University Place

The Art of Food Forest Design

[gentle music] – Rachel Belida: Hello, everyone.
Thank you so much for being here today.
It’s great to spend a weekend with all you wonderful gardeners.
My name is Rachel Belida, and I will be talking about the art of food forest design today.
Here’s a quick overview of what I’ll talk about.
I’ll give you a brief introduction to myself.
We’ll talk about what a food forest design is, the seven layers of a food forest.
We’ll talk about a few of the benefits, and then I will show you some sample designs that I put together.
We’ll talk about some food forest plants and some common questions about food forests.
And at the end, we’ll have some time for Q&A.
So I want to start with just a very brief background of myself, because I think it helps to understand, like, my take on food forests and how I approach them the way I do.
So, I first became interested in plants in high school, and I decided to study horticulture and landscape design.
So I did that at the University of Minnesota.
Afterwards, I bravely set off and started a gardening business where I did garden design, installation, and maintenance in Minneapolis.
But it was then that I kind of felt like something, there could be more to this.
Maybe we can grow food in a really beautiful way.
So I had that in the back of my mind, but I also really wanted to join the Peace Corps.
So I took a couple years and I went to Mali, West Africa, and there’s a picture of me with my best friend, Manya, in the village.
When I got back, I was still thinking about growing food and wondering how we could incorporate more food into landscapes.
And at some point, I learned about permaculture.
So if you don’t know about permaculture, a very brief definition would be, it’s a system of design that connects the pieces that works on making connections between things rather than just having a lot of separate parts.
So I studied permaculture design, and I also studied some herbal medicine, and that brings me to where I am today with my business, Daily Harvest Designs, where I focus on a combination of ornamental landscape design style plus permaculture.
So it’s kind of bringing it all together in a really beautiful way that can be incorporated into residential landscapes beautifully.
So, what is a food forest?
Is anyone here brand-new to food forests?
Yeah, a few hands, all right.
So I’m gonna start with a very simple definition.
A food forest mimics how nature works in an actual forest while growing food.
And that’s a pretty basic definition, but if you can just imagine standing on a trail in a forest, thinking of all the plants, but having those all be food-producing plants, that’s generally what a food forest is.
If you’re looking for a more comprehensive definition, a food forest is a layered garden that creates a self-sustaining ecosystem.
It has seven layers, from roots to tall trees, allowing various plants to grow together.
This design boosts biodiversity and strengthens the ecosystem.
By including edible plants, a food forest supports sustainable food production and creates a healthy environment for many plants and animals.
So, as you can see, it’s more than just about growing food.
It’s about creating a whole system that works together and kind of supports itself.
So you might be wondering, what does this all mean for you?
And if you think about a forest, it will grow whether or not humans are there taking care of it, right?
It doesn’t need a lot of attention.
So that’s the idea with a food forest.
Like, how can we grow food in a way that is just gonna keep coming back year after year without having to put all this time and energy into the garden?
So, for us gardeners, I don’t know about any of you, but sometimes I like to be a lazy gardener.
I have other things going on in my life, and I just want to be able to harvest some food.
So a food forest is a way to have a landscape that’s partly self-sustaining while you’re still growing food.
All right, so we’ll talk about the seven layers of the food forest, and I won’t spend a ton of time on this.
I just wanna mention a few of the harvests that you might expect from each layer, and a couple of the functions of each layer of the food forest.
The top layer is the canopy, and these are the trees that are about 30 feet tall or more.
Harvests that you might expect from these trees would be sap, some nuts, some fruit, and medicine.
And of course, trees are great for producing shade and oxygen.
They help with our air quality and climate improvement.
So you might be wondering how in the world you might fit a canopy tree into your garden.
Perhaps you have an urban landscape or you already have a lot of plants growing.
And the great news is, is that you don’t have to have the canopy tree.
It’s okay to skip this layer if it doesn’t work with your space.
The next layer is the understory layer, and these are the trees that are about 10 to 30 feet in height.
