In today’s episode of the Grow Edible Podcast, I chat with Michael Judd, the author of Edible Landscaping with a Permaculture Twist about how to create a food forest. Michael has an interesting history; he spent his early adulthood in rural Latin America, including living with a Mayan community in Guatemala. These experiences gave him a unique opportunity to see mature food forests managed by indigenous cultures who have literally thousands of years of experience maintaining sustainable perennial food systems.
Michael’s Easy Step-By-Step Mini Food Forest
In this show, Michael talks about his step-by-step plan to create a food forest, even if you don’t have very much room.
Step One: create a large “patch” of super fertile soil with layered, top-down mulch, including a thick layer of woodchips to feed the fungal layer.
Step Two: Plant your anchor tree in your prepared patch – something like a dwarf apple, a persimmon, or even a large fruit shrub is good if you are very space limited.
Step Three: Surround your anchor tree with four types of perennial support species. Include nitrogen fixers like wild blue indigo or lupin, living mulch “chop-and-drop” plants like comfrey, insect habitat plants like yarrow and pollinator plants like echinacea.
Step Four: make as many patches as your space will allow, allowing them to eventually merge together. If you only have room for one patch, that’s ok too! Even one patch of a tree plus support plants counts as a mini food forest.
Step Five: As you expand, add additional layers to your patch: try edible groundcovers like alpine strawberries or edible vines and brambles like thornless blackberry to add depth and layered texture to your food forest.
Show Notes
Today Michael and I discuss:
- How to make a super fertile soil patch with layers of compost, woodchips and cardboard.
- The psychology of Chop-and-Drop mulching.
- The four categories of companion plants Michael recommends for a food forest “guild”.
- How to adapt the food forest concept to small scale and urban backyard environments.
- Why temperate-climate gardeners need to spread out their food forest plantings to account for lower light-intensity.
- What “sneaky” edible plants you can grow to discourage feral hippies, confuse zombies and fool the HOA landscape committee.
- How to save money implementing a food forest, and where it might not make sense to go the cheap route on your edibles.
- Michael’s favorite unusable edible fruit for vodka infusions.
- Why fruit growers should consider embracing alcohol fermentation as an efficient way to deal with seasonal bounty.
Resources for Today’s Episode
- Michael’s book, Edible Landscaping with a Permaculture Twist.
- Ecologia Design, Michael’s edible and ecological design company.
- A really cool series of videos featuring Michael at Edible Landscaping Nursery in Virginia, sampling unusual fruits and giving tips for how to incorporate these edible choices into a suburban backyard.
- My original review of Edible Landscaping with a Permaculture Twist.
The Giveaway!
Michael has super generously agreed to give away three copies of his book, Edible Landscaping with a Permaculture Twist.
To be entered to win one of three copies of Edible Landscaping with a Permaculture Twist, leave a comment below telling me what your dream food forest would look like!
Contest open until Wednesday, August 27th. Winners will be notified by email and shall have 24 hours to claim their prize. US addresses only due to shipping (sorry international readers!).
Good luck!
Podcast Stuff
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The theme music for the Grow Edible Podcast is Rodeo, graciously provided by my dear friend, the supremely talented Kristen Ward. You can find Kristen’s music on iTunes and Amazon. Rodeo is off the Last Night on Division album – it’s one of my favorites!
Perpetual hat tip to Erik and Kelly of Root Simple, the cool Godparents of the urban homesteading movement. Erik and Kelly put out a sharp and edutaining podcast in addition to writing great books, running a fantastic blog and generally spreading their urban farm wisdom far and wide. They graciously allowed me to steal their phrase “audio companion.”
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I would love to have blackberries and peaches in my yard. I’m working on getting dwarf trees now and would love more pernial food in my yard. I have strawberries, rhubarb and bunching onions now. Thanks.
would love a pear tree… and strawberries, blueberries.. yum 🙂
I have been wondering what to do with my upper garden that is getting too much shade. This could be it. I will have to use understory type trees, native persimmon, blueberry, pawpaw etc. I can still plant some veggies that don’t need as much sun – cabbage, broccoli etc. Maybe add a secure chicken area. I will have to undo the raised beds and brick paths I created 28 years ago. Oh well, it is great exercise! Who needs a gym? Keeps me young.
I will wait until cooler weather.
