Branches heavy with fruit bow above wild herbs bustling with ecstatic pollinators drunk on the nectar of medicinal plants. A gentle labyrinth of shaded paths invites people to slow down, bring a blanket and find a spot on the green to let time pass while the clouds play with light and the birds sing stories to the day.
The forest garden (or food forest) is a flowering marriage of the wild and the tended. Though most people in the US have never seen a forest garden, vast areas of this continent were tended by indigenous people as an interconnected food forest for hundreds or thousands of years. Home forest gardens are still common around the world. It might be said that it’s our modern idea of a garden that’s unusual! Why wouldn’t we want our gardens to have more of the resilience, diversity, and wild vitality of a forest?
Forest gardens promise lower maintenance – and in our experience, they are! Once the trees, shrubs, and other perennials have grown past the first few years, most of the work is harvest. The forest garden needs less watering and weeding each year. If life happens and you can’t plant a bunch of raised beds one Spring, the forest garden still gives its gifts of food, medicine, habitat, and beauty.
Food forests bring health to the land and our families. The perennial crops that are the center of the forest garden are some of the most nutrient dense and health-giving foods we can eat. It would be too expensive for most families to eat pounds and pounds of fresh organic fruit per year; but in the forest garden (after a while) it is free.
But forest gardens aren’t only for us. The biodiversity of a vegetable garden cannot compare to that of a food forest. The sheer amount of leaf surface of a tree means so much more photosynthesis per square foot than a row of vegetables. The variations of sun and shade, the niches of bark, leaf, stem, and root; every tree is a center of life by itself, and the food forest is made of centers of life like these; and while our organic gardens can have better soil each year, that usually comes by bringing in (or making) huge quantities of compost. Like a forest, the forest garden makes its own compost – and its own fertilizer, and can even make its own mulch. It also makes its own ecological balance.
Our Food Forest (Forest Garden) Design and Install Services
At Silver Branch Permaculture, we bring years of rare experience working and living with forest gardens in the Southeast.
In designing a forest garden, we apply Permaculture to consider the optimal placement on the land. We harmonize the design with the dynamics of slope, sun, shade, water flow, rainfall, wind, and existing animal and plant life. We assess the soil, find and enhance microclimates, and consider the wholeness of the land in each step of the design. We also listen to your goals and what brings you joy to find the optimal plants to include for your forest garden.
We recognize that not everyone who would love to live with a food forest has the time, physical capability, or interest in designing and planting one. That’s why in 2025, we are now offering full Food Forest Design and Install services (….and we still also offer design-only help. See our Permaculture Design page).
How We Work
We work in phases to design and then install your food forest.
- We start with a free 30 minute call to get to know each other and see if we’re a good fit to work together.
- We come out and offer a design visit where we spend a day on site, listening deeply to you and the land. We measure sunlight availability, take a soil test, assess patterns of vegetation, wind, and water, and combine those observations with your goals to find the best layout for your forest garden.
- At the end of the design visit, we create a unique “on-land design sketch” for your future food forest. This is a design approach we evolved using physical placeholders to layout the garden on the land. We find it gives much better results and saves money and time. We may also make a simple digital or paper sketch to help preserve the layout.
- From there, we present a proposal in person or via zoom for implementing the design including estimated costs for installation and a timeline.
- If all seems good on the proposal, we carry out the plan to plant your food forest!
- We create and share a custom plant list with you for review. We want to be sure we focus on the plants you’re most excited about.
- Then, we order the plants! Either to your house, or we take care of them for you leading up to planting.
- Depending on what you need, we may do some site preparation before planting
- If desired, we may also help set up small garden structures (arbors, trellises, small ponds, etc).
- We give you a custom food forest care guide that tells you how to care for it through the seasons and keys you into some of the benefits of the main plants we’ve selected.
- You enjoy your food forest for years to come. And we are always available to help with support with future pruning, questions, expansion, or anything that we can do.
Start Your Food Forest Today
Our hope is to create many more forest gardens – not just for the people alive now, but for the birds, the insects, the frogs, and our children and grandchildren.
We would be honored to help you create a forest garden where you live or work.
Contact us today about designing your forest garden.
Food Forest FAQs
What are some of the benefits of a food forest / forest garden?
- Less maintenance (watering, weeding, etc) than a garden – and you don’t have to replant it every year. After a number of years, the main work is harvest!
