Making Our Food Forest

When we bought our house, I knew I wanted to completely redo the entire yard. Front and back. And I wanted to get started the minute we moved in.

Part of my impatience was knowing that the sooner I could get things like trees and larger shrubs in the ground, the sooner they could grow and mature and start to make the yard look intentional. We had to garden on a budget, which meant we would be buying things as small and cheaply as possible.

Here’s a look at our yard when we bought the house. I always knew I wanted a veggie patch and lots of other interesting plants, and that meant I would need a lot of light. Unfortunately, that also meant I would need to take out a few big trees. While I would likely do things differently now (because I have a new appreciation for mature trees in an urban setting), I was over eager at the time and took them all out. I won’t say I fully regret it though because I am very happy with our current yard. But I think I will always live with some guilt. I’m sorry trees. You served well and I will try to honor your sacrifice with a truly remarkable garden!

We bought our house in late July of 2017 and I spent nearly every weekend of that first year filling several yard waste bins with ivy and branches from clipping back the insane amount of English Laurel and other wild, overgrown shrubs and tree branches. As I cleared away, I got to know every inch of our land and would always be thinking about what I would want to plant where.

Below is what the back yard looked like from August 2017 to August 2018. As you can see, there was a lot of tree removal, underbrush removal, and fence building to get it down to a clean slate. I then made a drawing of the plan I had for our future yard and got to work on making it happen.

I’m the kind of person who likes a little bit of everything, so I decided to section the yard out into little zones. I would have my topiary zone, my tropical zone, my Zen zone and my shade garden zone. These zones would be relatively small but very specific. My husband was concerned that I was going to rip out all the grass and take over the entire yard with my plant obsession, but I guaranteed him that we would always have a nice, lush, and large section devoted to lawn. While I know I would be thrilled getting to plant whatever I wanted, wherever I wanted, I also want our yard to be as functional as possible. We have two small children. We have a dog. We like to entertain. It just makes sense for us to have a lovely lawn. It also makes sense for us to have a delightful food forest!

Other than the grass, the edible garden/veg patch is the largest section of the back yard. In my vision and drawings, there were to be about six raised beds, a raspberry patch and several fruit trees.

The first addition to this area were the fruit trees. I was able to buy a few tiny apple and pear tree starts from Home Depot for $17 each, and I got two larger columnar apples from Sky Nursery for considerably more. I got a three-way blend cherry tree from Costco and my aunt gave me a fig tree start. Aside from the trees, my friend was moving so she gave me a small square raised bed kit that they never assembled. I also went on to the Share Plants Shoreline Facebook group and was able to get some free raspberry and strawberry plants. And with that, the Food Forest had officially begun!

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The pictures above are from late summer 2018- end of the year 2019. Below is 2020. Since we were all home due to the pandemic, we had a lot of time on our hands to get things done. And so we did!

In the photos below you can see everything we did from February through April of 2020. We try to build things for as little money as possible, and we are fortunate enough to be able to find lots o things for free. For the raised beds we bought the 4×4 posts from Home Depot for $10 each (We cut each into four and that determined the height of our boxes), but the rest of the wood was free from my parents. They have some property that had been logged and still had some milled wood left that they didn’t know what to do with. We were happy to take some off their hands!

We were able to use a lot of salvaged material for the raspberry patch as well. We bought the 4×4 posts from Home Depot, but the cross pieces were scraps of 2x4s that were leftover from other projects of ours. I was also able to salvage an entire patio’s worth of pavers from a construction site across the street that was just going to demo everything and throw them away. I decided to use a bunch of them to create walkways on either side of the raspberry trellises to help keep weeds and raspberry shoots down. As mentioned in another post, I also incorporate free bricks in whenever possible to create walkways and keep the weeds down.

Once the planter boxes were built I put cardboard on the bottom to help prevent weeds from growing (I avoid plastic whenever possible) and I then put the last of our scrap wood that was left from when we cut down the trees in our yard. This was so we didn’t have to use quite so much dirt to fill the boxes, but also because as the wood breaks down over time it will add nutrients to the soil, and it also keeps the bottom more aerated for plant roots to grow and spread around.

It was really exciting seeing this formal part of the vegetable garden come together. It’s finally starting to look like I actually had a plan and that our yard wasn’t just an overgrown mess!

By summer we were occupied with a LOT of other projects, but I was able to build one more raised bed – and I did this one all by myself! I know that doesn’t seem like a big deal, but my husband is incredibly helpful and likes to build things, so he typically will be the one actually constructing the projects that I come up with. The fence and this one little raised bed however were all me!

At this point, I think I will be building three more raised beds, and then we can actually focus on learning how to grow yummy veggies. Eventually, the goal is to see if we can go an entire summer without buying any fresh produce. But we are definitely not there yet!

For now, I have a very good start on what will eventually be the area that takes up most of my time. As of now, I am much more devoted to building the veggie patch than I have been about actually using it. I’ll plant things and not get around to harvesting it all. But at least I know things grow well in the beds! And perhaps the most rewarding part has been seeing our girls learn about building and gardening, and seeing them get enthusiastic about growing and harvesting our own food.