Starting your own food forest sounds like a great idea, but the amount of work you think has to go into it makes the task seem daunting. However, turning your piece of land into a food forest is possible! It doesn’t have to be hard. For years David has been reading, planting, collecting ideas and building food forests. Today, he shares some of those ideas with us. This week he was LIVE and shared Establishing a Food Forest Inside an Existing Forest (Goodstream #048)

You don’t have to jump in all at once. You may even have some very useful species already growing in your yard or woods, just waiting to be found. Maybe you have Bidens alba, the incredibly useful plant that grows rampant in weedy yards. Maybe you have native persimmons or pawpaws or nitrogen-fixing trees. In the Goodstream linked above, he goes step by step on what it takes to start from a piece of woods and develop it into a marvelously productive source of food as well as a shelter for wildlife.

The great thing about a food forest is how beautiful it becomes over time and how little work it takes to maintain that beauty. You can see the recent tour he filmed of his old food forest in North Florida.

He also filmed the food forest he planted with our Dad in South Florida.

Another good overview of a food forest system is Geoff Lawton’s recent video. You can watch that HERE.

And for plenty of answers and advice regarding food forests, Permies.com has an excellent forum on the topic.

Another video David highly suggests that’s on food forests is Geoff Lawton’s Establishing a Food Forest the Permaculture Way. After looking it up on Amazon Video, it looks like it’s only available when you do some $9.95 Food Matters TV subscription deal, fortunately for us, he found it at Archive.org for free.

In David the Good’s most recent newsletter he shared a list of book resources! They are not all solely focused on forest gardening, however, they will help you as far as long-term, tree-based food systems. If the cost is an issue, be sure to reach out to a friend or the library to see if you can borrow them instead.

Creating a Forest Garden by Martin Crawford

Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture by Toby Hemenway

Restoration Agriculture by Mark Shepard 

Farming the Woods by Ken Mudge and Steve Gabriel

He also wrote a short book for Florida gardeners who want to grow food forests, titled Create Your Own Florida Food Forest.

Get planting and enjoy the process. Start small and start now! If you have not subscribed to David the Good’s newsletter you can do that HERE.