COMPLETE guide to Food Forest Design Installation (2024 / Syntropic Agroforestry)

I've just walked through every step of the Food Forest design and installation process everything you need to know about the fundamentals to understand Copic Agro forestry what even is that the design process itself and the actual installation step by step this is a tremendously valuable video you're going to know everything you need get started let's dive in it looks like this we're going to walk through the fundamentals the design process and the installation itself so starting up in the clouds with the fundamentals start off with two main Concepts it goes like this time and space

so we're going to explore each of those together which are going to make up the food Forest fundamentals up in the clouds food forests evolve over time which is why this is a fundamental part of understanding the evolution of your food forest or your aggr forestry system over time each species has its own life cycle a life cycle is the time it takes to go from a seed it grows it goes into its reproductive stage and then it dies again and the Next Generation begins so every plant life cycle starts and ends with seeds it

goes through this growth stage right here where it's rapidly growing new leaves then it gets into its reproductive stage which is when it begins to flower and produce fruit that's when it stops growing and it's moved into its reproductive stage once that finishes it's on the decline right towards death and then rebirth again from the new seeds now each species will go through this life cycle no matter what species whether it's an annual vegetable a perennial vegetable or a long- lived Walnut or an avocado tree the only difference is how long it takes right some

species like a radish or a lettuce might go through that entire cycle in 60 days whereas avocado might take 60 years but every species every plant goes through this life cycle but understanding this is a key component of the time equation what a food Force looks like is a diversity of species each with different life cycles so you have short medium and long life cycled species that make up your food forest and that's how you make your food Forest ultr productive in the first two months all the way to 2 years 6 years 20 years

multigenerational and this is the thing that most food forests or most permaculture design or most Orchards or most Gardens totally miss out on is they don't have a succession plan that's what this is It's a succession plan of species most of them are edible but sometimes maybe you have non-edible support plants in the early succession of your food Forest to help Drive the succession forward as time goes on you are responsible for accelerating that succession through time and making it as productive as possible and so you can see the short life cycle medium life cycle

and the long life cycle species this is the foundation of your food Forest is understanding succession and applying it that's the time component of your food Forest it looks like that you have your individual species life cycle and then the whole succession by stacking A diversity of species together this is ecological succession that's what we're talking about here and this is true in a native Forest this is true in a food Forest that's welld designed and it's so important to understand this and reading your landscape and understanding where are you in that succession do you

live in an old growth native forest or do you live in a degraded pasture or somewhere in between maybe you have a couple different stages maybe there's this early really low fertility stage where there's not a lot of natural capital in the soil low organic material low biological activity or maybe you live in an old growth forest where there's huge trees that have been around for decades and there's been lots of ecological process happening over those years most of us live somewhere in this middle stage where the soil fertility isn't great but there's some species

there there's some early succession Pioneers maybe whether that's Blackberry whether that's gors whatever local weeds are in your area and that's called a weeds scape by looking around your local landscape you can assess the plant and the vegetation and seeing what ecological stage are we at here because those weeds that are in your local landscape or on your property are going to give you a great indicator of where on this timeline are you in succession and so that's your aim is to move that succession forward with the right kind of management and the right species

selection splitting it down the middle into an accumulation stage which is this first part here where there's low life there's not a lot of high succession species and then you have on the other side an abundance landscape an abundance ecology where there's lots of fruiting species maybe there's a bunch of nuts and the ecosystem itself is able to support a lot of Life larger mammals for example so that's your goal that's what you're working towards and that all goes into the time component of the fundamentals moving on to space up in the clouds concept but

your food Forest evolves in space as well as in time the first year of your food Forest the space Dynamics are different than in the third year or the fifth year or the 10th or 20th year the space evolves and changes they're a dynamic system understanding the space that your food Forest occupies as it evolves is a really helpful way of understanding how to organize the species and the management so we're going to cover two different Frameworks in the space component of our fundamentals the two key Frameworks are this there's layers of a food forest

and strata now they're slightly different they're used for different things and if you Google online layers of a food Forest you'll find a ton of information now I don't actually find this to be the most helpful framework for understanding space but it is helpful as a checklist and so we're going to run through it for Agro forestry I actually lean the most on strata I find that to be the most helpful framework and so we're going to dive into both and compare them and then you'll be best equipped to understand your own food Forest space

