Planning a Food Forest

Back in May, we reached out to Food Forest Abundance, a company I discovered through a podcast. This company uses local landscape designers who are permaculture experts to create a custom food forest for your property. They sell plans by the acreage and build on a library of pre-created plans, tailoring them to your local environment and growing zone, to produce a very affordable plan that you can execute yourself. Perfect for us!

From the Food Forest Abundance website:
Welcome to a journey where you reclaim your health, well-being, and independence in the way you source your food. At Food Forest Abundance, we're spearheading a movement to transform lawns and farmlands across the globe into diverse, abundant, and easy-to-maintain food forests. Our ecosystems harness the biological and botanical strengths of nature, eliminating the need for harmful pesticides and creating sustainable habitats that flourish year after year.

We worked with our assigned designer to do an initial call, where he asked me questions about my property, my goals and how we live - essentially how much time I would want to dedicate to managing the forest once in place. The beauty of a food forest, and the reason I was sold on it, is that it becomes a self-sustaining ecosystem that requires very little maintenance. I've integrated my vegetable garden into the plan, which will require more of my time because most of what we'll plant are annuals. But we'll integrate permaculture practices into the garden, and the rest of the space is anchored by trees and plants that will feed off each other to keep themselves going.

After that we had a series of design reviews, where our designer would walk us through the plan and we would provide feedback - which plants should stay or go, more of this, less of that. He had his hands full with us as we also needed to change the location of the forest on our property after we started digging in (literally) to the soil and found too much rock in the first area, and too much incline in the second projected location. He used his expertise to build the guilds for each tree and ensure placement and proximity works, as well as recommend the specific varietals best for our growing region.

This week, we received our final plans! It's exciting and also somewhat overwhelming to see it all laid out on paper and consider how much work we have ahead of us now. I expect it will take us at least a couple of years to get everything in place - we'll start with foundational elements and build from there.

Our plan first enhances the mini-orchard that we've already planted. We have two trees each of peach, cherry, plum, apple and pear. We planted them the spring after we moved in, and they struggled along through the summer and fall but didn't do much growing. Now we have a plan for the guild around each tree to support its growth and long-term health. A guild is a grouping of plants that work together to enrich the soil and health of the plants around them. You'll see pollinator plants, insect repellers, nitrogen fixers, etc. We'll have about a 4-ft radius of guild plants surrounding each tree. We've also already planted four rows of berry canes, which have struggled to really get started as well. A plan was provided for guilds for this area as well.

The main and most exciting feature is a large fenced-in area to hold the majority of our plants. Generally our fruit trees would be included in this area, but since they're already planted in a slightly separate area, they'll be close to the forest but not enclosed by the fence. Inside the fence, we'll have all of our annual garden plants growing in a variety of in-ground and above ground beds. The forest is anchored by a large fig tree, a bay leaf laurel, and an elderberry. We've planned for nearly every berry that will grow in our climate - our kids will eat them ALL. There's a guild for each tree, an herb spiral, and a variety of plants to line the perimeter that act as pollinator attracters. There's also a compost system that we'll use to manage the garden beds, and another specifically for the blueberries and honeyberries that require a more acidic mix.

Beyond the fenced area, we'll convert my hugelkultur beds into a pollinator garden. I'm happy to incorporate it in this way, since we did a lot of work to build those beds! In fact, I built them twice - the first time I oriented them the wrong way - a story for another time.

So with all these plans, we now need to plan how to get started. First thing will be to start building up our soil, and also getting the fence in place. I need to research where to buy the plants, and when they're available for sale. Lots to do! But seeing our plan on paper is in inspiring first step.