Foods that you can grow here are a lot of fruit trees.
So this would be like your fruit tree layer, whether you have dwarf fruit trees, semi-dwarf, or standard-sized fruit trees.
Fruit trees this size are excellent for climbing.
I know my kids love to be up in the trees.
They like to play make-believe and just spend a lot of time up there.
So they’re great for recreation.
And then, these trees also start to bring in more species diversity into the food forest.
Next is a shrub layer.
These are plants that are woody and up to about 10 feet in height.
This is a layer where you’re gonna find a lot of fruit and some nuts, and some medicinal plants as well.
Similarly to the understory layer, there’s a lot of species diversity.
There’s nutrient cycling that happens.
So it’s creating this system where all the leaves are just falling to the ground, and that’s gonna be the mulch for your space.
And, over time, it’s gonna help with the soil building and other benefits like that.
This layer is the herbaceous layer.
This is probably my favorite because this is where we start to get a lot of color, lots of flowers, lots of different scents in the garden.
And those are helpful because they can repel, confuse, and distract pests, and they can also help to attract beneficial insects, as well, for pollination in your food forest.
So this is a layer that can help a lot with ecosystem health and fertility.
Harvests are more varied in this layer: edible flowers, tea, culinary herbs, greens, lots of different medicines.
And it’s also kind of the fun layer.
I love to go out and just pick flowers and have lovely flowers on my table throughout the year.
The next layer is the ground cover layer, and I like to think about this layer as being like natural mulch.
So it’s your living mulch layer that covers the soil, and if the soil’s covered, you’re gonna have less erosion.
You’ll have less weeds coming in because you don’t have that open soil space.
And there are quite a few foods that you could harvest from this layer, like fruit, edible flowers, greens, herbs, and medicines.
Next, we have the root layer.
This would be your root veggies and your medicine.
The roots are fantastic for helping to build soil.
So if you have a garden with a lot of clay soil, you can grow plants like daikon radishes, where they have very large roots, and they’ll break up that clay soil.
And if you leave them in the ground, they’re gonna break down, and over time, it’s gonna start to build up a really nice soil, soil health and soil community.
Roots are also fantastic for uplifting water and nutrients.
So bringing that up from deep in the soil up to the top, and then if you can chop the tops of the plants back and lay that on the soil, it’s adding, like, this nice mulch to the top and working with that nutrient cycling.
The next layer is the vine layer.
So these are your climbers.
And in a food forest, you can design it in a way that you’re really making use of all of the space in your landscape.
So paths can be a space to grow food.
So as you can see in the picture, I have arbors over the pathway in my garden.
And it’s a great way to grow squash.
So you’re increasing the amount of photosynthesis in the space and increasing your production.
The food you can get are vegetables, lots of staple crops like dry beans, that’s a great thing to grow, squash, fruit, edible flowers, and medicinal plants.
I love to grow vines for the craft material.
Grapevines are great.
I’ve got all sorts of weavings and things going on in my garden.
It’s just fun to play with those and integrate them as well.
There is one more layer that I don’t have up here.
It’s kind of the bonus layer.
So if you like to eat mushrooms, you can incorporate mushrooms or a fungi layer into your food forest as well.
So, next, I just wanna mention a few of the food forest benefits before we get on to some design ideas.
And hopefully, you picked up on some of them already as we talked about the seven layers.
So the first benefit is biodiversity.
So if you’re picturing a forest, there are so many different types of plants that grow in the forest.
And then, within each of those groups of plants, there’s a wide variety of plants that will grow in each layer, if that makes sense.
So you have this large diversity of plants, and with that, it’s going to invite in a nice variety of insects and birds and animals, and it starts to create a community of life that supports itself, to a certain extent.
So with that, you end up with a healthy, healthier ecosystem that needs less interventions, and that goes back to the lazy gardening that I like to do.
The next benefit is soil health.
So food forests are typically– well, primarily made up of perennial foods, and that means that you plant them once, you don’t have to disturb your soil again.
