Food Forests

I live in a food forest, and I love it. Click here to read more about them: View of Food forests: Their services and sustainability (foodsystemsjournal.org).

Velvet mesquite, with the scientific name Prosopis velutina, has been feeding people in the desert for millennia. They are bean trees! Twenty years ago, my spouse and I planted our irrigated acreage in Phoenix with a couple dozen of these heat-tolerant trees who historically grew in the floodplain of the Salt River. Because they are nitrogen-fixers, we don’t have to add fertilizer. Because they are long-lived trees, we don’t have to till the soil every year. They are a wonderfully low-maintenance food.

We hand-pick the pods, which is fun, and cook with the flour that is ground from them. Food forests such as mesquite bosques are a sustainable alternative to industrial-style agriculture. We, as a society, need to wean ourselves off fossil-fuels, to stop the climate from warming, and this is one place to start. I would love to see the irrigated parks, school grounds, and back yards of Phoenix become filled with these shady trees who also provide habitat for songbirds.

If you are looking to grow a mesquite bosque of your own, take care to seek out velvet mesquite (P. velutina) or honey mesquite (P. glandulosa). There are many species in the Prosopis genus and though they all produce edible fruit, not all are equally tasty.

Here is a piece I wrote about our food forest, in the book Bringing Home the Wild: A Riparian Garden in a Southwest city:

My admiration for velvet mesquite increased after learning about her capacity to engage with tiny creatures who have mastered the miraculous feat of converting atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia. Before she allows the nitrogen-fixing Rhizobia into her body, they do a delicate, chemical, pas de deux. Are you friend or foe? Mutualist or pathogen? Her root tips secrete signaling chemicals into the soil, the bacteria ‘listen’ and respond, and she completes the conversation. Nodulate, away! Once in, she supplies her single-celled dwellers with the energy they need to drive the enzymatic catalysis. In exchange, they give her the nutrients she needs to create her protein-rich fruit. A fine partnership, indeed. 

Her ability to find water and nitrogen where no one else could allowed her to become abundant along rivers in the American Southwest. And she shares her bounty. Think: McDonalds in the city, except nutritious and free. She packages the considerable carbon she fixes in hand-size morsels that feed us, the coyotes and ground squirrels alike (so we overlook the occasional poke from her spines).

Marcella, our young neighbor to the north, came over this morning to help harvest the pods. Marcella is sweet, just like them. She is learning to live off the land and has a garden of her own. We share food and local knowledge; it is nice. I hauled out the step ladders and we climbed into the canopy, picking the pods that were dry and leaving the ones that were still green, slowly filling our bags. Some velvet mesquite have long, thin, red-streaked pods while others are plumper and less colorful. Each is different. Matt is our sommelier, of sorts, tasting the pods and selecting the most delectable trees to harvest.

The community milling is but a few days away, during which the starchy pods will be transformed into flour and then into us. I cook with the flour throughout the year, tossing it into pancakes or cookies or, last night, apple-zucchini bread. Yum. A mini culture has re-sprung around this regionally important food which helps stabilize one’s blood sugar while giving the bacteria in one’s digestive tract something to do. As we picked the pods up high, our terrier Sunshine was down low, munching on her breakfast selection. Well done, you! Less kibble to buy from the store.