Make your Garden a Food Forest
A garden is not a house. A garden is not an office desk, closet, or garage. A garden is a living, breathing, digesting and reproducing profusion of plants. You cannot maximize the space in your garden with organizers from the Container Store.
If you want a beautiful thriving garden that produces a maximum of output (food, herbs, shade, habitat) with minimal input (labor, tools, fertilizers), go for a walk in the woods or forest. Or just remember the last time you took a walk in a forest.
Do you see orderly rows of the same kind of trees and plants, evenly spaced? Empty ground scratched bare of life? Do you find anyone weeding, or fertilizing, or laboriously tilling the soil? Has the leaf litter been raked into plastic bags awaiting a diesel-guzzling truck to pick them up?
Of course not. A walk through the forest reveals a diversity of plants growing in a seemingly mad jumble, some in clusters, others farther apart, few of them alike, and none of them standing alone. Fallen leaves form a soft thick carpet, food for beetles, worms, colonies of ants, networks of fungi, a whole universe below ground. No one fertilizes, no one weeds. Nothing is superfluous, nothing is wasted.
Now what if I told you that your little home garden, whether you have a yard, a terraced slope, or a box full of dirt, is really a miniature edible forest?
Thousands of years ago, the original inhabitants of the Americas crept through the undergrowth of the forests of the Eastern Shore, the Pacific Northwest, the basins of the great Amazon and Orinoco Rivers. They dug roots from the ground, sifted through the leaf litter to find good-smelling herbs, plucked berries from low bushes, fruits from overhanging branches, gourds and legumes from vines snaking up the trees, and waited for the towering canopy to rain edible nuts and seeds. They tested and observed. Some things were good to eat, some things were better than others. They kept and planted the seeds of the better tasting things. Over generations, these people gradually replaced areas of forest with other forests, self-sustaining ecosystems that provided food, building material, animal fodder, and natural fertilizer.
They were the original forest gardeners.
Ok, jungle lady. I’m back here in the city with my patch of dirt, my kid’s beach shovel, and some seed packets. What does this have to do with me?
Stay with me. Now, picture giant sunflowers growing in a narrow band of earth next to the wrought iron or chain link fence that separates you from your neighbor. In between the sunflowers, a pickle cucumber vine winds its way up the fence. Joining the cucumbers are pole beans twining up the fence and the sunflowers themselves, tendrils reaching up to the overhang of the patio roof, making an edible archway of beans. Under the sunflowers, tucked in the shade of their big flowering heads is a bed of tender greens — spinach, parsley, and mesclun. A small crop of radishes, planted here and there, push gently into the clay soil, creating drainage for rain and opening tunnels for air. A border of calendula and borage flowers provides nectar for bees and butterflies and refreshing herbal tea for you. In a sunny patch next to steps there’s a cluster of containers spilling over with strawberries, cherry tomatoes, nasturtiums, and basil. Poking out from the cracks in the concrete just beyond the steps are sprigs of oregano and thyme.
A canopy of sunflowers trees, fruiting shrubs of tomato and strawberry, climbing vines of beans and cucumber, tender green plants of spinach and salad, a groundcover of herbs, edible roots of radish: this is a garden, a forest, and an ecosystem.
Not only does gardening in the style of the forest sound lovely, it works. Here are some practical tips to adapting the systems of the towering forest to the humble home garden.
Plant several times throughout the growing season. As anyone who has walked into the woods to gather nettles in the springtime, blackberries in summer, and acorns in autumn knows — a forest gives different gifts at different times; so should it be with your garden. You can easily find lists of what grows when in your region and I encourage you to use them.
Or, live a little and develop your intuition. Spring crops are springtime itself — mild, moist, fresh. Think tender leaf lettuce, baby spinach, snap peas, radishes, and clover sprouts. Summer crops are lush and juicy, full and round like a July sun. Tomatoes, eggplant, bell peppers, cucumbers, monster zucchini — words that fairly ring of summer. Fall and early winter conjures up thoughts of pumpkin pies, baked squash, corn and bean succotash, hearty soups and stews with roots and greens, carrots and kale — exactly the foods that flourish as temperatures dip.
But I only have this small space. How can I grow all that?
Well, maybe you can’t. You will have to make some choices. And that’s ok. I’m certainly not advocating for total self-sufficiency here. If you have a nice crop of carrots in a box and your neighbor has delicata squash sprawling across her narrow front yard, consider trading. Gardening is about gardens, not one garden.