So the soil really has a chance to have a life of its own.
It’s not being disturbed all the time, you know, year after year, every spring to plant seeds again.
And next is maintenance with the diverse planting.
You really end up with a more self-sustaining garden than you would otherwise.
Food security is another benefit, and that one seems quite obvious, since we’re talking about food forests.
But the one thing I want to mention is the perennial foods.
I love that even if I don’t plant any annual vegetables in the springtime, I’m still gonna have quite a big harvest of food from our garden, because those plants are gonna grow and harvest, or grow and produce, whether or not, you know, you’re doing much of anything for them once they’re established.
So I think that’s a really huge benefit to food forests.
And then, there’s also quite a big diversity of harvests and harvests that you can get throughout the season.
And you can grow plants that you would not normally find in the grocery stores or at farmers’ markets.
And then, of course, if you have excess food, you can share it with your neighbors and your community.
And lastly, aesthetics.
So, this is kind of where my ornamental landscape design training comes in.
But I think that food forests are so beautiful.
I mean, they can be designed in a way that’s going to look gorgeous with your home.
It can draw people in.
You can use certain plants as focal points in your garden, and they really create wonderful visual interest year ’round because you have the structure, you have the trees and the shrubs in your gardens.
Next, I’d like to show you a few sample designs that I put together, and it’s just some examples of how you could take these seven layers of a food forest and incorporate them into perhaps your own residential space or a public garden.
The first one I want to talk about is a food forest border, or what I’m calling a food forest border, at least.
And this would be a planting that separates a space in some way.
So it could be used to block or highlight a view.
You could use it to add privacy or direct traffic through a space.
You could put it along a property line, whether it’s a front, side, or back yard, or between some outdoor spaces to create, like, outdoor rooms or the feeling of a space being closed in a bit.
So, I chose this property just randomly off of Google Maps, and I chose this one because it felt like, you know, a kind of standard, newer development neighborhood residential home.
Got the driveway in the front, single-family home, a deck in the back, and I love that they have a little vegetable garden way off in the back corner.
So for this design example, or, for this property, I came up with three different examples of how you could incorporate a food forest into this space.
So, I created a base map, which is basically the outline of the property, the home and driveway and whatnot.
And I added that green circle, which could be an open space.
It could be a lawn or an eco lawn, just some sort of extended gathering space off the deck.
And from there, I put in a canopy tree.
So that could be, like, a standard-sized fruit tree or a nut tree, and then a few understory trees, which could be fruit trees in the corner.
And then, after that, you could put in some groups of shrubs kind of clustered together and plant herbs and roots underneath.
The little vegetable garden in the back could actually be moved up closer to the deck, because the vegetables need much more maintenance and watering and care than your food forest is going to need.
So that could be closer to the deck just to save yourself some time and energy and to have that close by so you can easily run out and harvest veggies and herbs for cooking.
Something like this would blend really well in a neighborhood because it’s very organized.
It has a really neat appearance, but you can still get those benefits of, like, the food forest structure from it.
This is a very similar example to the last one.
The only difference is that the plants are in a more kind of natural pattern.
They’re not grouped together like the other one was.
And if you wanted to add vines in for this layer, you could add a pergola over the deck, or you could add arbors along the left side of the house to make a nice pathway from the front yard to the back yard.
And the last example for this property is just simply a line of plants.
So something like this could be great for creating a living fence.
It could be used along a road, anywhere you would like to block the view.
For this one, I put the canopy tree in the front yard to add some height and shade for the house during the summertime, and then the sunlight can come in during the wintertime.
And for the shrubs and trees, I would keep them between, you know, maybe waist height and up to about 10 feet tall, because that will create a nice visual barrier whether you’re inside the house, like on the first floor, or out on the back deck.
Can really create some privacy between spaces.
The next example is what I’m calling a freestanding food forest.
So this is an example of a garden that could be placed in pretty much any open, sunny, grassy space.