Dynamics when it comes to the layers of your food Forest you can Google it online and what you'll often find is that there's anywhere between 6 7 8 9 10 layers depending on what resource you're looking at we're going to run through them very quickly right here starting with the biggest layers we have our big trees these can be things like chestnuts walnuts pecans avocados large trees keeping it simple then you guessed it we have medium trees right these are things like most fruit trees apples plums pears peaches nectarines these are the more common fruit

trees that people see and use in the garden center at their home in Orchards mediumsized trees really simple you could have guessed it small trees are next these are things that are either on dwarf rootstock or just generally small trees mandarins grafted dwarf peaches trees that don't get big or mediumsized small trees the next one is similar but it's not actually a tree there's shrubs things like hazelnuts blueberries currants things that don't have that same form or structure as a tree and so that's starting to give you an idea of how we're actually organizing and

making these different comparisons is that shrubs have a different growth habit and so that's what we're assessing here is the different growth habit of these plants the next layer Vines passion fruit grapes kiwi fruit things like that things that are going to climb up into the canopy after that we have our herbaceous layer these are plants that don't get Woody over time think rhubarb comfrey interestingly enough bananas are a herbaceous plant that don't get Woody next we have roots and tubers the edible component is beneath the surface of the soil and you're digging them up

think potatoes carrots yakon Jerusalem artichokes sweet potato things that grow underground the next layer is fungi edible fungi edible mushrooms are all over in a forest ecosystem because you've created the right conditions for them oyster mushrooms King staria wood ear shantells there's so many different kinds edible mushrooms are a huge component of a food Forest I'm already harvesting some after just one and a half months of inoculating into a new system one of the last layers and this is a little bit of a lesser known concept but maybe you have a pond for some aquatic

edible species things like Wasabi water chestnuts Water Crest those are the ones that I think of you can probably think of more for your own local ecosystem but aquatic plants can do a really great job in a food Forest if you set up the right aquatic environment for them so how many plants have we got here on our food Forest layers list 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 nine layers you could certainly think of more you could maybe think of some epip fights you could think of all sorts of layers it depends on

how you classify them nature doesn't fit into a box this is just a helpful framework to be honest I only use this as a checklist when I'm going through a food forest for myself or for a client I run through this to make sure that we've hit at least all of these layers what that does is it ensures that you have have a high diversity because you can't fill all these layers and not have a high diversity of species in your food Forest especially if you're combining it with the successional time and getting a diversity

of species with different life cycles using the layers as a checklist is a really helpful framework again I don't rely on it for my own design work there's a much more simple framework which we'll look at strata when it comes to strata there's one big misconception people think it's about the height of a tree the height of a plant determines its strata that's not the case a really easy way to remember it is light not height it's about how much light a plant wants how heavily filtered light does that plant want to thrive not every

plant wants to be in full sun you can disregard the labels in the nursery not all plant wants full sun because if you think about where these plants evolved from right plants that evolved in a rainforest they probably don't want to be in full sun they probably want sheltered dappled light condition strata is about light not height and so there's four different layers in strata and this is a much more aggr forestry based framework we have four different strata emergent at the very very top wanting full sun High strata just beneath there medium and low

now these are indicative of what kind of light intensity does a plant want think about where the species evolved did it evolve in a rainforest or did it evolve out in the exposed Mediterranean those are going to give you an indicator of what kind of strata a species wants to sit in a big part of this also is observation you'll see in your garden or see in your food Forest that one particular species just does really not look healthy when it's in full sun and vice versa maybe there's a species that doesn't look healthy when

it gets any degree of shade pay attention you'll start to see these patterns in a food Forest you don't necessarily want to have an equal distribution across all of your canopy layers from my understanding in the literature if you separate these layers out with a subtropical Food Forest you want around 20% of the emergent layer occupied this used to confuse me so I'm going to try and explain it as simple as possible you're looking across the layer across the whole emergent layer of your food forest and you want about 20% of that layer occupied after

doing an intervention obviously things grow they expand when you prune it you're pruning the emergent layer back to 20% in a temperate Food Forest maybe that's closer to 5% because the things underneath need more sun for the high canopy in a subtropical Food Forest you want 40% canopy occupation so as you're looking across that strata across that canopy layer 40% of that canopy layer is occupied in a subtropical system in a temperate system maybe it's closer to 20 think of your primary fruit trees peaches plums apples pears nectarines in a subtropical system think avocados think