My dream food forest is 1.5 acres I no longer have to mow. 🙂 I’m slowly getting there as I’ve planted spice bush, sassafras, thornless honey locust, and a chestnut in there to get something going while I finalize my final design.
I also hand dug two small tester swales just to see how they’d do in the spot I chose, and planted five pawpaw trees into those swale berms. Not all of them leafed out this year, but at least some did!
I’ve already got an apricot tree growing in the front yard (HOA doesn’t know/care/realize). I’ve been trying for years to grow something under that poor tree with no luck. I’m thinking that will become my food forest. I have alpine strawberry seeds growing in my kitchen right now. Now I just need to find a few of the missing pieces. I’m thinking comfrey and maybe some bluebonnets since I am in Texas. Thanks for the great blog!
We’re already dreaming of turning our former-driveway into a food forest. It was gravel… but we’ve removed most of the gravel, tilled in the rest, and deep mulched it with tree shred to wait for us to do something with it. Next step is planning and doing. Thanks for providing the inspiration and baby steps. My family would eat a ton of fruit if we could afford it so fruit trees and berries will be the critical components of our food forest.
My goal is to try and grow most of our fruit and herbs. I really like his idea of a spiral herb staircase. I’d not heard of him before so I found this podcast extremely interesting.
I want to fill my backyard with raised beds since the soil is just atrocious and would take years to fix to even a moderately acceptable level to grow anything in. I’d fill it with plenty of tomatoes, green beans, corn, peas, strawberries, blackberries, winter squash, broccoli, cucumbers, sunflowers, and anything else that I’d like to experiment with! One bed at a time, though 🙂
We are moving to Hawaii next year, where anything and everything can be grown. Having this resource would be great for us. We are senior citizens, and need all the help we can get!
I’m just learning about food forests and I love the concept! I’d like to incorporate more perennial veggies into our yard: rhubarb, asparagus, Jerusalem artichokes, etc. along with more herbs. I’m very excited to listen to this podcast, thanks for doing it!
Blueberry, raspberry, blackberry bushes, artickokes, beets, lots of kale, oh my gosh. mushrooms, edible flowers oh my!!!
My food forest would have LOTS OF FRUIT.
We have a small (about 1/4 of an acre) patch at the front of our property. It was previously used by some friends for a small organic urban farming project and now has reverted back to our care. My dream is to have a few fruit trees and a couple of raised beds. The idea is to grow a substantial amount of the veggies and fruit we consume.
Nut trees! To feed foraging hogs for meat. Lots of a blackberries and elderberries on the lower deck. Scattered nettles and ramps and other medicinals. I’ve always wanted codonopsis to climb up a tree trunk but no luck yet… 🙂
My food forest would have blackberries and blueberries. We’ve got a small patch in the back of our yard that might work.
We are buying a half acre property soon. The pervious owners put in concrete on half of it! So I guess some raised beds over that area will be the plan. Since we have five active boys we will retain 1/4 of the property for kid run around space and use the remaining area, including a steep slope for our food forest and perennial gardens. We are all about needing fruit and berries! Food prices are soaring and growing food must become part of our budget busting strategy. I dream of a day when I can open the door and tell my kids to go and snack in the yard!
It would look like a spice rack, fruit stand, and veggie garden outside, and with tropical plants in my covered patio.
Danny and I are young seniors living on fixed incomes, so we garden to stay fit, eat well, and give a legacy to our neighborhood. We teach our neighbors’ children when they join us outside.
We have been transforming our sunny front yard into flowers and food, playing “one for you, one for us” with our neighborhood deer.
Our back yard is officially a conservation zone, an amphitheatre of fir/ oak/ madrone forest. So we have a whole food chain of wild mouths to feed, including birds (a large family of wild turkeys, woodpeckers, hawks, owls, songbirds), snakes, frogs, butterflies, dragonflies, squirrels… we even had two cougars leave tracks in our garden.
We already grow comfrey, echinacea, and yarrow, but not in the same place, so we could move them to surround a food tree such as our apple.
Our next idea for a food forest would be Asian pear or quince with clover, broadleaf arnica; and lemon balm or thistle as the chopanddrop mulch (because they volunteer anyway), and more of our pretty alyssum because its scent is lovely complement to the pear or quince.
The ideas you’ve covered today are enticing us to level our approach. Thank you. I am excited to learn from you and Michael! I hope we win this book!