It could be used in a public space or a residential property, perhaps at a commercial building, or, like, a business park where employees could go out and take their break or eat their lunch outside.
So, I started with three circles that are exactly the same size, organized in a triangular pattern, and I left plenty of space in between.
So the gray area is a nice, wide path where there’s some open space in the center, and that could be for benches or a picnic table, perhaps an outdoor classroom at a school.
And the brown lines around are just, like, mulched access paths into the center of the circular gardens.
There’s a canopy tree in the northernmost garden and about five understory trees, so those would be nice fruit trees in the other gardens.
And then from there, I added in some more layers.
So now we’ve got the shrub layer mixed in.
And these I kept mostly in groups and clusters.
So it still has a really nice organized appearance, especially if it’s a public garden and you want to keep it looking intentional and kind of neat and tidy.
And after that, the herbs and ground covers and roots can be planted underneath, and those are the green hatched areas.
And for this one, I also added in pollinator plants.
So, oftentimes, when I’m designing gardens, there are places where it’s hard to find the right plant or perhaps you don’t want to grow food in a certain area, so.
And it’s also great to add in the native plants because those are going to bring in the beneficial insects and pollinators and all of your native insects to the garden.
So I added in some shade-loving native plants and some sun-loving pollinator plants.
So, this last one is a food forest landscape.
So this is an example of a residential property.
And a garden like this could be– It’s a combination of the ornamental landscape design principles plus permaculture and food forests kind of all mixed together into one landscape.
So you could take any of these ideas for your home or around commercial buildings or around public properties.
And once again, I chose a property just kind of randomly.
It’s an urban lot.
It’s a duplex, so you see there are two sidewalks going up to the property on the left side.
There are two street trees between the street and the sidewalk.
And aside from that, not too many other plants.
There is a driveway and a garage in the back and a walkway up to the back part of the house.
So I created the base map for this one, and then I started adding in some trees for the food forest.
In the northern part of the backyard, there’s a canopy tree.
The north side, obviously, is a great place to put your taller plants and to create some nice, shady gathering spaces as well, because it’s great to be able to go out and interact with your food forest and spend some time there.
I added a couple smaller canopy trees along the sidewalk, because that is probably a really hot and sunny place, so a little shade would be nice for people using the sidewalk.
And then, a few other understory trees, which could be the fruit trees, and those would be, like, dwarf or semi-dwarf fruit trees.
There are also a few larger shrubs, and those are placed so that they can create some privacy, so both between the front doors of the homes and by the backyard.
You can see that I’m starting to kind of enclose the backyard with this food forest.
Next, I added a gathering space in the backyard.
Some vegetable gardens along the sidewalk on the south side, and those would be raised gardens since they’re right along the sidewalk and it’s nice to keep your veggies up, kind of out of the dog zone and off the sidewalk.
And you could add some height with trellises or arbors between the veggie beds, and then, also, a nice walk-through arbor to access the back area.
There are also some foundation plantings, so those could be some berry bushes right around the front corner of the house.
And on the north side, some larger shrubs, larger shade-loving shrubs.
I would imagine some elderberries would grow well there.
They could grow under that canopy tree and behind the garage, and create a really nice, private backyard space.
And then, after that, you can add in your herbs and roots and ground covers.
That brings in so much more food and medicine to this space, and flowers and color.
Sometimes, there are just places in a landscape where you would prefer not to grow food, and on a corner residential lot, you might want to avoid growing food directly in the planting strips, just depending on how busy your street is.
It’s really case by case.
But those are fantastic opportunities to grow native plants.
So I put pollinator plants all around the corner in that sunny southwest corner, and some more shade-loving native plants in the other areas.
So, next, I’d like to talk about some food forest plants.
So, hopefully, with those design examples and that quick overview of food forests, you can start to picture what a food forest could look like in your space.
But once you get the design kind of set, what are you gonna plant there?
So that’s the fun part, and it’s always kind of the last part that I do with designs.