macadamia think low quats things that are going to be the primary canopy of your food forest for the medium layer very similar 60% canopy occupation so you can start to see that as we move further down in strata more of the canopy becomes occupied Citrus are a fantastic example of the medium strata they don't want full sun they're less healthy they require more water they're more prone to disease pressure insect pressure and that's something that I've observed here at my own site Citrus that are planted in full sun are more stressed and then less resilient

to pest insect disease pressure they need more water and they're just less healthy whereas when you put them into a medium strata they have these beautiful deep green leaves they're growing vigorously they have nutrient-dense fruits I've even tested the bricks levels between Citrus that were planted in the same day in and out of the Agro forestry the difference is night and day trees want to be in their ideal growing conditions in a temperate system maybe this is closer to 40% then you get to the low strata most of this layer wants to be occupied in

a subtropical system around 80% in a temperate system even higher around 90 and so what you're looking at here is you're seeing progressively more and more canopy occupation As you move down in the layers these are the rough proportions to which you're managing your canopy layers as you're going in for those management and the pruning interventions you're resetting things to that distribution one interesting note is that in Brazil where the standard was having 5 m between their tree lines where they had a diversity of emergent species High canopy species and medium canopy species they filled

their alley crops up so the area in between their tree lines with their low species in their case it was coffee what that allowed them to do is that gets a volume of their target crop which is coffee because you're not maybe going to get the volume if you're including everything in the same Tree Line they're getting a volume of crop from their coffee a good amount of area but still getting the diversity from their tree lines and maintaining enough light levels organic material production and biodiversity to support a really healthy coffee crop you can

think in clever ways about how you want to organize the space of your agor forry we'll look at the layout in the design section but that's the space concept is you've got the layers and the strata and the two biggest differentiators between layers and strata layers is looking at the actual form the growth habit of the individual plant whereas strata is looking at how much light does that plant want to thrive how heavily filtered light does it want to be as healthy as possible where in the canopy does it want to sit two helpful Frameworks

strata we've got four layers there's 10 plus depending on what you're looking at so I find strata a much more helpful framework for understanding the space dynamics of your food Forest on to design process design is this process of bringing things from the clouds these Frameworks these Concepts bringing them down and honing in on what are the next best steps for you in your landscape how do we make this really practical for the installation of a food Forest the design process has these leaves and the foliage that reaches up into the clouds the branches that

bring us in and then you can see the tree actually goes into the soil where we have our installation the Practical work and I love this illustration because it really does represent the leaves and the foliage do really touch into the concepts and these big conceptual ideas but it makes it very practical through this process and so there's four different stages of the design process that we're going to explore together the first is observation what are we observing there's two main things and it's a vend diagram people and place and what we're looking for is

this juicy bit right in in the middle that bit right in the middle is the combination of what's possible with you your hopes and dreams and everything you want out of life that's you the people and then the place the place where you live the place where you're actually doing this work what's the biggest possible potential of this landscape there's plenty of things it could do but what's important is where it intersects with you and your dreams your hopes your visions and your goals and so this is actually a really key component of understanding what

are my goals with my land how do I want to apply this what's possible with the land and so we're going to run through some Frameworks to see how to explore that and get a deeper connection with what is your purpose and Mission on your land Vision goals dreams time how much time do you have available to do this work to manage the land do you work full-time are you full-time on the land what are your Visions what are your dreams your hopes your aspirations what is everything you want to do with your life budget

how much money do you have to spend on a food forest or on an agro forestry system or on this endeavor skills what relevant skills do you have are you an arborist do you have propagation skills are you totally new to all of this what skills do you have that can contribute towards this vision and Mission wish list what specific things do you want are you super passionate about pomegranates do you want a tree house do you want an outdoor Jungle Gym what do you ultimately want out of this land these are things to be

considering at this stage in the design process because again we're still up in the clouds we're still in the foliage thinking big picture we haven't yet made it down to get really practical in The Roots yet so we're thinking big and no wrong answers this is just you and your vision and what you ultimately want with you and your family for your land then we move into play place this is the physical place that you are located you're making assessments of the hard realities of where you live and the land a really helpful framework for