I have an apple and pear growing side by side but it’s in my chicken pen. I’d love to add the lower levels (blackberry, lupine, blueberry, echinacea, mint, but I don’t know how to do so with the chickens in there. And would they destroy mulch layers?
I have a large / old Gravenstein, which I just added layers to this year–bee-friendly flowers, fennel, dill, cilantro, etc. It’s coming along nicely. I also introduced a Beauty plum into a fairly established layered area with tons of herbs, flowers, etc. already doing their thing year after year. We’ll see how the plum does. Maybe I should have done it the other way around, but later is better than not at all I figure. Then I added a dwarf rootstock 5-type cherry, a peach supposedly friendly to the Pacific NW weather (we’ll see if it produces fruit, but at last the flowers smell amazing), and an espaliered 3-type Asian / Anjou pear. I have yet to layer these last 3, aside from calendula, but Alpine strawberries showed up all on their own–in fact their showing up all over my yard, and I’ve never had them before. Likely, thanks to the birds…What will I add to these 3 to create my dream food forest? Chamomile, nasturtiums, epazote, sweet peas, sage, oregano, tarragon, thyme, rainbow chard and whatever decides it likes to grow there except morning glory and dandelions.
My dream food forest would have lots of rainbow chard and spinach, a blueberry bush, an avocado tree, strawberries and some butternut squash.
We have a dwarf fig surrounded by lavender and Echinacea and succulents and strawberries in our little food Forrest along our driveway. Would love to continue down the nearly mile long driveway. So excited for whoever wins this book, there will surely be lots of great tips and tricks.
I already have a dwarf apple and cherry going, and plan to add an all-in-one almond as an experiment. The biggest thing I learned on today’s podcast is add the layered forest element, so soon I’ll be planting comprey and yarrow to compliment the strawberries I already have as a groundcover.
It would be lavish & dream esque with meditation areas & koi pond for fertilization/watering.
I want to turn my small front yard into a mix of food and flowers. I already have blueberries and rhubarb in front and would love to add a fig tree and more plants for pollinators. I have catmint, echinacea, borage, lavender and sedum in place. I would also like to have some alpine strawberries.
It would include all kinds of fruit specially bred for my zone 3a garden 🙂 grafting experiments maybe some haskaps etc. 🙂
As fall rapidly approaches here in Northern New England, I find myself scrambling to think of what I can do to plan for next years gardens. I have a large wide open side yard at my suburban home, and have been yearning to somehow create areas of edible perennial plantings. I already have a lot of rhubarb and asparagus as well as blueberry bushes and a few Dwarf apple and pear trees planted. I would love a copy of this book I think it would be great inspiration for years to come.
I have about 1.5 acres and my goal is to eliminate about 75% of the lawn, replacing it with a mix of edibles and ornamentals (ideally one and the same). Using a process that basically mirrors Michael’s 5 steps above, I’ve planted 2 full size nut trees, 15 semi-dwarf fruit trees (8 different species) and 8 fruiting shrubs, all with supporting plants surrounding them (all of the permie hype about comfrey is actually deserved!!!). I’ve spaced everything such that the canopies should not quite touch when fully grown. My dream is to fill in the space between these to create a single forest with many walking paths weaving through it and a hidden patio in the middle with a fire pit. Rooting cuttings from many of the plants I already have will help this process along without hurting my wallet.
I would love to get a hold of a copy of this book, to see what ideas I can glean off it. Right now, my idea of what I want to do, is discretely convert my front yard into a food forest. I want to use a large walnut tree as the main anchor, but a lower canopy cherry tree, then something like coneflowers to attract pollinators and help as ground cover.
We have a second city lot that a joins our home and for decades it was left to the noxious weeds. A few years ago we allowed some women in the neighborhood to grow food there and subsequently legally purchased the lot. The food grown there now is great for us because it controls the weeds and we get buckets of produce during the growing season. The women maintaining the garden are older and I know eventually I need a plan to plant and maintain it myself. I’m a perennial person, can’t seem to keep up with the demands of annuals. I’d really like to add some filbert trees and a sour cherry-both are so hard to by commercially and expensive to boot.
Dream food forest would be; layers of natives, heirloom veggies and fruit along with perennials of all colors and shapes. I have been working on my food forest for the past 9 years, it’s amazing how far it has come yet I still have some much more I want to add/edit and change.