For canopy trees, I would love to talk about every single plant, but I’m gonna just pick and choose a few to talk about for each of these areas.
And there might be some groans, but black walnut trees.
Does anyone have black walnut trees here?
Yes.
Do any of you know that you can tap your black walnut trees and make the most delicious syrup I’ve ever tasted?
I see some nods back there, yes.
So that’s always a first harvest for us in our yard.
We have about a dozen black walnut trees, and the sap makes, I mean, the syrup is fantastic.
So, sometimes, you know, you might already have these plants growing in your garden or in your yard, and it’s just a matter of knowing what to do with them, you know, and learning a little bit more about that.
So that’s my example for the canopy trees.
And you can see we’ve got our little tea cup collecting sap there.
And then of, course, canopy trees are fantastic for relaxing, putting up your hammock.
The next layer, the understory trees.
For this layer, there are so many different fruits that we can grow in Wisconsin.
Peaches, a lot of people are surprised by that, but peach trees will grow here, and we have one that has just produced so many peaches, and they are juicy and delicious and healthy, chemical-free.
You can grow cherries, sour cherries, crab apples, elderberries.
There’s a hardy fig tree which I’m still trying to get to produce figs.
And these are all great understory trees.
And they’ll make, they’ll add to the structure of your landscape.
Some shrub ideas.
We’ve got currants.
Currants are super easy to grow.
They look nice in a food forest or an edible landscape.
They come in all different colors, pink, red, white, and black, and they all have different flavors.
They’re very productive.
We tend to eat them fresh or juice them.
Make them into fruit leather or jelly.
Black currants have a very strong flavor.
And I have one bush.
I think we picked about seven pounds before we got tired of picking the black currants.
There were so many.
But at first, I didn’t like them, and I realized that if I made jam with them, I could make these lovely little jam tarts or, like, mini pies, and they’re delicious, they’re so tasty.
So sometimes when you have a food forest, you have to get creative and, you know, try out different foods, different ways of cooking, different ways to prepare your foods, which I think is pretty exciting.
Another plant I’d like to highlight is goumi berry.
These will grow about 6 to 10 feet tall, and they have some thorns, but they’re not like– they’re okay to manage.
Like, some thorny plants, you just kind of want to stay away from.
But goumi berries have some thorns.
And, you know, perhaps they could be a good barrier plant.
If you want to keep some animals out, you could use them maybe as a live fencing.
But their berries are delicious, and they taste a little bit like Sweet Tart candy, I think.
And those are great for juicing.
I like to use them in juice to make lollipops and things like that.
Lavender is a really nice small shrub plant, and there it is growing with chives.
Got some nice textures going on in the landscape.
Some more shrubs.
Raspberries are fantastic.
I imagine many people here probably grow them already.
But if you have not harvested the leaves for tea, that’s something you might want to consider.
You can harvest the leaves before the flowers bloom, so then you’re getting two harvests from this one plant.
Golden raspberries are especially delicious, if you have not tried those.
Honeyberries are a fantastic option if you would like an alternative to blueberries.
They’re really easy to grow, they come in a variety of sizes, anywhere from about three feet up to four or five feet tall.
They’re not as sweet as blueberries, but they’re very productive.
They ripen early, right at the end of May.
And there is one of my kiddos and our neighbor girl looking for honeyberries because they know that they ripen first.
So they get excited and head outside and look for them toward the end of May.
Common sage is a nice small shrub.
There’s more sage in my garden than our whole town could consume, I think.
But it’s great for the pollinators and to add color and if you want to, you know, bring the flowers into your house or do any sort of craft projects.
All right, moving on to the herbaceous plants.
I’ve got– there are so many that I could talk about.
Okay, so I’m gonna start with borage.
Borage is actually an annual plant.
And I know that I talked a lot about growing perennial foods.
But the thing I like about borage is that it will just reseed itself and kind of spread around the garden, and it might sound like a problem, but food forests can take some time to get established, and sometimes, you just need to fill that space.