looking at this is called the scale of permanence I'm going to run through it really quickly we've got climate you should be really paying attention to what is in your climate what grows well already part of this is just paying attention to what other local Growers are producing in your area that's a pretty great indicator of what will work well for you land form where in the landscape do you sit are you in the flood Plains are you in the mountains in the Foothills what is the shape of the land really important things to be

considered water just as important do you have flood issues do you have drought issues do you have a stream do you have a lake what's the water holding capacity where does water pool paying attention to that very important access for ongoing management equipment major access minor access existing trees that are already in the landscape structures do you have houses buildings out buildings fences sheds soil what kind of soil do you have Sun wind that says wind I promise animals domesticated or non domesticated are in the area how is that going to influence what you're doing

these make a giant ven diagram of you your family and your hopes and dreams and everything about you guys and what you want out of the land and then what the land is doing and what its capacity is now something to think about here is that with each of these there are limiting factors both on the people side you have limiting factors as a family as an individual and the landscape has limiting factors pay attention to identify those spend time thinking about that because that's often the biggest thing that sets the bar for what we're

able to achieve it's not it's not the wildest potential because every place has potential every human has potential but what are the limiting factors that will restrict what you're able to do that will set the limit for what you are able to achieve pay attention to those identify them and see how you can work with them change them but don't ignore the limiting factors what this does when you're creating this ven diagram making an assessment of people in the place what you're doing is you are quite literally identifying the DNA of your project this is

so important I cannot stress this overstress I can't overstress this you're creating the project DNA you're articulating what is the DNA of this project the details might change but the DNA of a seed never changes as it grows from a seed into a big beautiful tree and so that's a big part of this design process is identifying what is the Project's DNA so we're going to draw that up here in the foliage cuz that's what you're doing here you're identifying what the DNA of the project is another fancy word for that is context and ultimately

context is everything in permaculture design in Food Forest design no matter what you're doing context is everything just because I can do something doesn't mean that you should do it just because you see me doing things doesn't mean you should do them because your context is without a doubt different than my context nobody's context is the same as yours so pay attention spend a lot of time there we're making things more practical we're honing in what wants to happen what are the next steps and so part of identifying that is understanding how these things apply

at your place and getting it on paper I find this tremendously valuable and it's one of my favorite steps is creating a landscape character map what you're doing is you're mapping the hard realities of your land putting them on paper not in a really detail driven way because what you're not doing is you're not going to the details of I want this particular tree here and this here and this detail forget that what we're doing is we're starting at a very conceptual level still think areas rather than details you've probably heard that saying before patterns

to details in permaculture Design This is no different we're looking at areas and what I mean by that is landscape character map you are allowing the landscape to reveal its character to you listen closely and allow the landscape to tell you its secrets and so what you'll find is that as you're walking through this activity you're assessing the location the shapes the sizes and basically the different qualities or characteristics of your landscape here's what I find is that no matter how big the landscape is whether it's a small little Urban section or whether it's a

big large farm is that generally there's between 8 to 12 different areas now these areas are differentiated by having different characteristics or qualities maybe some are are really hot exposed some areas are more overgrown and shady and cool maybe some areas are really flat or some are steep you're drawing that on the map and you're creating these different areas just looking at the characteristics not worrying about the details yet this is going to start to help inform what the next stages are and so what this activity does with the landscape character map is it brings

us further down bringing us from those larger observations and this ultimately turns into a concept design as you're walking through this activity you'll find an area that seems to have this latent potential almost as if it's crying out to you and saying focus on me it's this area of latent potential maybe there's tension in the landscape there the next steps are calling you right you have that intuition follow that that's going to lead us to our next stage which is more of a detailed design let's dive in through this design process we've moved from observation

developing a context into the slightly more practical development of a landscape character map where a lot of that cont Tex has come together into the trunk and it's going to begin very quickly to transition into the more practical details of how do I start applying this food Forest stuff how do I make a plan and put it together what are we doing the next step is following the roots of that tree into the soil getting more practical with our design there's two main components of this the first component is looking back at our succession and

putting together a more detailed succession plan choosing what kind of species we want in our food forest in our AGR Forestry system and this brings us back to our goals what are the goals of the people in the landscape is it to become self-sufficient is it to produce fruit for the local community what are the goals create your succession plan accordingly a really helpful way of doing this is breaking up just into a few different time frames longterm what do we want to be harvesting in 20 years what do we want to be harvesting next

