New Resources for Planning, Designing, and Managing Forest Gardens
Food forests are gaining momentum as a resilient, community-centered way to grow food while restoring ecosystems—but for many growers, knowing where to start can feel overwhelming. That’s why Katherine Favor of The Giving Grove National Orchard Advisory Committee, in partnership with leading agroforestry organizations, has developed new resources to help communities plan, design, and manage thriving forest gardens tailored to their unique sites and needs.
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Lessons from a San Diego Food Forest
Food forests – often called forest gardens – are multi-layered production systems that incorporate a diverse range of trees, shrubs, and other understory plants into a single system. Years ago, when I was helping manage a community food forest in San Diego, I often wished that I had some sort of guide to help me figure out what I was doing. In addition to determining what plants grew best in our semi-arid climate, our team was navigating challenges like how to engage the community, how to enrich our low-fertility urban soils, how to make volunteer days more fun, and so much more. As is the case with so many projects, we figured it out through trial and error – celebrating successes but also making plenty of mistakes along the way.
There’s no “one size fits all” recipe for designing and managing a food forest. Every site, climate, and community is different. Still, there are key considerations to think about that can guide land managers in the right direction. I had the privilege of collaborating with University of Missouri’s Center for Agroforestry and the National Cener for Appropriate Technology (NCAT/ATTRA), with supplemental funding from the USDA National Agroforestry Center, to distill some of those key considerations into a new technical guide: Introduction to Forest Garden Planning, Design, and Maintenance.
Drawing on research, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, personal experience, and insights from dozens of food forests around the country, we developed this publication to help growers think through the many questions that arise when engaging in food forest projects.
Topics include:
Social and environmental considerations
Designing around specific climate and site conditions
Inventorying resources
Selecting species and grouping plants into guilds
Design and layout
Installation strategies
Soil and water management
Managing weeds, pests, and diseases
Land tenure and long-term stewardship
….and more!
While the guide doesn’t claim to have all the answers, our hope is that it begins to ask the questions that will lead growers toward solutions uniquely suited to their growing context, resources, limitations, and goals. You can explore the guide on NCAT/ATTRA’s website, or in University of Missouri’s Training Manual for Applied Agroforestry Practices.