So there are certain plants that I like to just let spread, and I just enjoy them as they are in the garden, and borage is one of them.
The flowers are edible, and they’re just these teeny little, not too teeny, but like, these sweet little blue flowers.
They don’t have a very strong flavor, but they’re gorgeous.
You can use them in, like, decorating cakes.
Put them on ice cream.
I like to freeze them in ice cubes and have some borage flowers floating in ice cubes.
So that’s one plant I really love.
There’s bee balm.
It spreads like crazy, but it makes a really lovely tea.
And then asparagus.
Perhaps some of you already grow asparagus, but it’s a really neat plant.
So, after the harvest period, it has these really ferny frond leaves.
Comfrey is another plant that I love.
And this one’s great because it’s called, it’s what’s called a dynamic accumulator.
And that means that the roots go down, and it really does a good job of pulling nutrients up from deep within the soil.
And then, the beauty of comfrey is that it has tons of mass at the top of the plant, so lots of big leaves.
It creates a lot of bulk, so you can chop it down and use it as mulch in your garden.
So you’re cycling the nutrients through your garden with plants like comfrey, for example.
It’s also a great medicinal plant, and the flowers are edible.
Elecampane is one that I love.
It’s a tall plant, probably, I don’t know, six to eight feet tall, perhaps.
It has large leaves.
It almost looks kind of tropical, and it has these beautiful sunflower-ish flowers.
And the roots are medicinal.
So it’s a really nice plant to use to make a cough syrup for the winter.
Cutting celery is a great plant.
I believe it’s a biennial.
It has a really nice strong celery flavor.
I grew a bunch and blanched it and froze it, and I’m still using it, like, two years later because one plant produced so much food.
And I just toss it in soups, and it’s great.
It tastes amazing.
Some more plants for the herbaceous level: horehound.
This one is a nice medicinal plant.
I believe it was used more in the past for cough drops or lozenges.
Lemon balm is a great plant if you’re looking for, just to kind of fill one of those shadier nooks in the back of your garden, something that’s a little out of the way.
It’ll spread around a bit.
It doesn’t need much care, but you can make a lovely tea out of it.
And then, there’s a basket of assorted herbs, because there are just so many that you could grow in the herbaceous layer.
Next is motherwort, and I had some laughs yesterday when I mentioned motherwort.
It’s kind of a weedy plant, but it’s nice.
Like, if you’re looking for some plants for a shadier spot, sometimes there are already plants growing that are really useful and make a nice addition to the landscape.
So you can make a lovely tea with motherwort.
Salad burnet is a really cool perennial edible plant.
You can eat the greens or the leaves on it.
It tastes like cucumbers.
So you just strip off some of those leaves and toss it in a salad with other greens, and it’s a really nice plant.
Rhubarb and chives, which I’m sure you’re all probably familiar with, but those grow really well in a food forest.
And the rhubarb can also be a nice mulch-type plant because it has those big leaves.
So you can chop the leaves, drop ’em in the garden.
I know there’s one spot that’s kind of bare in my garden.
I keep adding the rhubarb leaves every year just to add a little more organic matter.
Next is yarrow.
This is a native plant.
It’s also a medicinal plant.
It is awesome for a tea for fevers.
Great if you’re bleeding.
You can take the leaves and, you know, put it on your cut or put it in your nose if you have a bloody nose.
And it’s one of those plants that will attract the pollinators to your garden as well.
So it’s an important one to incorporate in there in your food forest.
Red-veined sorrel is a really beautiful plant.
You can add some leaves, not too many.
You can’t eat too much of it at once.
But it has kind of a, I don’t know, lemony-ish flavor.
And then stinging nettles.
Does anyone have a relationship with stinging nettles, either good or bad?
Yeah, yes, lots of nods.
So whether you love them or don’t love them, stinging nettles can be a really good addition to a food forest.
They like the shade.
So, sometimes it’s hard to find edible plants that will grow in the shade.
Stinging nettle is a good one.