month or the month after that or in the next couple years and everything in between start listing out species that are appropriate for your climate so that's the first part of our detailed design as Things become more practical in The Roots is putting together a succession plan the next stage is layout with layout there are no right answers but there's two approaches that I've seen work tremendously well there're as follows the first and the most common one that I see in Agro forestry are tree lines linear rows of your species all planted directly in line

you can have multiple tree lines and the context will dictate how far apart they are the second thing I've seen work really successfully is nests 1.2 diameter circles full of their own succession plan Space 3 m apart so we're going to look at the details of how you would maybe apply these in what different contexts and how do you actually develop a layout plan for your systems tree lines exactly as it sounds it's a line where you have your different tree species maybe you include some herbaceous things in here non- tree species maybe you include

everything in the tree line it totally depends on the context maybe you have tree line but then a support line of biomass or maybe you have tree lines spaced 5 m apart and you're growing vegetables in between you can grow vegetables between in the alley crops you can grow biomass crops you can grow grass for grazing animals you can do all sorts of things the difference is how far apart are your tree lines spaced the standard that I saw in Brazil for coffee was 5 meter tree lines here at my site there're about 3 to

4 M apart depending on the area maybe they're 20 M apart if you're doing large scale annual cropping or animals in between this is where it comes back to the context and why you spent so much time developing and figuring out what are my goals and maybe you have different systems you have a grazing system you have an alley cropping system you have all kinds of systems you could also just let it stay grass and eventually slowly transition into crops it doesn't all have to happen all at once you can establish some lines and then

in a few years time as the conditions improve there's less wind there's less Sun whatever the conditions are then you begin transitioning into the next phase of your food forest in your tree lines this is where your whole succession of species is developing you have your fast growing Pioneers your medium succession spe species and then your long-term fruit and nut trees slowly growing in the understory that's the sign of a great food Forest is a thoughtful succession plan now how do we apply this stuff with nests nests are quite simple they're essentially that same succession

of species but it's all stacked into a 1.2 M Circle what I saw most frequently was that they're spaced 3 m apart from each other this is a great way to cover a large landscape without heavy machinery you can do these by hand with hand tools a team of people can smash out mult mle nests in an afternoon one of the keys for nests especially if you're in a subtropical area where you're growing bananas is that you would either make the decision to include one grafted tree in the center of your nest or a banana

all the other species will sit around those there's even this idea of family planting where you can include multiple grafted trees into one hole really pushing the bounds of what's possible in a small compact Urban landscape for example now how do you combine these ideas of nests and lines something something that I saw applied quite regularly in Brazil but also here unknowingly was this different application of nests and lines and nests in a landscape I'll show you what I mean what I saw most commonly was right around the house people would have nests before I

even knew about nests that's essentially what I've done here in my backyard where we're filming this is nests of species sometimes they're connected but just spot planting and part of the reason for that is right outside your house you don't necessarily want to have big strong lines that divide a space up the nests around the house have this nice organic and flowing feel to them they're also a great spot to incorporate those special species the ones that they're harder to find or you want to look after a little bit more closely they're a gift any

special unique or rare species put them in the backyard nests the next application that I saw lines this is when things became larger scale and efficiency became much more important managing your food Forest is 95% of the work planting it and designing it that's only 5% so ongoing management is the majority of the work you want to design systems that are easy to maintain and manage and lines very much are that and so that's what I would see at that medium to large scale you start moving into Agro forestry lines the third application that I

saw was of nests again in the broader landscape think large-scale reforestation efforts tricky terrain where equipment isn't possible nests were seen as a fantastic way to regenerate huge areas of land into Agro forestry in Brazil 3 met spacing between 1.2 meter diameter and a huge succession of species this is great because you can plant in and amongst the existing vegetation without having to do all this huge soil disturbance big heavy machinery lots of effort and you can still just manage that organic material and use it to develop these Food Forest nests so those are the

three areas where I saw nests and lines applied obviously you can do a combination of nests and lines if you're really clever but this is how I saw things applied most successfully in Brazil and here been doing a great combination of this here at my place so those are the specifics of getting a detailed design is figuring out your succession plan and choosing between the layout of nests and lines once you get to this stage you're pretty much ready to move into the Practical installation so that's where we're going next installing your food Force has

