and grow beautifully together.
In “The Layered Edible Garden: A Beginner’s Guide to Creating a Productive Food Garden Layer by Layer,” author and food gardening pro Christina Chung introduces a modern approach to home food gardening that follows nature’s lead by growing plants in mixed communities, instead of in agriculture-centric monocultures.
By intentionally including edible plants from 8 different layers (trees, sub-canopy trees, shrubs, vines, perennials, annuals, ground covers, and edible roots) in your home garden, you’ll be building a mini “food forest” that will produce food for years to come and require less work and fewer resources. With the insight found in The Layered Edible Garden, you’ll:
- Learn how to transform your home’s landscape into an edible plant community
- Meet dozens of plants in each of the 8 layers
- Discover the many perks of growing perennial food crops that return to the garden year after year
- Find design and planting advice to make your layered edible garden as attractive as it is productive
- Be introduced to intensive planting strategies to organize plant layers in a functional and beautiful way
- Acquire info on how to establish new planting areas and how to utilize the existing garden features already present
“That’s the main concept of this book: to plant up all the layers, all the spaces, of your garden with edible plants to make a different kind of more beautiful, more ecologically sound, less labor-intensive, edible garden.” – Christina Chung
Whether you have sun or shade, a large growing space or a small one, planting many layers of food plants together results in a diverse, low-maintenance edible garden, filled with plants that help support each other. The future of growing food is multi-layered.
Follow Christina Chung on Instagram and Facebook on @fluent.garden. She creates educational content to make gardening accessible for a wide range of online audiences. After completing the Horticulture Technician Foundation program through The UBC Botanical Garden’s Horticulture Training Program, Chris served as the program’s coordinator for two years. Working as an educator, she created and taught small-scale urban food production courses. Chris’s current passion for growing perennial edible plants has led her to investigate the viability of introducing thoughtfully designed food forests or “layered” plantings into residential-scale gardens in Metro Vancouver, Canada. She completed further training through Gaia College’s Organic Horticulture Specialist Program.