What is a Food Forest?

Using permaculture principles, food production should mimic nature, which is always in a state of progression. A disturbed landscape such a major modification to the ecosystem by forces like forest fires or human interference, regenerates successionally, with pioneer species (grasses, forbes, sedges, etc) that require direct sunlight emerging first and progresses for decades or centuries to become a closed canopy forest. Rather than cultivate just annual vegetables in the pioneer state like most modern food gardens, a food forest or forest garden is developed with 7 or more layers of vegetation: the upper tree canopy, lower tree canopy, vines, shrubs, herbs, roots and fungi and progresses over time to become a mature forest.
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[Music] to explain something that I don’t know if I’ve ever explained on this channel and that’s exactly why I keep calling the garden of food Forest there’s a difference between a I would say a like a regular garden and a food Forest one is that U typical vegetable garden is mainly annuals so stuff you plant every year that doesn’t survive the winter so you plant it like set every year for that reason grow it from a seed or from a plant start where a food Forest is mainly perennial with some annuals scattered in there but a perennial system where the plants are planted once and they continue to grow from year to year and either have a short lifespan and then replace themselves or you have to replace them after just a few years all the way up to like a tree an apple tree or fruit tree that can last 20 to 100 years or the overstory trees that can last much longer than that so I’ll give you some examples here mosquitoes are horrible today it’s been very damp I thought they were going to be better cuz it’s cool this morning but no they’re brutal I’m going to give you some show you some examples from three sections so the garden right here the most rustic one by the cabin here well not the most rustic and I’ll show you the food forest or the uh food plot let’s call it so it’s the animal forest food Forest that’s back here few hundred yards through the dense forest here and then around the new Homestead um the main vegetable garden and that’s being converted to more of a food forest and with Orchard but here’s an example of an understory tree so this is an apple it’s my tallest one I think tallest one in any of the properties and I’m letting this grow taller so that it uh gets above the browse height of anything that can get into this area but also produces fruit higher than I can reach that would either be consumed by Wildlife or will fall to the ground I can collect it and feed it to the wildlife outside this Garden because I’m really trying to keep them out of here and I have been for the most part but there is the risk that a moose or deer jumps the fence or squeezes through somewhere and feeds on it so Food Forest basically has seven plus layers so you have the overstory so that’s the tall trees in my case I mean this is a I’m in forest all my sections are surrounded by dense forest and I had to clear the forest in order to make the gardens but besides the like regular trees like the pine tree you see behind me there the food producing trees the valuable trees for wildlife or for people I would say mainly the key species would be Oak and it’s red oak mainly up here northern red oak and then there’s beach trees that provide Beach nuts that could be consumed by humans but are mostly eaten by the Bears turkeys and and uh I think the Deer uh grows for sure anyway consumed mostly by the wildlife here problem is the beach trees are dying off there’s a a bark disease that’s killing them 100% kill rate on mature trees so they’re starting to disappear so what I’m doing is replacing them with hybrid chestnuts so they’ll hybrid between an American and an Asian um Chestnut that’s what I’m replanting with mainly as well as some other Oak species like Bur Oak swamp Oak White Oak uh what else we got bitternut or Butternut no bitternut Butternut some hickory he one of our food producers major food producers is the maple trees of course for maple syrup maple sugar so anyway that’s the overstory the under story trees of the fruit trees for the most part which I’ve got hundreds now I’ve planted below that we have the shrub lir and for me oh there’s lots of shrubs blueberries are a shrub I’ve got those everywhere I’ve got honey berries have uh some bush cherries tons of hazelnuts I’ve planted probably 150 hazelnuts over the last 3 years uh currants probably put raspberries and blackberries in that category um just lots of examples of bushes so that’s the that’s three so far right so the over story The Big Trees the midstory trees are the fruit trees in my case for the most part got the bush Lair which a lot of fruits and small nuts are in that category and then we move down to the herbacious layer there we have lots of comrey and in the her racious layer you would include a lot of the annual