Persimmons and Patience
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If you visit Niky Schultz’s food forest, you might get the sense she’s planting her own little Garden of Eden, an edible landscape where bees nap in her “Pollinator Paradise” and salamanders swim like little dragons in her pond. It’s hard to believe that she’s spent most of her adult life living in apartments with only enough space for a container garden.
So how did she go from apartment-dweller to agroforester?
“I was concerned about the climate crisis and looking for something to give me some hope,” Niky explained. “When I read The Soil Will Save Us by Kristen Olsen, I realized how much each person can do to reduce our reliance on traditional monocultures. I wanted to grow as much food as possible for our family, wildlife, and even my neighbors.”
As Niky learned more about agroforestry, she decided she wanted to grow a food forest. She spent the next year doing research and building her vision until she and her husband were able to buy a five-acre property in Arlington.
But once she was finally on the land she’d been dreaming of, Niky quickly learned that establishing a food forest requires some trial and error.
A Rough Start
Almost nothing Niky planted in the first two years survived. Was it disease, drought, flooding? Nope. Goats.
“No matter what I did, I could not keep my goats away from the trees I planted. I spent about two years just constantly failing.”
The goats have since been rehomed.
“The good news is that it gave me a chance to study the sun and really understand the different microclimates on the property.”
Like many agroforesters, Niky found that adaptation is just part of the process in building a productive food forest. It takes time to get to know and learn from the land, including the plant and animal interactions.
“I tell people that if you can think of it as an experiment, you're going to be a lot happier.”
Edible Art
After almost five years of hard work, Niky now has over 65 fruit trees and about 70 berry bushes. She’s planted her food forest in different sections of the property, each with its own character. Not only does it add beauty, it also reduces the risk of potential diseases spreading.
“Berry Hill” has aronia, service, and goumi berries, plus autumn olive. “The Orchard” is chock full of apples, plums, pears, crabapples, along with some of its own berry bushes.
“Pollinator Paradise” in front of her house is full of fragrant herbs and flowers for her to enjoy along with the bees, hummingbirds, and other pollinators.
And then there’s “Goat Hill.” The area the goats had once overgrazed became the site of Niky’s first successful planting and is now filled with persimmons, apples, elderberries, blueberries, and six grapevine trellises that will eventually create a tunnel.
Introducing Different Animals
While Niky’s experience with her goats didn’t go so well, she’s found that animals can still be an asset to a food forest—it just depends on the animal and how they’re incorporated. Niky’s five pot-bellied pigs were much easier to contain than her goats and they provide great fertilizer. But that’s not all. Niky figured out that she could train them to remove invasive Himalayan blackberries on the property.
“I just dug up some of the roots in front of the pigs and fed it to them, then dug up some more and showed them until they caught on,” Niky said.
Almost all of her Himalayan blackberries are now gone.
Turning a Problem Into an Asset
Niky also found a creative way to deal with the flooding issues they encountered after moving in. Rain flowing off of their upper pastures was causing a significant amount of mud in the areas below. At the same time, Niky knew that the previous property owners had run out of well water multiple times in the summer. After reading Restoration Agriculture by Mark Shepherd, she had an idea.
“Instead of fighting the flooding, I realized I could take advantage of it. I thought, what if we captured some of the water by building a pond and let it absorb back into the ground?”
It worked. Nicky was able to capture the rainwater at the bottom of her slope and allow it to slowly percolate into the groundwater. After months without rain last summer, Niky never ran out of water, even while irrigating all of her fruit trees and berry bushes. She’s even planted the area in and around the pond with blueberries, kiwis, and edible cattails.
It’s also been a huge benefit to wildlife.
“Last year we had tons of tadpoles, salamanders, and birds. I love sitting with my coffee and watching them. It’s become our own little sanctuary.”
Lessons from Persimmons
While Niky is enjoying fruit from many of her trees already, her persimmons are a different story. Both Asian (Diospyros kaki) and American (Diospyros virginiana) persimmons are becoming popular in agroforestry since they are prolific, easy to grow, and resistant to pests and disease. After their leaves drop in the fall, the fruits hang like vibrant orange lanterns and ripen in November or December, a time of year when their fresh, honey-sweet fruit is especially welcome.
So what’s the catch? Persimmons typically take seven to ten years before they bear fruit. In many ways they personify the investment required in building a food forest, and the benefits that come from it. Like many practices in agroforestry, food forests require us to embrace patience, observation, and adaptation—qualities that are often undervalued in a world full of instant gratification.
Niky will have to wait a couple of years before she can make her favorite holiday cookies from her own persimmons. (Check out the recipe at the end of this newsletter!) But she's willing to wait.
“I’m growing my own little ecosystem up here,” Niky said. “And that takes time.
“For now I kind of have to baby things a little bit, but it just feels so good when you start getting fruit and you know the love you put into it all is being returned.”
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