- Gets better year after year – as the trees and other perennials grow, the roots and falling leaves build ever-deepening soil, the canopy creates avenues of shade, the plants get more resilient, and there’s a whole lot more fruit!
- A beautiful place to inhabit – the shade, flowers, and magic of a forest garden invite people to slow down, bring a blanket or a chair, and just be with the earth and themselves. A forest garden is also an amazing place for children (…and the child in us all!).
- Climate- and predation- resilient – compared to a garden, a food forest is much more equipped to handle drought, surprise frosts, and giant rain events. A mature food forest can even be a part of mitigating wildfire. The diversity of a food forest provides its own “integrated pest management,” balancing out any excessive insect pressure with the natural predators of those insects.
- Sequesters carbon – The fast-growing trees and perennial support plants of a forest garden sequester so much more soil carbon than a garden. They participate, even if in a small way, in the gentling of the earth’s warming while leaving the soil deeper, darker, and more alive.
- Offers cooling, warming, drainage, and privacy benefits to your home – If placed in relationship to your home, a forest garden can reduce your heating bill (with a wind break from winter winds) and your cooling bill (deciduous trees that shade the house only from April to October), mitigate drainage by trees’ absorption of water flowing over the landscape, and provide privacy to your home with the shelter of trees and shrubs
- In summer, gardening happens in the shade, not the sun! – In the Southeast’s heat extremes, summer gardening can be increasingly hazardous to health. The shade of a forest garden, in contrast, is a way to be happy outside and with the plants even in July.
- Supports far more wildlife than a garden – the diverse environment of a mature food forest supports so much more life than a garden, forest, or pasture. If you want to support pollinators, meadow plants can’t compare to the total nectar volume of flowering trees. Migrating and resident birds will thank you with songs for the trees you grow. Amphibians, reptiles, mammals, fungi… the forest garden makes a place for everyone.
- Conserves genetic heritage of valuable plants – A food forest is a conservatory of dozens of food plants – often rare – that are grown in few other places and can be an essential and delicious part of human survival. A forest garden is also an amazing opportunity to participate in plant breeding.
- Magic and reconnection to the earth – A well-designed forest garden is fundamentally a place of wonder. Around each bend, beneath each bush, something magical is happening. For tending a food forest, life will reward you with glimpses of rare pieces of the ceremony of nature. Life loves a food forest. They call even the most nature-disconnected person to slow down, open their senses, and consider something greater than the smallness of their worries.
How long does it take for a forest garden to make a whole lot of food?
With successional planting, it’s possible to get yields from the forest garden in the first year the same way you would from any garden. The real abundance, however, begins closer to year 3 and ramps up until around 7 (for most plants) – after which, you may well be drowning in fruit! That said, there will be a lot happening and a lot to enjoy in years 1-3 as well…!
How large (or small) can a forest garden be?
We’ve worked on forest gardens as small as 1/10th of an acre and as large as 2 acres. Beyond 2 acres, the pattern usually looks more like what I’d call “agroforestry,” which has less of that garden feeling and more of a diverse orchard layout.
Can animals be integrated into a forest garden?
Yes! Though it’s best to design for that from the beginning as it will involve smart use of fencing. In most cases, ducks are the easiest to integrate while chickens are next. Goats told me to tell you that they’re easy to include in forest gardens but I don’t believe them…
How long does it take for you to design and install a forest garden / food forest?
Every forest garden design and install will be different and we’ll share a timeline with every proposal. One thing to consider is that the Summer time will not be the best time to plant, as we don’t want the new plants to have to deal with the heat stress. That said, we can start any time of year and design work and some site prep work can happen in Summer. We generally try to have a food forest design-install wrapped up within 6 months. it’s also possible to start small and do a phased design that gets added to over years.
How much does a food forest / forest garden cost to design and install?
Every food forest will be different. Size is a factor as is how much site prep is needed. Whether you want to start with very small trees or larger trees also changes the cost. We can’t give an exact figure here but we can share a close estimate in a proposal after our design visit so you can make an informed decision. In general, we bill our time at an hourly rate. We’ll help you understand the costs for plants, mulch, and anything else, and will do our best to work within your budget. We are also open to helping you to do some of the work yourself to save on labor costs. We want there to be a lot of forest gardens!!!