vegetables typical but um what do I have here I have a lot of support species in the herbacious layer here cuz I’m not growing many annuals for food this year but even the squash and pumpkins um things like that that’s all the herbaceous layer then we have the root layer so that’s below ground then we have the Vining layer and my Vines are all dying here I had Shandra and Hardy kiwi they’ve all died they didn’t come back this spring combination I think this year it was probably the lack of snow cover when we got some deep freezes there was no snow to insulate them so I think that probably killed them off and then I have some grapes so they’re not doing awesome here I have put some lime down especially this spring I put more lime down than I ever have around these species that need it because the soil is so acidic and Sandy um so that Vining layer would include grapes wild grapes as well as these sweet grapes and wine grapes uh Hardy kiwi got a bunch of that growing around the main Homestead Garden that’s I think mainly it for me for Vining Lair herbaceous Lair I talked about got the root layer here that’s so many examples of roots but beets obviously for an example potatoes as you know I grow hundreds of pounds of potatoes each year and theyve got them coming up in this Garden even though I didn’t specifically plant them they just any little piece of potato that got left is still in the ground I don’t know how many people realized that’s asparagus if you don’t snap it off and eat it when it first emerges then it turns into a fern essentially and that’s what’s photosynthesizing and adding energy back down into the root by the end of the season that’ll die back the energy will be back in the root in the crown and then that’ll send up new shoots next spring more of them and that’s what you’ll eat so that would be considered part of the herbaceous layer so lots of examples I got strawberries all over the place as well uh but the root layer potatoes beets turnips Sun chokes which have naturalized got all kinds of those on both properties now that are well established the deer love those it’s I’m actually not eating them but the uh deer love them and the the uh chickens they’ll eat a bit of well they’ll they’ll eat as much as you give them but I don’t give them too much of these Sun chokes because of the inulin in it but the uh top growth the leaves are actually pretty healthy so the deer and the chickens love that Rosa Rose here’s another shrub very uh thorny shrub and my sweet Buck or SE Buckthorn another example of the of the uh shrub Lair and then another commonly recognized I would say layer of in a food force is the fungal layer which for me I’ve got shitake mushrooms on in the logs that I grew on the logs that I inoculated three years ago that are finally really starting to produce this spring and uh wine caps all over we actually collected some morels from the front um mulched area which is nice to see got various other other fungi like we we have a lot of fungus in this area a lot of edible mushrooms a lot of fungus in general but a lot of edible mushrooms like chicken of the woods and oysters the shitake that are domestic but that we plant in propagated Lion’s me got a lot of that so that’s basically a food for so just a quick recap got the upper story so the over story trees got the mid story trees or lower story trees the fruit trees got the vines we have the shrubs we have the herbaceous layer we have the root layer and we have the fungal layer um you could break that down even further into like different levels like size of trees for example large medium small and then you could talk about the water plants I have a stream right here of course and ponds and they provide various water plants for food that’s it in a nutshell Food Forest is a forest that produces food and to me it’s the Garden of Eden that’s what I’ve always envisioned I’ve dreamt about that from time I was a kid to just have an environment and ecosystem that you could just wander through picking food off the trees and harvesting animals for food and I’m pretty well at that point right now I’m four years on these properties now think four years of planting and harvesting game and to me that’s like the ultimate Paradise just to be able to Source all of your own food from your own property so I think that’s pretty amazing so I’m excited and I’m going to keep doing that because I do love that so much I love the abundance I love knowing that I’m surrounded by food but I’m also um I just love wildlife and I love nature so to spend time in nature be able to get my sustenance from my surroundings and see all the wildlife even though I’m harvesting some of it to to eat I’m killing it I’m hunting it or fishing for it or foraging there’s so much Wildlife because I continue to improve the the landscape that the excess doesn’t U is barely noticed the excess that I take is barely noticed but again the pleasure I’m getting to see that Wildlife regularly is reward enough for me so that’s what a food for is say