Black Locust | seedling | root trainer

Description

Black Locust is a deciduous tree in the legume family, growing up to 20m. It is native to southern United States and is widely spread around the world. Robinia is a great forest gardens plant as we could harvest several crops – early flowers for bees, ground durable posts, it coppices so posts can be harvested every few years, and is nitrogen fixing.

Forest Gardens are orchards designed in such a way so the needs of the heavy bearing heavy feeding fruit trees are taken care of in the design.

We do this by:

• Ensuring no more than 60% of the canopy space is taken up by heavy feeders. We prefer 40%.
• For every square metre of heavy feeder canopy there is 0.8 of a square metre of nitrogen fixer.
• For every square metre of heavy feeder there is 1 comfrey plant.
• You have all seven (7) layers of the forest garden present.
• You have as wide a range of mineral accumulators present.

For more details about this see the Koanga Design Your Own Forest Garden Booklet