Food Forest Freedom
What is a Food Forest?
A food forest is a diverse, perennial garden that mimics a forest ecosystem and patterns found in nature. Through layers of design, life extends in all directions producing food, medicine, sanctuary, and habitat.
Food forests incorporate 7 layers of edible plants including fruit and nut trees, shrubs, herbs, vines, rhizomes, mushrooms, and perennial vegetables.
A food forest is thoughtfully designed to produce maximum nutrition, beauty, and abundance.
Food forests integrate and draw from the disciplines of permaculture, regenerative agriculture, ecology, biology, and other natural sciences. Together, these disciplines create a living set of tools and practices that can help us engage with nature and our food production in a meaningful way.
A diverse community of life can grow in a small space, making food forests especially suitable for urban and suburban environments. At a deeper individual level, the practice of food forestry can help us cultivate ourselves and transform the ways in which we see and live in the world.
Why Should You Plant a Food Forest?
So why should you plant a food forest? To invest in a long-term perennial food system that will provide food for your family and community for years to come, without the need for regular inputs from you.
Building healthy soil is a core part of our 5 pathways to abundance, and it’s key to helping heal our living world. But often, modern ways of growing food damage the soil and the life that lives in it.
Every time you till the soil, you destroy the life within it. Earthworms and other soil life don’t tend to survive tilling. And over time, you can also create a layer of compaction just below the depth that the tiller reaches.
The result is that the soil becomes poorer over time, with less and less life. This is often mitigated through the addition of chemical fertilizers and other inputs.
It creates a vicious cycle that not only damages our living world, but also makes your garden dependent on outside inputs.
A food forest does the opposite. Over time, the soil is built up.
Questions & Answers
We designed a food forest on 700 square feet in Orlando, FL and it’s loaded with over 40 food and medicine producers. Through the layers of a food forest and what’s planted, more can be yielded in the same square footage of space as an annual garden.
An average backyard installation costs about the same as conventional landscaping. We can grow a lot of food for $10K.
Food forests are forever. Perennial plants can take between 2 and 5 years typically, however, we also plant annual vegetables for your short-term food supply.
You first share details with us about your space, how much you want designed, and what you want out of your food forest. Your designer will gather the information they need and use Google Earth and other tools to assess your property and create the food forest design of your dreams.
Yes. We work with our network of local food forest installers, in locations all across the country and globally, to ensure your designed food forest is installed professionally and to the highest standards. If you are in a remote area, or an area that we do not yet serve, we will do our best to travel to you.
Since our launch on Earth Day 2021, we have designed food forests for customers in 40 states and 15 countries, including resorts in Thailand, large farms in Africa, and single family residences from Poland to Mexico and all around the United States. Our professional food forest designers can design in any location around the world.
Our food forest designs are low-maintenance and, over time, self-sustaining like a natural forest would be. We will create a design that suits your lifestyle and provide any necessary care instructions, support, and training. The best way to maintain is to observe and interact with joy.