four main practical steps they are as follows step one is pruning the existing vegetation around your food Forest Area pruning the trees pruning the shrubs cutting the grass and organizing the organic material because this is material that you will utilize as mulch for your food Forest so you're pruning the nearby vegetation and what that's doing is that's starting a growth hormone response if you plant a system next to some old stagnant unpruned trees your system will suffer by pruning the nearby vegetation before you plant a you're not risking smashing your young system when you do

eventually go into prune but B you're also organized that org organic material and you're getting that growth hormone response so that when you plant everything it's all on the same page and it's all in that growth response it's called gibberellic acid or gibberellin is the hormonal response to heavy pruning make use of that prune the trees any vegetation that you don't ultimately want in the area cut the grass and set it aside keep it organized to be used later and when you're pruning prune more than you think you need because the material goes so quick

so go like really heavy pruning don't be shy don't be timid heavily prune these trees step two for the installation is preparing your soil you can either use equipment for this you can use tractor rotary hoe or just hand tools a hoe a spade a pickaxe whatever your soil needs to prepare the soil you're breaking the soil up you're cultivating you're removing the existing vegetation so after you go in with the rotary hoe or the tractor remove the grass remove the existing vegetation unless you want to deal with that in your system but I don't

think you do so after you've cultivated you've removed the existing vegetation the third step of soil preparation is adding any ments or soil conditioners or any additional inputs that you want this can look like compost aged manures warm castings biochar if you have really heavy clay soils maybe you want to include lime or scoria or pmus to make it more free draining and begin breaking down the heavy clay or if you have really sandy soils maybe you want to incorporate clay maybe you want to increase the water retention capacity I've done that myself successfully at

other projects where it's really free draining this is that time where you include anything you want to amend your soil with you can use a little red rotary hole like I've got you can use hand tools step two for the install is preparing your soil step three of your installation is actually planting your trees now what I'm going to recommend you do start by planting the biggest trees first not which will grow into the largest trees but actually the biggest trees that you have on hand so if they're a bunch of grafted trees that you

have or a bunch of big banana stumps plant those first as you move downwards in size you will finish by planting your seeds you'll finish up in your tree lines or in your nests after having made the biggest soil disturbance down to the smallest where you're just making little holes and popping your seed bombs in and so you're working from grafted trees down to maybe some seedlings that you've grown or a friend has grown maybe some cuting and then planting seeds at the very end the final step of the installation of your food Forest is

mulching using the organic material that you pruned earlier when you pruned the nearby vegetation you're now organizing that material to mulch and cover your soil that's one of the most fundamental things about Food Forest and Agro forestry is you should see no exposed soil whatsoever everything should be covered in organic material that's how you're going to protect the life in your soil quickly transition from bacterial into fungal dominated soil and really just have the best start to your food Forest as possible now the reason I said to organize your organic material when you pruned it

up here because you want to be mulching with the most coarse material first what do I mean by that when you're pruning trees heavily you end up with quite coarse material you should end up with a bunch of straight logs some of them are going to be bigger than others you want to start by placing the most coarse most Woody largest material down first and so ideally what you're doing is you're sandwiching your high value trees with the largest material because they're your highest value material highest value trees partner them up you're putting the largest

logs down at the base of your fruit trees and on top of that then you're putting the smaller sticks that you've cut the smaller branches and on top of all that then you're covering it whether you've made some wood chips or some Leaf litter you're covering everything up so it's really nice and inviting that's what you're looking for is you're making inviting conditions for the soil biology the fungi the bacteria you want to start that decomposition process having sticks poking up in the air and not in contact with the soil that's not what you want

cover everything make sure it's nice and compact you will have a happy system so those are the four steps of the installation of your food Forest here was the whole design process laid out for you from observation to the landscape character map into the details of layout and succession planning and all of that is built on the foundation of fundamentals of food forest and aggro Forestry hopefully this has been helpful for you if it has send it to a friend who needs this information for their place and I really hope you make great use of

this I know you will give me some feedback leave a comment follow me because this is what I teach this is what I do and if you have any questions let me know hopefully you found it valuable and I will see you guys all very shortly in Brazil Costa Rica Florida it's going to be an epic adventure you'll see you very soon