Silvohorticulture: A Grower’s Guide to Integrating Trees Into Crops

＂Dibben and Raskin offer an insightful, inspiring but also exceptionally practical guide to integrating trees into annual cropping systems. . . in this book we see how the phrase ’the sky’s the limit’ has never been more applicable.＂--Jesse Frost, author of The Living Soil Handbook

An invaluable handbook for farmers, growers, and gardeners, Silvohorticulture is the first book to offer a detailed, practical guide on how to effectively integrate trees with vegetable growing, offering information previously known only in the foresting world.

Drawing on the decades-long experiences of Ben Raskin and Andy Dibben, both of whom have designed and managed agroforestry systems and have extensive experience in commercial horticultural crop production, this is the definitive book on the interaction between trees and crops, covering the benefits of trees for edible crops and the potential for additional crops from trees, plus crucial new information on how to fit trees into complex crop rotations as well as manipulating access to light. Ben and Andy also reveal the latest research on how tree roots behave and, importantly, how that impacts your crops.

Agroforestry can bring immense benefits to farmers and growers--not just optimizing yield, but also improving soil, managing pests and water, increasing biodiversity, and reducing costs. System design must be customised to each grower’s requirements, and Silvohorticulture offers step-by-step detail that will allow you to manage your trees and crops successfully.

＂In this immensely practical guide, the authors provide the technical details towards integrating trees with vegetables and other crops, all while dispelling any preconceived notions that this idea reduces productivity or function. In fact, these systems might prove essential for farm resilience in a changing climate.＂--Steve Gabriel, author of Silvopasture

Ben Raskin has worked in horticulture for more than thirty years, with a wide range of experience in practical commercial growing as well as policy and advocacy work. As the Soil Association’s Head of Horticulture and Agroforestry, he provides growers at all levels of production with technical, marketing, policy, supply chain and networking support. He is currently implementing a 200-acre silvopastural agroforestry planting in Wiltshire. Additionally, Ben co-chairs the Defra Edibles Horticulture Roundtable and sits on the boards of the Organic Growers Alliance and Community Supported Agriculture Network UK.

Ben is the author of The Woodchip Handbook as well as books on gardening, including Zero-Waste Gardening, The Community Gardening Handbook and three volumes of the Discover Together Guides: Compost, Grow, and Bees, Bugs, and Butterflies.

Andy Dibben is currently Head Grower at Abbey Home Farm, where he is responsible for the production of over ninety different fruit and vegetable crops. Over the last eight years, Andy has been responsible for designing and establishing an agroforestry system integrating fruit, coppice and wildlife trees with field-scale vegetable production. Andy regularly writes horticultural articles and speaks at conferences, including the Oxford Real Farming Conference.