However, the question takes me to my next tip: Plant seeds for the next crop BEFORE the last one is spent.
Oak trees don't wait for the last blackberry to fall from the bush before shifting their energy into making acorns. Neither do you have to wait for the July sun to wilt your lettuce before planting tomatoes. Right when spring is warming into summer, start planting tomatoes and basil in the ground in between your spinach leaves and clover sprouts. As you pull up the radishes, plant seeds for larger plants like eggplant and beans. Likewise, as summer wears on, try planting kale and radicchio seeds under your tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant. Their low shade will protect the tender green seedlings until they get established.
Don’t worry about making straight lines or rows. Do you see any straight lines in the forest? And plant densely — don’t leave bare patches of soil. Remember: An empty space in the garden is like a neon vacancy sign for weeds.
If you are really ambitious, you can start each wave of new crops in containers and then you will have ready plants to fill in the gaps as you harvest others. But that is a lot of work. So instead, you can follow my next tip:
LET THE STRONGEST SURVIVE. Oohh, so heartless! So cruel. No, I’m simply following the cues of the guiding forest. Did you happen to see trees tucking all their seeds into little peat cups or "sterile soil"? No, because the trees simply let their offspring drop away, come what may. Many will germinate, some will take root, even fewer will outrace the competing vegetation and reach maturity, only to copy the ways of their parents. The strong seeds become the stronger plants that produce the strongest seeds. And on it goes.
I do the same thing in my garden. I plant seeds directly in the ground which saves me the trouble — and the plants the stress — of transplanting. I plant more seeds than I have space for plants because not all of them will make it. The weaker ones will struggle and get nibbled on by bugs, which also keeps the bugs from eating all your lettuce. Then they die and become food for the survivors, so they also fertilize. Efficient, yes? Just like a forest.
Now, there is something you can do to help seedlings along, exactly like the parent trees of the forest do for their seeds. My final tip is:
Don’t weed. Mulch! Weeding a garden is backbreaking work, toiling hunched over or on your knees, ugh. It’s fine to squat once and while and pull out a handful of weeds, but hours of that? No way.
Now if you’re just getting started and you have a weedy patch, by all means rip them out, ONCE. Then, like the forest, cover the ground with leaf litter or mulch to suppress them from springing back up. Weeds love sun, and shading them from it with mulch keeps them at bay. You can buy soft wood chips if you don’t have anything else, but I’ve been known to filch bags of raked leaves left on the sidewalk before they get picked up. Or simply ask your neighbors — hey, can I have that bag of leaves? No one ever told me no.
As the growing season progresses, your garden will make its own mulch. Because you can use any part of the plant you don’t eat to cover the soil in between plants to suppress weeds and retain moisture. As the leaves and stems break down, they add nitrogen and other nutrients to the soil, giving your plants food without costly fertilizer.
Just as a garden is not simply a place that produces food, a forest is much more than a place for our hikes, our camping, our amusement. A forest is an intelligent teacher of sophisticated systems we can learn if we set ourselves to the task of observation and right action. The forest has much to show us about how we can live as part of the natural world, rather than futilely try to impose our order on it. We only have to open our eyes and see.
At Sueño de Vida we work in a meaningful way to heal land ravaged by deforestation. How meaningful? According to a recent UN Foresight Brief on climate change,
--It is of the utmost importance to stop deforestation and to increase reforestation efforts around the world. Agricultural practices should focus on soil building and the use of agroforestry methods.
That is exactly what we do here at SdV. You can help by helping us do what we do every day: plant forests that nurture soil, people, and community.
Click HERE to donate directly to our reforestation fund OR make a monthly pledge on our Patreon.
Thank you.
Kristen Krash is the director and co-founder of Sueño de Vida, a regenerative agroforestry farm, education center, nature reserve in Ecuador’s Chocó Andino Cloudforest. Prior to moving, Kristen was known for her guerrilla gardens — productive green spaces she created in any available space. Now an urban transplant in the South American rain forest, she has adapted her urban gardening and sustainability skills to large-scale reforestation of degraded land. She takes a practical and accessible approach to helping others achieve more balance and self-sufficiency in their lives.
Kristen’s articles and interviews have been featured on popular sustainability platforms like Abundant Edge and The Mud Home, and in the Rainforest Regeneration Curriculum at the Ecological Restoration Camps.