You can harvest them before they flower, so you want to get ’em early and use ’em for pesto, dry ’em for tea, cook ’em up like you would spinach, put ’em in an egg scramble.
It really makes a lovely, a lovely edible plant for the food forest.
And now to the ground cover layer.
Lots of ground covers.
I put mint in there.
I don’t know.
Mint is kind of controversial, I guess.
So if you have a place to let it spread, it’s a great plant to just fill the space.
You can also grow it in pots.
Calendula, I use it similarly in the garden as I do borage, so I just let it spread.
So, last year, for example, I don’t even remember what happened, but I had a super busy spring and I didn’t plant my vegetable garden as I had wanted, and the calendula just took over, and it was amazing.
So instead of having just bare soil, once you create kind of these communities of plants, things will fill in.
And instead of having, like, weeds you don’t want, you end up with weeds that you do want.
So calendula is kind of like the weed that I did want, I guess, in my vegetable garden, since I wasn’t growing many vegetables.
And these, the petals of calendula are edible.
And you can also make some really lovely skincare products with the flowers as well, among other things.
Chickweed is another nice one.
That’s often just a weedy plant that will show up.
What else, aronia berries.
I did not mention those in the shrub section, but aronia berries are great.
Those are often used in ornamental landscaping, so perhaps you have them growing in your yard already or somewhere nearby.
They have some berries in the fall that are edible.
They’re not my favorite, but I had one recently that someone had just let dry on their kitchen counter, and it was delicious.
So, there’s always, like, ways to incorporate these foods.
So you might already have them growing in your yard.
And you can also get a ground cover version of aronia berry as well, if you’re looking for some more berries to grow at the ground level.
A few more ground covers to talk about.
Sweet woodruff.
I’ve always known that more as an ornamental ground cover, and it’s one that I like, I’m not quite sure why.
It has a nice scent to it.
It flowers earlier in the season.
But I found out recently that you can cut off the flowering tops, like the first few inches, and make a vanilla substitute with it.
So that’s what we’ve been using all year.
I made some last year.
You just cut it off, put it in a jar with some vodka, and let it sit for a while, and strain it, and there you go.
It’s a really nice, affordable option to just do at home easily.
Thyme makes a lovely ground cover in a food forest, and it’s also great at attracting bees and other insects.
And violets might be one of my all-time favorite ground covers.
I just have huge patches of violets at home.
And I love them because a lot of reasons.
They’re edible, they’re medicinal, you can eat the greens in salad, like, the young greens.
You can harvest the larger greens and cook with them.
You can dry them for tea.
I made this really beautiful violet flower jelly last year, I believe, maybe the year before.
And they have some medicinal properties as well.
So that’s a great plant, especially for more, like, damp areas, and it really helps to hold the soil in place in your food forest.
And next, the root layer.
We’ve got onions, potatoes, carrots in this, and many other things, but those are a few to highlight.
In my garden, I have several potato patches.
I like to call them the perpetual potato patches because I never quite harvest them all.
Has anyone else had that problem?
Yes.
So instead of fighting it, I’ve just kind of learned to embrace it.
And I know where I can go dig around and find some potatoes.
So in a pinch, I’m like, “Oh, no, it’s dinnertime.
What am I gonna do?”
Okay, I know by the goumi berries.
Before I planted the goumies there, there were potatoes, but now they’re still happily growing together, even though I dig around and get the potatoes out.
So that’s kind of the beauty of a food forest.
You can let things kind of evolve on their own.
Like, plants will find where they like to live and grow and thrive, and it’s just a matter of letting it, letting it kind of be its own, have its own, I don’t know.
At a loss for words.
Hopefully you know what I mean.
[chuckles] The next layer is the vine layer.
Vines are great.
I love that you can add these to your food forest in all sorts of fun and beautiful ways.
This is a grapevine that’s growing outside of my back door.
It’s kind of like a, you know, halfway to the basement back door.