I personally would LOVE an anchor Macadamia nut tree- but would be pretty marginal in my climate. Pine nut would be cool too- but not for my space…
I would love to see food forests sprouting up in public landscaping= libraries/post offices/schools- as well as churches & other places that are paying to maintain “landscaping” anyhow. They could trade free maintenance for food!
My ideal food forest is one without quackgrass and morning glory (bindweed)! Also one teaming with wildlife, supportive to honeybees and other pollinators, and one where every bit of space is filled with something useful, working together to be self-sustaining, requiring little work from me other than to wander around and harvest 🙂
I envision my dream food forest to be based on principals of permaculture with an ample gathering of plants, shrubs and trees that each fulfill several functions including soil builders, medicinal plants, edibles, companion plants, and indigenous flora – all arranged in a beautiful landscape. It would be a sustainable, ecologically balanced habitat to nourish the body and nurture the soul; and would include resting spaces so that people could observe, interact with, learn from and enjoy the rich, holistic environment.
I JUST learned about his book last week at Edible Landscaping’s site! My dream food forest would have pawpaws, peaches, persimmons, figs, pomegranates, and maybe hazelnuts; surrounded with elderberries, blackberries, sweet potatoes, horseradish, artichokes, and blueberries; plus herbs, comfrey, greens, and beautiful flowers! I just bought some land this spring and am planning the guilds now, so this podcast is very timely – thanks!
I’m just getting started. My dreams of gardening and landscaping our yard maybe unrealistic. I need resources, like this book to help guide me.
I would be all over an edible food forest! I think a fig tree would be ideal, but avocado and almond would also make the short list, along with a variety of perennial vegetables (especially greens) and self-seeding herbs. I’m definitely a permaculture beginner, so I’m excited to check out this book! Thanks for the giveaway opportunity!
My dream garden is to expand the beds done by a previous gardener/owner of our property.
My dream food forest would diminish the maintenance work necessitated by our traditional raised beds and orchard. After 13 years the wire under the beds has rusted out and this year the moles and gophers have pretty much destroyed the wood boxes, the brick mowing border and some of the plants, so it’s a perfect time to plan what we’re going to do with that area for next spring’s project.
Working to make my small space as productive as possible. Blueberry bushes, apple trees, raised bed gardens in the front yard (back is shady). Probably will be adding a small pond by next summer. Slowly adding more edibles as time, space and money permits! 🙂
Would a kumquat tree work? I’ve seen them in a sort of bush form, that would be totally cool with herbs, and greens. We have rats around so I’m staying away from berries, but maybe blueberries if I can grow them. Book sounds very interesting.
My dream food forest has an apple or nut tree at its center, with an abundance of berries and flowers for cutting.
We don’t have the resources to buy fruit trees right now (or permission to plant them) so we made an “annual” food forest with sunflowers! They’re about 7-8 feet tall right now, and our brassicas, herbs and beans are thriving in there. We’ve also got cucumbers and zucchini exploding from the borders.
sour cherries, apples, plum, black currant – with lots of great ideas for the understory from your book
Well we have a decent size property to work with and are pretty self sufficient with vegetables, at least what we can squeeze into a shorter growing season. We would like more fruit beyond apples, raspberries, strawberries and rhubarb, grapes and currants. We are in zone 4 with last frost 5-15 (it was after that this year) and first frost 10-15. I saw peach trees advertised in nursery catalog , dwarf, supposedly hardy to zone 4. Would like to add those. Blueberries are really hard to grow here. Would like to figure a way to add those.
My dream food forest would include apple trees for cider, sour cherry trees for pie and jam, lots of cone flowers and phlox, rhubarb, bush beans, squashes of all shapes and sizes, herbs, and colorful leafy greens.
More fruit—peaches and berries especially—lots of flowers, more herbs. We have a big garden now, but also a lot of open space. I’ve gotten stuck in “finding the right place” for all the more permanent big things, and I think I need to start prepping and planting.
We are slowly working up to this! Young fruit trees we inherited are not doing well, but we’ll be adding around them…I want a plum thicket!
After years of doing just that – dreaming – my ‘new’ dream forest = the one that’s attainable: my side yard, the compost, and that dwarf apple languishing in the pot on the back deck. Aiming to start soil prep once the weather cools a smidge. Your post and podcast – so timely for me!
My food forest, which I’m excited to learn how to create, would include variety with something hopefully always making food.
I want anchor trees of both the nut and fruit variety — I love the idea of having both as anchor trees because nuts store easily, and some can be used as flour in a pinch.