Elements of a Food Forest
Soil - There should be plenty of healthy, beneficial bacteria, fungi and other life forms in the soil. It should be self-renewing, meaning there is enough leaf drop and other biomass in the system to continually build new soil.
Nutrition - The system will only continue to produce if it is circular. That means, if you eat from it or take from it, you must return energy to it, whether that be through your own waste (pee, humanure) or through design of enough chop and drop to maintain the system. Nitrogen fixing and mineral accumulating plants and trees can make a big difference in the amount of nutrition made available to the system.
Diversity - Dynamic forest systems have a lot of diversity, and beneficial connection between the elements. Plant communities are those plants you find near each other consistently. They may prefer the same types of soils and moisture levels, or they may have found ways to exchange ecosystem services with one another. Some trees, like beech and pine, will feed each other at different types of year through their root systems, for instance.
Some of the benefits plants in a community can provide are:
Mineral accumulation - some plants are able to access minerals in the soil that others cannot access. For instance, comfrey can access phosphorous and provide it to other plants through its leaves or in comfrey “tea” (leaves placed in water and left there for a month).
Nitrogen fixation - some plants are able to access nitrogen from air that other plants can’t access. More on this later.
Mulch or living mulch (Plants either drop leaves or sprawl over the ground, protecting the soil from erosion and drying out).
Insectary (some plants provide habitat for pest predator, others support pollinators that can pollinate your trees and veggies).
Pest repellant (some plants help repel pests with odors, or can attract them away from your crops).
We ensure our systems have plants with these functions in the system. We love plants that perform multiple functions, and we’ll share lists of some of our favorites in temperate, drylands and tropical climates later.
Stability - this is achieved with canopy trees, undisturbed soil, and use of perennial plants.
Layers
Canopy - In permaculture, this is often fast growing, nitrogen fixing trees or existing native trees. I’ve used existing old oak trees as canopies in many cases. Some mature trees have been shown to feed other trees and share information with them about pests and other survival aspects to help them survive. These are called Mother Trees*.
Mature trees may provide this function to other trees, and many other benefits to the system. Most large trees are suitable for a canopy. Some plants put out substances, usually through their roots, that inhibit growth of other plants. This is called allelopathy. Walnut trees are one example. Only certain plants are immune to this substance and can grow under or near walnuts.
The canopy can also be made from large fruit trees, like mangoes. In some systems, people grow pine or other trees that have quality wood as the canopy, and they will eventually be removed selectively.
Understory tree layer - This doesn’t have to be dwarf fruit - just smaller than the canopy. We plant avocados and olives near pine trees. They both do well near pines and the pine gives the avocados some protection in our cold pockets. Peach trees thrive in full sun, so can be on the southern edge of the canopy. Citrus does very well in shade, especially under oak. That ecosystem appears to protect them from the diseases that have devastated the citrus industry in Florida.
Shrub layer - This can include perennial greens, like one of our favorite bushes, “tree spinach” or chaya. It can include fruit bushes or medicinal herbs or flowers.
Herbaceous layer for us often includes annuals, like kale. Planting kale in our food forest extends the season for it, sometimes year around. Most kale in Florida fades out and dies by early summer because of the heat. This layer can also include perennial spinach, medicinal and culinary herbs, and other useful plants.
Groundcover - One of our favorite ground covers is wood sorrel, a delightful addition to salads that thrives in the shade of mature forests and helps control other growth.
Root layer - sweet potatoes, gingers, taro, malanga, and cassava are examples of root layers in our systems. Gingers, taro and malanga do better in shade than the others, which we would put in new food forests that get more sun, or on the edge. Florida betony (a native Florida plant) provides an edible root and is also a ground cover.
Vine layer - the tall trees can provide vertical growing space. We grow wild yams and passion fruit up our tall pine trees. Passion fruits drop when they’re ripe, and the wild yam is a root crop, so it isn’t necessary to be able to reach the vines.
