Creating a food forest or edible forest garden is a wonderful choice for a sustainable garden. In previous articles we’ve covered creating a “Perennial ‘Food Forest’ in a Polytunnel” and designing a forest garden for small spaces, but in this guide I thought I’d delve a little deeper into exactly how you should plan and prepare for a new edible forest garden. There are of course many different approaches to creating a new woodland garden. Some people may not plan as rigorously and things may still go very well. But putting a little time and effort into planning and following the steps outlined below can help you avoid many of the most common pitfalls and create a successful and bountiful forest garden.
Planning Step 1: Fact Gathering and Brainstorming
When you think of a forest, you may think of a large expanse of land covered in trees. But there are no limits to the size of a food forest. A food forest can cover acres of land – or be a system with just a few small trees in a typical home garden. No matter the scale at which such a system is created, the general principles and practices remain the same. Whether you plant three trees or three hundred, the goals will always be to create a bountiful system filled with layered plantings that work harmoniously together to provide for you, improve the environment and also work for wildlife. Before you begin the process of designing a food forest, you should spend some time determining the size and scale of your planned project, as well as what specifically you want to achieve. Consider, for example, whether you want your food forest to also serve as an attractive, ornamental garden space, or whether maximizing the amount of food that can be produced is your primary goal. Do you want to create a food forest that will be just for you and your immediate household, or are you looking to start a commercial business? Think carefully about your goals and what you really want to achieve. Spend time thinking big picture, assessing the opportunities, challenges, strengths and weaknesses of your particular site and how you can work with what you have to achieve the desired results.
Planning stage 2: The main phase of forest garden design
Forest gardens are typically designed using permaculture ethics and principles, as well as the permaculture design process. There is a lot to learn about these things and a lot of complexity, which is why some people will prefer to hire a professional permaculture designer at this stage. But you can also work carefully on this yourself, using information in books, online, and from other sustainable gardeners. The most important thing to remember when you start is that observation is key, and every woodland garden should and will be unique – designed for a specific site, setting and situation. The permaculture design process begins with the process of observation. This is, in many ways, the most important step in creating any design. We need to know where we are now to know where we are going, and how to get there. This observation process involves examining sectors and flows. We can then analyze the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and challenges of the site or situation, undertake the permaculture zoning process, and work from there to complete our holistic designs. By the end of this planning stage, you should hopefully have considered the basics of water, infrastructure, and access. You should ideally have a rough sketch showing the main elements and areas of the space – a large-scale, holistic plan that you can use to plan the placement of plants and the precise placement of different elements in more detail. When planning your forest garden, you need to make sure you regulate healthy temperatures in the garden. Here’s how to protect plants from summer heat.
Planning Step 3: Creating Complete Planting Plans
Woodland gardens generally have a more complex planting plan than other types of food-producing gardens. The food is not grown in rows or squares as is often the case in an annual vegetable garden. On the contrary, in a forest garden, we create dense and mostly perennial planting patterns. This can make creating comprehensive planting plans a little more difficult. However, planning precisely where the plants will go in all layers of the forest garden before beginning its creation can be beneficial. This can help you see where problems could potentially arise and help you create a truly eco-friendly system, where plants work together rather than competing too much. When creating planting plans for a forest garden of any size, it may be helpful to think about creating specific guilds for each of the canopy trees (usually fruit trees or nut trees) included in your design. These guilds of fruit trees or nut trees can then be linked together to create a larger food forest. Remember, in a forest garden you will have several layers of plantings, often trees, sometimes smaller trees, shrubs, climbers or vines, larger herbaceous perennials, ground covers, roots and tubers… All of this needs to work well together and benefit the central food producer at the heart of a guild and/or the system as a whole. This can be a complex thing to achieve and sometimes we cannot know until we try something whether it will work as expected, because there is still much that even the most eminent experts do not know about the specific interactions of plants. But trying as hard as f it is possible to anticipate and plan, we should reduce the number of failures in our experiments. When you have complete plant lists and planting plans, you can then determine where you can get what you need. For those sticking to a budget for their woodland garden, check out these money-saving ideas for a garden.
Planning Step 4: Establishing an Implementation Timeline
Once we have our complete planting plans and plant lists, we may be tempted to begin the actual process of creating the forest garden. But it can also be useful, before starting, to have at least a rough idea of the order in which we are going to carry out the different steps. This can help organize work and ensure everything runs smoothly.
