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If you’re tired of spending every spring starting your garden from scratch, horticultural experts have a solution they predict will be huge in 2026: food forests. Starting a food forest, or forest garden, involves planting edible trees, shrubs, and other plants grouped to mimic a natural woodland ecosystem.
As gardeners look for ways to make their spaces more resilient against rising temperatures and climate change, food forests offer a solution. Unlike the single-crop approach of traditional gardens, this method of gardening helps increase biodiversity and stability. The whole idea is to mimic nature to grow healthy, delicious food with minimal human intervention, which allows gardeners to conserve resources and help them contribute to a greener planet.
This style of gardening has many advantages, especially when considering water use and long-term viability. Since the system relies primarily on perennial plants, they return year after year, saving time, labor, and the cost of replanting. Perennials also reduce the need for frequent irrigation required by annual plants.
How to layer your food forest
Want to get more out of your yard? You can swap your boring lawn for a food forest, a garden design that is typically organized into seven layers that copy the natural environment. This type of design is what allows gardeners to produce a lot of food in a small space. The layering begins with the canopy, which is made up of the tallest fruit and nut trees, like chestnut, pear, and apple. Directly below that is the sub-canopy layer, which has smaller fruit and nut trees, like medlar, or ones that grow well with less sun exposure, like mulberry or pawpaw.
Next is the shrub layer, featuring plants like raspberry, gooseberry, elderberry, and nitrogen-fixing species such as the Siberian pea shrub. Below that is the herbaceous layer, where perennials like rhubarb and self-seeding annuals like tomatoes, chard, kale, chives, and mint are found.
The low-growing ground cover layer is next, designed to suppress weeds and often includes creeping thyme, sorrel, and strawberries. The underground layer contains root vegetables like garlic, ginger, onions, and leeks, while the climber layer uses vertical supports for vines like grapes, beans, and cucumbers. Some food forest designs include an eighth layer for fungi or a ninth layer for a section of wetland crops.
How to get started planting a food forest (& it’s benefits)
Planting a food forest helps boost biodiversity because it creates a welcoming habitat for birds, pollinators, and small animals. You’ll quickly learn how to bring more pollinators to your garden with this kind of planting. For busy gardeners, one of the biggest benefits is that it is typically low-maintenance. The use of ground-cover plants naturally prevents weeds from sprouting, and once established, the garden becomes nearly self-sustaining, needing little, if any, supplemental water.
To start incorporating this practice into your existing garden, you first need to assess your site. It’s important to check the soil type, depth, and how much sun the area gets each day, since the fruit and nut trees in the upper layers prefer full sun. Shallow soil depth will result in large trees struggling to develop deep roots, and they could become unstable. The pH of the soil is another item to consider, since highly acidic soil will limit the type of plants and trees you can grow. Once you understand your site’s conditions, you can begin to plan the specific plants for your food forest.
Begin with a mix of large trees and shrubs, making sure their spacing is correct and that they won’t grow too large for the area. When choosing fruit trees, confirm that they are compatible with others that are nearby due to pollination. Then, you can arrange the lower layers of perennials and root crops around them. Even small yards or balconies can support one or two layers of smaller trees, herbs, or climbing plants on trellises.
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