But it was just this bare patio, like, really ugly space, and I put up that trellis, and there’s a grapevine growing, and it’s just gorgeous.
And it produces so much food.
And it was home to a family of robins in the spring.
So, yeah, just an example of how you can incorporate that into your landscape.
If you’re looking for some annual vines, I love scarlet runner beans.
You can eat the flowers.
They taste exactly like beans, which is pretty wild.
You can eat the bean pods when they’re young, and then you can also let the beans mature and dry on the vine for dried beans.
And they’re big, so it produce– they will produce a lot of food just from, you know, not a big patch of scarlet runner bean vines.
Another great vine that I love is passionflower.
It looks very tropical, but it will grow in zone five.
I have it in a nice, warm spot next to my driveway between, like, my driveway and my house by the front door.
It has a great smell when it’s blooming, and it’s just such a cool plant.
It also has fruit that’s edible, although I have not quite gotten mine that far yet.
And it has medicinal properties.
Okay, so moving on.
I want to talk about a few common questions about food forests.
So, you might be wondering, how long will it take for a food forest to get established?
And it all really depends.
So, if you have the budget to buy larger trees, larger shrubs, obviously you’re gonna get food sooner than you, than you would if you planted some bare-root trees that are much smaller.
So these are kind of the earlier numbers.
So this is like, if you’re planting the larger plants, you could probably expect large nut trees to start bearing at about four years or more.
Fruit and small nut trees, two years or more.
Berry bushes at a year or more.
And all of your perennials and herbaceous plants, you know, within that same year or so, depending on the plant.
How big does a food forest need to be?
Really any size.
You can have a tiny little food forest in an urban patch of land.
Just because it’s called a forest doesn’t mean that you have to have a really large space.
But if you do have a large space, you can also plant a massive food forest as well.
How much food will a food forest produce?
There was a study in Scotland.
There’s a link there.
It’s “Sustainable food production in a temperate climate.”
And what they found was that a plot that was about 2.4 acres produced enough carbohydrates for seven males or nine females, enough fat for four males or five females, enough protein for three males or four females.
And then, of course, if you increase the legumes and nut trees, you can increase the amount of protein and fat.
So what does that mean for you?
Kind of taking it down to a smaller scale ’cause that’s really, you know, 2.4 acres, that’s pretty big.
So the typical, or, the average size property in Wisconsin is about 1,500 square feet.
So if you took a third of that, so 5,000 square feet, and planted that in a food forest, this is what you could expect from a food forest of that size.
So carbohydrates for almost one male or one female, fat for about half of the fat needs for a male or about two-thirds for a female, about half of the protein needs for a male or a female.
How much sun does a food forest need?
At least six hours.
So if you’re planning to grow fruit trees, you need some space that has at least six hours of sunlight.
What are the challenges to planting and maintaining a food forest?
I think the biggest challenge is the land and time and probably money.
I think those would be the big three.
Because it does take time for the food forest to become established.
So you need to be committed to that piece of land and have the patience to wait for it.
There are things you can do, you know, if you plant your fruit trees and you have a lot of open space underneath, you could grow squash, you can grow other vegetables, you can grow medicine.
You could put your annual veggies there.
So there are ways to use that space as your food forest is maturing.
Of course, the money up front.
So you’ve got to buy those trees and shrubs.
They’re not cheap, but you can also do it on a tighter budget by starting with smaller plants.
Bare-root trees don’t cost quite as much, so that’s a great way to go.
And then delayed harvests.
It takes a while to get some fruit from these plants, so you need to be dedicated and patient, which can be challenging.
And then, lastly, irrigation.
It is important to make sure that your your food forest is getting watered, at least until it’s established.
And then, of course, if needed after that.
So I have just a couple of final thoughts that I’ll read.
My hope is that you gained a better understanding of food forests and their benefits beyond just food production.
I invite you to plant your own food forest, work with your community to install a public food forest, or simply share your knowledge and excitement with others.
Let’s embrace this opportunity to cultivate a greener future.
[audience applauding]