A Mount Pleasant couple transformed their grassy backyard into a lush food forest with maturing fruit trees and gardens that yield vegetables and herbs.
“High-quality, nourishing food is the most important thing for our health and well-being,” said Patrick Nienaber. “The food in the grocery store has been dying for weeks, but fresh off the vine is the way to go.”
His partner, Wilmington, N.C., native Beth French, remembers how her grandmother sustained herself from a backyard garden at her home in Ohio.
“When we sat at her table, our dinners were ears of corn, tomatoes, potatoes and that is how I eat growing up.”
French and Nienaber are honoring the home-grown vegetables tradition of gardening with an added twist — fruit trees.
Fruit trees are the foundation of their garden, which gets help from native greenery that nourishes the trees in a food forest that requires minimal human attention.
A different way to grow food
The idea for this unique gardening style comes from Permanent Yield, a Charleston-based regenerative landscaping company that Ben Sinderman launched in 2022 after he became disenchanted with growing vegetables at a local indoor hydroponic farm.
“Grass is the biggest crop grown in the United States,” he said. “It is wasted space. That is why I am focusing on backyards to have reciprocity with nature to create landscapes that produce food for future generations,” he said.
Much of the food production in South Carolina is row crops, and a few farmers have perennial fruit trees, he said. But none of it is designed for people like the French-Nienaber family, who are one of his seven food forest clients mostly in the Lowcountry.
said her son likes to show off the garden to his friends. | Photo by Herb Frazier
Each garden starts with a vegetable garden that gives a harvest the first season as the perennial fruit trees in the food forest mature, Sinderman said. “The fruit trees usually mature in four years, and then you can start harvesting fruit,” he said.
In the two years after installing their food forest, French and Nienaber are picking tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, cabbage, broccoli and arugula. Their fruit trees are already producing some Santa Rosa plums, Anna apples, Dorsett apples and Brown Turkey figs.
The base of each fruit tree is surrounded with plants that benefit the trees, Sinderman said.
The Santa Rosa plum, for example, is surrounded with mint, lavender, yarrow and sun choke — native plants that provide different benefits, he said. “The mint attracts pollinators, and it serves as a natural fertilizer” while other plants repel insects, he explained.
The miniature self-sustaining ecosystem of fruit trees with supporting plants is called a permaculture tree guild. It mimics the natural interactions in a forest, where clustered plants support the group’s growth and health, he said.
A tree guild, which can vary in size, does not require much maintenance, he said.
“The most important thing is the pruning of the trees,” he added. Over time, the ground-cover plants block the sunlight to cut off weed growth.
Nienaber added that much of the effort comes at the beginning and when Sinderman installs the gardens. “He encourages us to work with him to be part of the process and to learn because he is teaching the whole time,” Nienaber said.
After the plants and trees are installed, they create an energy that draws the natural environment into the yard “with all the insects, the butterflies and dragon flies,” Nienaber said with excitement. “The life that is created, you feel it.”
A nonprofit mission
Sinderman is in the process of forming a nonprofit organization that he will call Food For Every Yard. He wants to plant 150 fruit trees in the Lowcountry by the end of the year.
He’s currently seeking partners and funders for it.
“Studies show that food grown in living soil and natural ecosystems carries its own microbiome, which plays a critical role in supporting human gut health and overall well-being,” he said.
Sinderman also said he wants to empower homeowners to grow their own nutrient-dense food “to help people reconnect with the land, regenerate health from the soil up and cultivate resilient neighborhoods.”
He admits that one tree is not going to feed a family. “This goes beyond having the food in your yard,” he said. “It is about getting people back out in nature and having something people can have in common with each other.”
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