Why and how to plant your own food forest

Imagine yourself walking out the front door, turning right after the kitchens and heading for the trees. You haven’t had breakfast yet, but that’s okay. This isn’t just any forest you’re strolling to – it’s a food forest, packed with a rich variety of edible species. Your first stop is your favourite apple tree, then the persimmons, which have only just ripened. Add some beech nuts and walnuts to your basket, then head home to share with your neighbours. All this bounty will be enjoyed as part of a community food system that values self-sufficiency, sustainability and collaboration not just now, but for generations to come.
Alas, this place isn’t real – at least, not yet. It’s a community plan called the Oodena, created this year by 75 students at the University of Waterloo’s School of Architecture as a collaborative class project inspired by traditional Anishinaabe principles. “It was an incredible project,” says Mkomose, an Oshkaabewis (Ojibway for “ceremonial helper”) who taught the group. “They came together to envision the future, and I think we need people to do that on a larger scale.”
Food forests might be a vision for the future, but they’re grounded in the past. While modern agricultural practices tend to separate food production from so-called nature, many societies have long seen the two as a single whole. And in a world facing increased food insecurity, hotter heat waves and more frequent floods, these ecosystems – also known as forest gardens – have the potential to make our homes and communities healthier and more resilient while supporting wildlife too.
“There are so many versions of a food forest,” says Marie-Pierre Bilodeau, co-founder of the Vancouver Urban Food Forest Foundation, which is developing collective gardens in city parks. “It’s a perennial food system that mimics a natural forest ecosystem, just with edible plants.” If the vegetable garden in your mind consists of neat rows of crops, the food forest is its dense, diverse, multilayered cousin, combining food-producing perennials with a host of other plants aimed at tasks such as fixing nitrogen, attracting pollinators and acting as a living mulch.
Bilodeau learned about food forests through her education in permaculture, a sustainability-focused land-management movement. But she points out that this type of gardening has a very long history. Parts of the Amazon rainforest, for example, are dense in edible plants thanks to millennia-old human industriousness. And research shows that Indigenous-managed forest gardens in British Columbia continue to provide richer habitat for wildlife 150 years after management ceased.
“It’s complicated,” says Mkomose of the term. “‘Food forest’ is a catchphrase today, but people aren’t fully understanding the scope and scale from which they emerged.” In presettlement Southwestern Ontario, for example, people “worked together over generations” to design “huge swaths of land” to produce a massive abundance of food: from acorns and walnuts to pawpaw and Saskatoon berries to strawberries and wild leeks, as well as plants most people don’t think of as edible today, such as milkweed and trillium. “People call us hunter-gatherers,” Mkomose says. “They think we were roaming around hunting and gathering all the time when in fact we were planting, designing and preparing, often at least three generations ahead.”
Huge swaths of land is one thing, and the average Canadian yard or urban park is another. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have a food forest at home – or, at least, a garden inspired by food-forest principles. “They’re very scalable,” says Shelaigh Garson of regenerative and permaculture land design company EveryOne’s Eden in Kamloops. “I’ve been known to cram a whole lot of food-producing plants into very small spaces.” In one instance, she converted a six-car parking lot into a garden with 13 fruit trees, 22 berry bushes and “countless other perennial food crops and herbs.”
Garson is driven by the need for food-system resiliency, one motivation for her work on a community food forest in Chase, B.C., that opened this spring. “The end game was to get people producing their own food, specifically in perennial systems, because that’s going to have to be the future with climate change,” she says. “We’ll be able to grow some annuals, but industrial crops are failing worldwide.”
In many urban areas, an additional challenge is flooding: Rain runs off pavement and straight into drains in a rush of water that infrastructure often can’t handle. Another is extreme heat, exacerbated by concrete and other building materials. Green spaces ameliorate these issues, one reason cities are so eager to have residents plant trees. And food forests can be a part of this.
One project Bilodeau participated in, for example, involved turning a grassy slope into a tree-rich garden peppered with swales – channels that store and direct water – that has solved the park’s flooding problem. “The water used to just run down the hill, and there always used to be a giant puddle at the bottom,” she says. “It doesn’t happen any more. It gets absorbed by the soil.” As for heat, Garson uses her own home as an example. “My backyard with my mature fruit trees is probably 10 degrees cooler than if I go out front of my house on the street.”
When planning a food forest, it can be helpful to do research and to hire a professional who can consult on your space, says Garson. But the most important thing to start with is your why. Most of her clients are interested in sustainability, in feeding their families with fewer trips to the grocery store. But she adds that there are other benefits too, such as accessibility. “As we age, the plants grow, so we’re not bending over all the time,” she says. “I’m finding it much easier now that my trees are producing to be picking while standing up or even on a stepladder.”
Part of Garson’s point is that perennial gardens change over time. While your Saskatoon berry and plum trees are young, plenty of sunlight will still reach the ground, allowing you to interplant heat-loving annuals such as tomatoes, cucumbers or squash. Then as your trees mature, you can switch to crops that prefer shade, such as lettuce and spinach. This is in addition to other perennials such as gooseberries, haskaps and medicinal plants, plus native flowers to feed and attract pollinators. Mixed into this are principles such as building soil and harvesting water to create a healthy, self-regulated ecosystem. But how far you go is a personal choice. “It depends on what your long-term goals are, because these are long-term systems,” she says.
Food forests are denser than the food gardens and orchards you might be used to, and that’s one of their strengths, Bilodeau says. “In a forest ecosystem, things grow a lot closer.” And while some say it’s better to plant more and prune or remove things as needed than to have to add later, Garson says a phased approach is also possible – though trees are priority No 1. Just be sure you’re planting crops you’ll want to eat, she says. “There’s no point in growing black currants if you hate black currants.”
In permaculture, a food forest consists of seven layers: tall trees, low trees, shrubs, vines, non-woody plants such as herbs and vegetables, ground covers and roots, all planted in guilds, or groupings that support each other in various ways. But in reality, says Garson, “you can’t always fit everything in.” Some of her food forests have only a couple of fruit trees but many more understory crops such as berry bushes; others include all the layers, including fungi.
Bilodeau adds that a good guideline – as encouraged by gardening expert Linda Gilkeson – is to include 50-per-cent local native species to support bees, birds and other creatures. As for finding these plants, she says it’s worth seeking out nurseries that specialize in them, as mainstream garden centres often lack expertise in this area, sometimes even selling invasive plants. She suggests thinking about what your patch of soil used to be when it was stewarded by local Indigenous people. “It’s part of the land’s history,” she says. “I think that’s important to not forget about.”
Doing research, recruiting professionals, joining permaculture groups or even signing up for courses can help your food forest grow, but you don’t have to get it perfect from day one. “It’s okay to make mistakes,” Bilodeau says. And while many people think of spring as prime planting season, fall is actually an ideal time to get trees, shrubs and perennials in the ground, especially if you live somewhere with hot, dry summers. “Planting in the fall is always smart.”
Will you survive the apocalypse thanks to the mini-food-forest in your backyard? Maybe, maybe not. But at the very least, it can supplement your diet while providing shade, water retention, beauty and wildlife habitat. And who knows what tomorrow will bring. “We’re in for a pretty intense future,” says Mkomose. “I tell my students, the sooner you start managing your time and your energy differently, to dedicate to future generations, the more likely it is we’ll be resilient for what’s coming.”
Garson suggests searching online for resources relevant to your bioregion, including looking for local permaculture groups or guilds, who often communicate on Facebook. She also recommends the following resources: