Here are the 5 steps you should go through when you design a food forest, so that you can grow 3-5X more food, with less maintenance, compared to conventional methods.
By the way, if you’d like to hire me to do the entire design, I charge USD 3,000 for it and have 3 spots open.
Apply by filling this application if you’re interested, and I’ll send over the next steps.
(Note: If you’re a student of my Farm Design Course, do let me know! We’ll deduct what you paid for the course from the $3,000 service fee.
Now let’s dive into the design process…
STEP 1: What is the primary goal of your food forest?
The most common goals are:
- Grow food for the family
- Regenerate the land
- Generate income
Yes, a food forest will do all three.
But you should lock in one PRIMARY goal, because it will guide your design and also make it easier to decide on trade-offs. Depending on your goals and context you could opt either for a permaculture orchard, a classic food forest (with or without swales) or an agroforestry type of a system.
For example, in my own case, the primary goal is to grow food for my family, and I need to do it with limited time. That’s why we chose a permaculture orchard system and decided to grow common fruits, nuts and other crops that our family members love to consume.
The permaculture orchard layout will make the management easier, while still help us produce diversity and quantities required for being self-sufficient.
We are not driven by making an income. If we were, we’d plant acres of marketable tree crops in an agroforestry layout and choose different species with the expectation of different management.
STEP 2: Site Assessment
As a minimum, you should do the following site assessments:
- Climate
- Topography
- Water access and movement
- Soil and vegetation
- Sectors & microclimates
By the end of this step, you will understand the strengths and weaknesses of your site, so that you can:
- (i) choose the best location for a food forest on your land; and
- (ii) see what kind of food forest (and plants!) your land can actually support; and
- (iii) work with nature, and harness your site’s hidden potential, instead of trying to impose a design on your land that it will actively fight!
For example, here is my 7-acre farm in Croatia:
The strengths of the site are:
- Reliable rainfall in winter, spring, and fall
- Varying topography & microclimates
- Access to a creek
- Possible water storage at the highest point of the property
- Existing forest resources
The weaknesses are:
- Poor shallow soil over limestone bedrock
- Flood zone in the most fertile part of the land
- Unreliable rainfall in summer
- Steep slopes
- Wrong placement of access point and infrastructure
These strengths and weaknesses place certain constraints on the design:
I’m limited in where I can locate my food forest, with a flood zone on one end (flat) and steep slopes on the other.
I’m also limited in what I can efficiently grow on part of the land that has a shallow 1-foot topsoil over an alkaline rock situation.
On the other hand, this variety of topography and microclimate with an interesting water situation (flooding, creek, pond) still gives me options in terms of what I can grow and where within these limitations.
So based on all this, I located my food forest in this part of the property:
My reasons were as follows:
It’s close to the house and in my zone 2.
It’s on gentler slopes with a better ‘south-looking’ orientation
It’s (mostly) out of the flood zone.
STEP 3: Design the food forest layout (water + trees + access)
In this step, you design three things:
- (1) water systems
- (2) overall layout (including the tree rows)
- (3) access
Let’s show you a worked example.
Here is the overall design of my food forest:
The distance between the rows is uniform, with some 5m (16 ft) between rows, enough to grow mulch for trees and manage everything with our tractor. This layout is applied to both patch 1 and patch 2, as outlined in the image.
Water design:
Our water strategy relies on using a combination of swales, ponds, and irrigation pipes. Swales, in our context, are there more to give the trees additional soil volume on top of that shallow bedrock than to capture rainfall runoff, which rarely happens in our climate on this soil.
For the patch of the food forest that’s lower than the house (patch 1), we collect rainfall from the roof of the house into a water tank (marked in greenish-blue color), that overflows into a pond that’s on the flatter part of the land.
We then distribute that water using irrigation pipes (marked as blue lines ) to each of the rows, following the tree layout.
The food forest patch (patch 2), which is higher than the house, also relies on the irrigation water supplied by a large pond that’s higher in the landscape (not visible in this image).
Access design:
Access (marked in yellow) forms a circular pattern without dead ends. This allows us to access and maintain each of the rows and the ability to move around the whole area without having to make awkward maneuvers.
The access also subdivided the area into what I call management zones, where you can then position resources that are required specifically for that zone.
STEP 4: Choose the right plants for your food forest
In this step, you zoom in and think about what plants you’ll be growing and where you’ll position them in the grand scheme of the food forest layout.
In Step 3. you defined the overall layout of your food forest, but now you are going into the specifics of suitable plants and their exact planting location.
You need this type of detail for the implementation phase; otherwise, you’ll be making a lot of last-minute, on-site decisions which, in most cases, may turn out to be completely wrong.
That’s why you start with a comprehensive list of all the plants you’ll be growing, noting their features (function) and physical characteristics (size). This will be the most important working document that you’ll be referencing in the logistics and implementation phases.
Here’s a small sample from a bigger list I made for my food forest:
Once you have that list, you can determine the exact placement of the plants. You can do this in a number of ways, and I even recall watching Mark Shepard’s presentation where he showed how he drew this on the back of a napkin together with his kids, but ideally, I suggest you have some sort of permanent drawing that you reference.
Here’s an example of the drawing I did for one of the rows in my food forest, with canopy, shrub, herbaceous perennials, and groundcover layers.
With that, you are ready to hit the ground running!
STEP 5: Present the design
When you finish the design, I HIGHLY recommend that you record a video where you explain the design to yourself, and spell out the thinking behind your choices.
Capture your thoughts while they are fresh. Future-You will thank you!
Of course, if you are a client, this is where we hop on a Zoom call together, and I present your design, explain the thinking behind it, and walk you through each deliverable. We discuss if any adjustments are necessary, and then finalize the design accordingly.
Food Forest Design Service (Done For You)
If you want to have a food forest on your property and you’d like ME to design it FOR you, I run a done-for-you Food Forest Design service.
It costs USD 2,000 and I have 3 spots open.
Everything is done FOR you
(from choosing the best spot for it on your property, to the exact layout of the food forest, to selecting the correct plants for it)
So you can dump all the analysis and overthinking on me, and go book yourself a spa day 😉
Sound like you?
Fill in the application here and I’ll send over the next steps.
(Reminder: If you’re a student of my Farm Design Course, do let me know! We’ll deduct what you paid for the course from the $3,000 service fee.)
Talk soon,
– Willliam
