Food Forest Layers and Why They are Important

These 7 food forest layers each fill a potential growing space. That allows you to grow far more in any given area than you could in a traditional farm or garden, which would likely only use 1 to 3 of these layers (herbaceous plants, groundcover, and root crops).

So how do all these layers, taken from layers in a natural forest, translate into a food forest? Assuming you were going to plant all 7 layers, here is how you could do it.

1. Canopy Layer: These are your large fruit and nut trees, as well as support trees that help improve your soil such as nitrogen fixers like alders. When you design your food forest, you’ll space these trees differently depending on which type of food forest you’re growing. (More on that later.)
2. Sub-Canopy Layer: Around these large trees, plant smaller trees such as dwarf fruit trees or naturally small trees like hazelnuts.
3. Shrub Layer: Then mix in some shrubs, like raspberries, blueberries, etc.
4. Herbaceous Layer: Next, add your vegetables (perennial vegetables and self-seeding vegetables are a great option for a food forest), flowers for beneficial insects (native flowers are a great choice), and nitrogen fixing plants like lupines.
5. Groundcover Layer: Plants like strawberries make a great groundcover that is also edible—and they’ll help fill in space between your other plants.
6. Root Crops Layer: Add in some potatoes, garlic, bulbs, onions (wild onions are a great option,) or perennial root vegetables to get an additional harvest and fill another niche.
7. Climbers (Vines) Layer: Finally, consider adding some vines to climb the woody plants (or you can build some trellises). Annual climbers like peas and beans are great options that are not likely to cause problems with trees the way that some vine species can. A trellis is a great choice for grapes and kiwis. Some people let them grow through their trees, but you would need large trees to be able to do that.

Working the Living Layers into Different Types of Food Forests

The arrangement of layers in your food forest will be different depending on which type of food forest you’re growing. In the most recent post in this series, I covered 3 core types of food forests that you can plant on your property. Each type mimics a different type of natural forest. The 3 types of food forests covered in that post are:

• Oak Savanna: Primarily grassland with trees and shrubs scattered throughout.
• Recovering Forest: More trees and shrubs than an oak savanna, but it will have a lot of herbaceous understory and a lot of sunlight reaching the ground. 
• Mature Forest: A closed-canopy system with tall or very tall trees capturing most of the sunlight, and shade-tolerant plants growing underneath.

Each type of food forests has a different balance of layers, and different potential uses in terms of production on your property. If you haven’t already, make sure to look at the post on food forest types before you decide which type of food forest to grow on your property.

You can include all 7 layers for any one of these types of food forests. But depending on which type you’re designing, you’ll put more emphasis on some of the layers than on others.

In temperate areas, most mature forests in nature have plants growing in all 7 of these layers. But that doesn’t mean each layer is densely populated. Here in western Washington, there are very few native climbers.

An oak savanna and a recovering forest are also likely to have less of these layers. You wouldn’t find a full canopy in these two forests. This allows for more sunlight to reach the ground, resulting in more plant growth in the lower layers (layers 3-7).

All of these features are discussed in more detail in the post How to Work With Nature to Rewild your Property (And Why You Should), but here’s the gist of it.

Snags are dead standing trees. While at first glance they may not seem to serve a purpose, they actually provide excellent habitat for wildlife. Research has even shown that there is more life in these snags by weight then in a living tree the same size!

You don’t need to have dead trees already on your property to take advantage of this feature—I’ve “planted” quite a few snags on my property, and animals started taking advantage of them as soon as they went in the ground. I’m constantly seeing birds using them as perches, and I find other critters like chipmunks taking advantage of them as well.

I have even seen woodpeckers visiting the snags.

Large logs provide a similar benefit, but at ground-level. Additionally, snags, logs, and fallen branches and limbs all help support beneficial fungi which can help your trees, shrubs and other plants to grow and produce a harvest.

As an added bonus, sometimes you can even eat the fungi! I’ve loved finding morels growing in my food forest!

All of this woody debris also provides micro-climates that can help your plants get established and deal with droughts. You can also add piles of rocks and logs, instead of placing them individually, to provide additional habitat for wildlife and mimic the beneficial impact of rocks and logs that would be too big for you to install in your food forest.

Working the Non-Living Layers into Different Types of Food Forests

Like the living elements of a food forest, the non-living elements can be spaced differently depending on which type of food forest you’re creating.

The woody material would naturally be found near the trees. So if you are creating an oak savanna food forest, you can mimic what would happen naturally by placing the majority of the woody material around your large trees. Rocks could be placed throughout, and some woody debris, such as snags and large logs, can be added to the open areas.

There would naturally be a lot more woody material found in recovering forests and mature forests than in oak savannas.