food forest

Food forests (also called forest gardens) are a permaculture pattern for dense, highly-productive agriculture that mimics the ecosystems found in nature. Whereas traditional agriculture plants in only two dimensions, food forests make use of three dimensions, planting in layers that either help each other or at least don’t compete:

While permaculture as a term goes back decades, forest gardening has a long history by Indigenous Peoples going back millennia, as I learned from this podcast by Future Ecologies.

Those layers are:

1. Overstory trees (a.k.a. the canopy layer)
2. Understory trees
3. Shrubs
4. Herbs
5. Root/Rhizome plants
6. Ground cover
7. Vines (a.k.a. the vertical or climbing layer)

☀️ Light Considerations

When layering plants, it helps to consider how much light each layer will receive when choosing plants:

• Leafy foods (e.g. lettuce) need the least amount of light, and may even produce more leaves the less light they get (since the purpose of leaves is to capture sunlight)
• Flowers, Fruits, and Roots will generally grow bigger the more sunlight they receive

Community Food Forests

There is a growing movement to build public food forests in urban areas which provide a sustainable source of food as well as green space for public gathering. See The Rise of Community Food Forests by Catherine Bukowski, author of The Community Food Forest Handbook. Also this thread on how to grow a community food forest

Additional Resources

• What is a Food Forest? (YouTube) with permaculture educator Geoff Lawton
• A cold-climate (Montana) food forest tour by Kareen Erbe (YouTube)
• Edible Forest Gardens, an extensive two-volume work on the theory and practice of forest gardening