Edible Forest Gardens

Fruits and nuts swell on trees everywhere.  Berry bushes lean over fences.  You can walk down the side walk and nibble on the way.  Various green, red, blue, brown and multicolored foods grow along your path-you even know all their names and how to use them.  Flowers bloom all over the place.  The scent filled air buzzes with insects on their appointed rounds

[The community’s efforts] restored useful and ecologically appropriate species to their yards, making the soil healthier.  More birds began reinhabiting the human made landscape, as did more insect life.  As ecosystem balance began to reemerge with our help, the amphibians and reptiles came back too.  Then people noticed they had fewer pest imbalances in there landscapes, and pesticides became even less necessary then they were before.  As the soils improved the plants got healthier and less run off flowed into street sewers.  People needed less fertilizer and irrigation as time went on.  The health of the streams, lakes, ponds, and rivers improved as fewer nutrients washed into them from what had previously been mostly compacted lawns receiving strong doses of fertilizer.  People's yards became pathways for plants and animals to interact across neighborhoods that had previously blocked them.  Sometimes this was good and sometimes it was bad, but most folks understood that it meant the web of life was reweaving itself.

- Dave Jacke, Edible Forest Gardens, Volume 1