Fungi layer - Fungi thrive in a forest ecosystem, so why not use the moisture holding capacity of your forest to grow edible mushrooms? You can keep shiitake logs in the forest, or grow wine cap or chicken of the woods or other native edible mushrooms on nurse logs or in wood chips.
By layering your system you are able to get much more food into a space than you normally would. It’s very feasible to grow enough volume and diversity in your suburban yard to feed your family. We’ve done it and so have many others.
Banana circles are one example of a plant community mini-food forest that can fit in even a small portion of a yard and produce tremendous abundance by using all of the above principles. You can include the different plant elements needed, layer plants, and build soil in a small circle. It’s exciting to observe this mini ecosystem.
- Create a circle with sheet mulch.
- Plant bananas 4-6 feet away from each other in the circle.
- Add sweet potato, papaya, comfrey, pigeon or cowpea, yuca (cassava), melon or squash, herbs, flowers, perennial greens, etc (there is a long list of things that will grow in or around this circle).
- To the center add one or more of the following: mulch, graywater, compost toilet, shower, compost heap. This circle shape (remember pattern language) concentrates an area where you can add water and nutrients and creates a lot of efficiencies. You can automate sending graywater into the system, for instance. By concentrating water/nutrients, you enable the system to produce a lot of food in a small area.
- Bananas help pull water to other plants from the center circle.
Warning! To use this system with food waste or human waste or wastewater, you do need to ensure to understand how to do that safely to avoid pathogens. This isn’t difficult, for instance, you wouldn’t grow root crops directly in a compost pile that included human waste or other fresh manures, meat, etc. Keep those crops on the outside of the circle. We recommend you study safe ways to use human waste or water from toilet systems (blackwater) in particular before using it in a system like this.
To review, what are the elements needed for your food forest to thrive?
- Good, rich, living soils (see Soils section).
- Nitrogen fixing plants (plants that bring extra nitrogen into the system).
- Mineral accumulator plants (other plants that bring extra nutrients into the system).
- Plenty of biomass (chop and drop, nurse logs, etc).
- Sun.
- Shade (protection for soil, young plants).
- Water catchment and storage (mainly in the soil).
- Wind protection.
- Pollinators.
- Pest repellers or detractors.
- Predators.
- Habitat with diverse niches.
You have now created a mini-ecosystem that should continue to thrive on its own!
Slam dunking a food forest
Typical suburban lot. Low nutrition, grass lawn with weeds in it. (Our old house in Clearwater.)
We sweet talk tree companies into dumping truckloads of mulch in our front yard. Our neighbors start giving us the evil eye.
We invite our friends and enemies over for a “permablitz.” This is a well organized event planned to slam dunk the design by inviting people to a “manure shoveling party.” (who could resist?) We had five team leaders all directing people to install different parts of this system.
March, 2013. A few hours, some homemade soup, ice tea, and some beers later, a “forest floor” has been installed and we’re ready to plant.
July, 2013. Food forests grow fast in Florida. This was created with a budget of less than $300. We got plants from friends, or propagated them ourselves.
We used the waste stream and made raised beds out of ceramic roof tiles, a pond from a used billboard liner, and other infrastructure from found material. We dug up mature bananas from a friend’s wild stand, and they were fruiting within 5 months (bananas can take up to 18 months to fruit for the first time).
Pond, raised beds, papaya, sweet potato ground cover. We harvested about 600 pounds of sweet potatoes by fall of that year. A tremendous amount of food came from this space the first year, because of planning and because we did the work to slam dunk good soil, some fast growing shade, and other food forest elements.
Before.
After.
The front yard is a yin/yang symbol with the edge of the circle extending into the street a bit (implied, not drawn out). Yin on the left, with water features and flowers. Yang on the right with more defined lines, pineapple, and raised beds. The round arbor in front offered neighbors a place to sit and check out the food forest.
We never built that because we were renting. But we did put buckets of cuttings in front for people to take and plant in their yards. This food forest was so abundant that we could produce hundreds of plants from it to distribute into the neighborhood or sell.