The Food Forest Handbook Design and Manage a Home-Scale Perennial Polyculture Garden

Create ongoing abundance with low-maintenance, high-yield, sustainable food production

The Food Forest Handbook is an outstanding work that should be in the libraries of urban planners, designers, gardeners, property owners, naturalists, and even survivalists.
— JOSEPH JENKINS, author, The Humanure Handbook , The Slate Roof Bible , and Balance Point

What happens if we were to drop the boundary between the built environment and nature? Wouldn't we all be much better off? The Food Forest Handbook guides our first steps along that path .
— ALBERT BATES, author, The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and The Biochar Solution

A FOOD FOREST is a productive landscape developed around a mix of trees and perennials, helping increase biodiversity, protect valuable habitat for beneficial insects, and promote food security and resilience, all while providing an abundant annual harvest.

Rooted in permaculture principles, this integrated approach to gardening incorporates a variety of plants such as fruit and nut trees, shrubs, vines, and perennial herbs and vegetables. Authors Michelle Czolba and Darrell Frey bring years of experience building and maintaining food forests to provide this practical and accessible guide to creating your own food forest landscape, whether you're urban, suburban, or rural.

This practical manual for the design and management of a home-scale perennial polyculture garden covers all the steps to guide the reader through the process, including:

• Getting started – site assessment and planning
• Tending the forest garden – maintaining soil health, succession planning, mulching, pruning and more
• The fruits of your labor – crop profiles, harvest, storage, nutrition and recipes.

This timely book makes the concept of food forests accessible to everyone. Focusing on the potential of perennial polyculture to enhance local food systems, The Food Forest Handbook shows the reader how to mix and match plants in unique combinations to establish bountiful landscapes and create genuine self-reliance in years to come.

Frey and Czolba share the valuable fruit of their decades of experience with this carbon-friendly gardening form.
— ERIC TOENSMEIER, author, The Carbon Farming Solution

DARRELL FREY is the owner and manager of Three Sisters Farm, a 5-acre permaculture farm, solar greenhouse and market garden located in Western Pennsylvania. He has been permaculture teacher for 30 years, and is the author of Bioshelter Market Garden: A Permaculture Farm .

MICHELLE CZOLBA is co-owner of Pittsburgh Permaculture and co-founded the Hazelwood Food Forest.She has extensive experience in the design and maintenance of perennial polyculture.