Forest Gardens: Create a Food Forest in Your Backyard
If you live somewhere with space for growing food, a forest garden or food forest is one of the best ways to grow it.
What is a Forest Garden?
A forest garden is a garden designed to mimic the interrelationships that exist in the natural environment. As your forest garden gets established it becomes more and more hands-off except for harvesting, creating less work for you and letting nature take the reins.
When you intentionally group and place plants like wild trees, shrubs, ground-cover, and vines together they'll grow symbiotically, requiring no additional fertilizer, water, pest/disease control. This grouping of mutually beneficial plants is called a guild. When you put lots of guilds together you get a forest garden.
A well-known example of a guild is the three sisters, an Indigenous method of growing corn, beans, and squash together in the same mound. The corn grows tall, providing shade for the squash and a trellis for the beans to climb. The beans fix nitrogen in the soil to fertilize the corn and squash. The squash covers the ground, creating a living mulch for the corn and beans. The plants fulfill each other's needs and grow better together than they would separately.
There are infinite ways to create guilds and in turn forest gardens! Fruit tree guilds like these are a great example.
Designing a Forest Garden
You don't need a space the size of an actual forest to grow a forest garden. Even a small bit of land can hold food producing plants. The key is finding a group of plants that all benefit each other so you can create guilds even in small spaces.
Here's a basic guideline to creating a guild:
For every large/tall food producing plant/shrub/tree, include a nitrogen fixing plant/shrub/tree, a plant that attracts beneficial insects, a plant with a deep tap root to pull up nutrients from the soil, and a ground cover to create a living mulch.
This is a step up from the three sisters, and it can go even further! Forest gardens can be as huge or as small as you want them to be.
Consider the sun. All of your plants will need adequate sunlight, so plant your tallest plants to the north, then moving south plant your smaller trees, vines, herbs, and ground covers.
Figuring out What to Grow in Your Food Forest
So many plants can thrive in a food forest. What you grow is going to need to be tailored to your space, your needs, and your climate.
Both annuals and perennials work well, but perennials are often preferred.
Grow plants native to your area. Learn your growing zone and research your native plants. If you live in the United States this tool from the National Wildlife Federation will show you your native plants by typing in your zip code.
If possible, connect with other permaculturists in your area or growing zone (either on social media or in person!) and learn what they're growing and how they have it organized.
Keep on reading and learning! Books, classes, websites, blogs, YouTube videos, there's so many great resources out there. Gaia's Garden by Toby Hemingway and Edible Forest Gardens by Dave Jacke and Eric Toensmeier are considered some of the best books on the subject. I've found lots of helpful books on free websites like Z Library and the Internet Archives!
Creating a food forest takes a lot of planning, but the end result is so worth it. Better for the land, easier on us, and we still get incredible harvests. Happy growing!🌱
Source
