There are two key features of a food forest: plant layers and plant types.

Plant layers exist to mimic the verticality of forests. While farms and gardens, as we have come to know them, tend to grow along the ground in long, flat planes, forests are far more three-dimensional. They grow out and up. Therefore creating extensive layering from canopy to ground that allows for much more life in a single area.

This profusion of life is what makes forests such healthy places.

In forests, things like pest-management, fertilization, weed suppression, pollination, and nitrogen-fixation are all happening naturally. As are greater eco-system functions, like water retention, carbon sequestration, and climate stabilization— and forest layers are what make that all possible.

Layering is key in food forests. In a nutshell, these are the layers you’d want in a food forest, moving north to south:

Canopy or Overstory: This is your tallest layer, comprised mostly of large fruit and nut trees such as pecans, walnuts, or chestnuts. This layer has the fullest sun.

Understory: Smaller nut and fruit trees that can tolerate partial shade make up the understory. Here you can find things like persimmon or apples.

Vines: Grapes and other shade-tolerant climbers live in the vine layer, using overstory and understory trees as trellising.

Shrubs: The partial shade of the shrub layer is excellent for fruiting shrubs like huckleberry, elderberry, and currant.

Herbaceous: This layer is where you’ll find herbs like rosemary, lavender, and mint. Plus a whole host of other leaf-bearing, perennial plants like rhubarb and asparagus.

Groundcover: This is the soil layer and is made up of horizontally spreading cover crops like sorrel, alpine strawberries, or any number of green spreaders

Rhizosphere: Root crops make up this layer, and it is the one part of the food forest where you might find annuals— if sun is available.

Mycelial: This is the subterranean mushroom layer.

The other important feature of a food forest is plant type.

“Landscapes want to be perennial, that’s what they want to be,” says Garden City Harvest’s Greg Price. “The whole prairie landscape was perennial and that means life is in the roots.”

To farm and garden the way we do now, Greg says, with long stretches of open dirt, is to keep the earth in a juvenile state, where the dense foliage and intricate root systems we see in forests and prairies is constantly being prevented by things like tilling. And that, Greg says, is “not the natural state of ground. It doesn’t want to be exposed. Ever.”

When soil is regularly disrupted and exposed, it loses its ability to retain water, prevent erosion, cycle nutrients, build fertility, offer habitat, and to attract beneficial microbes that not only nourish plants, but hold carbon.

So, a key feature of food forests is the ongoing presence of perennial plants such as fruit and nut trees, medicinal shrubs and flowers, and self-seeding annuals— plants that remain, year after year, building increasingly diverse ecosystems and producing food.

Ready to start planting your own food forest? Take the courses below to up skill and regenerate:

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Our dream was to create the world’s largest and most accessible learning platform and community where anyone, anywhere, can access the skills, networks and funds they need to restore nature and learn to grow. 

Over the last two years we have been working with expert ecosystem restorers, community growers, regenerative farmers, urban gardeners and nature stewards from Haiti to India and everywhere in between. We’ve been gathering some of the skills we think you’ll be most excited to learn about – from building an earthship to restoring a river – and made short, easy-to-action films to get your hands in the soil and your hearts feeling alive. We are so excited to share this dream with you! 

There has never been a more urgent need to revive damaged ecosystems than now. In the past 60 years, 60% of the Earth’s ecosystem has been degraded, and 69% of wildlife has been lost. The United Nations reports that one billion hectares of land must be restored in the next eight years and that the only way to achieve this is to enable local people everywhere to take action. Earthed is a tool to help us do that. 

Earthed was born out of EcoResolution, a climate action campaign focused on behavioural change through public pledge-making. It was an early example of what became a huge trend of climate oriented social media accounts. While this type of change making is extremely important to increase awareness of problems and solutions, we began to see some shortfalls. On the one hand we saw increasing climate anxiety, disempowerment or apathy as we became aware of the scale of the problem yet felt we could do very little from the other side of a screen. On the other hand there seemed to be increasing polarisation and binary thinking, as we were quick to take sides to protect what we felt was at risk of being lost. While we were all becoming increasingly well versed in talking about the problem, we were not seeing much impact at the local level. 

Meanwhile, during COVID, many people had time to take to their gardens and discovered a love of growing food, felt the fulfillment seeing nature return to life, and reaped the many personal benefits all of this had on their health, happiness and wellbeing. Despite the boom in online learning around this time, we didn’t see anything dedicated to practical answers to the climate and biodiversity crisis, and we saw the huge potential in diverting our energy to broadening awareness of and increasing access to nature based skills. We believe that access to nature should be a birthright, and that humans at all ends of the social and cultural spectrum share a love for the natural living world, mourn its depletion, and share a nostalgia for our loss of connection to it. We wanted to shift the narrative of humanity as a virus to humanity as a force for restoration, to celebrate local answers to local issues, ancient wisdom and place-based knowledge, and to enable people around the world to learn from each other, share stories and skills, and support one another to thrive.  

We saw the incredible potential in uniting people around skills for the restoration of our ecosystems and wanted to create a model that could do that in the most equitable, regenerative and transformative way possible. We chose to become a membership organisation to best enable us to build a community and networks around the learning experience. We see human connection and sharing as one of the most effective ways to ensure long term engagement, as well as the transformation of online learning into offline action. We also chose to create an Action Fund through which all surplus will be distributed to on-the-ground ecosystem restoration projects. 

So Earthed was born. In the last two years we have filmed 40 courses, developed a beautiful brand and learning platform, and brought a cohort of inspiring teachers, ambassadors, advocates and early members together who share our dream. Our first year will be spent getting to know our members, nurturing the online community and our relationships with teachers, partners and projects, and creating powerful educational materials and films. By the end of the year we hope to have enabled over 8,000 individual members to learn the skills needed to heal the plant, and to use the Action Fund to finance projects across the world. Our small, passionate and dedicated team of five people can’t wait to get to know you. 

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