How to Build a Backyard Food Forest for Self-Sufficiency

It felt like all my Christmases came at once when my husband’s grandmother offered to pay for $400 worth of fruit trees.

I spent an entire day glued to nursery websites, comparing varieties, checking chill hours, and figuring out what would actually survive in our climate. We don’t get much cold weather here, so if I wanted apples, pears, or nectarines, they had to be low-chill types.

For years, I’d wanted to build a backyard food forest. Not a neat, highly controlled garden with ruler-straight rows and labels everywhere. I wanted a wild edible garden, a messy jungle of fruit trees, perennials, creepers, vines – all growing crazy, tangled, but oh so useful.

The kind of garden where you wander outside and accidentally come back having eaten lunch. A strawberry here. A nectarine there. A handful of pecans. Maybe some mint, maybe a few gotu kola leaves if we’re being healthy.

I was well on my way to creating that kind of self-sufficiency garden when we moved. Not around the corner, because that would have been far too sensible. We moved eight hours north, from dry, rocky soil that fought every shovel to rich brown loam in prime growing country.

So naturally, I started all over again.

If you’ve ever dreamed of building a backyard food forest, even in a small space, here’s how to get started.

What Is a Backyard Food Forest?

A backyard food forest is an edible garden designed to work more like a natural ecosystem than a traditional vegetable patch.

Instead of planting everything in tidy rows, you combine layers of useful plants that support each other. Fruit trees, shrubs, vines, herbs, perennial vegetables, root crops, and ground covers all share the same space.

Over time, a food forest garden becomes more productive, more resilient, and often less work than constantly replanting annual crops.

It doesn’t need to be huge, either. A backyard food forest can be built in a suburban yard, around fences, along pathways, or across acreage.

Can You Build a Food Forest in a Small Backyard?

Absolutely.

A backyard food forest doesn’t need acres of land.

Small food forest gardens often work brilliantly because you’re forced to use space creatively. Grow vertically with passionfruit or grapes, plant edible hedges instead of ornamentals, tuck herbs and strawberries under fruit trees, and use warm microclimates near walls or fences.

Even a compact edible landscape can produce a surprising amount of food when you stack plants instead of spreading them out.

Best Plants for a Backyard Food Forest

The best plants for a backyard food forest depend heavily on your climate, but the basic idea is the same: combine useful plants in layers.

Fruit trees like apples, citrus, mulberries, pecans, or avocados can form the upper structure, while shrubs, vines, herbs, root crops, and edible ground covers fill the space beneath. The most useful food forest plants usually do more than one job, whether that’s producing food, creating mulch, attracting pollinators, feeding animals, or helping suppress weeds.

If you want specific plant ideas, have a look at my guide to the best food forest crops for homesteaders and small gardens, where I go into far more detail on productive options for different climates.

How to Build a Backyard Food Forest for Self-Sufficiency

1. Plant in Groves

This goes against anything anyone has ever told you. Fruit trees need to be 4m apart, facing 70 degrees north-north-east, with golden ribbons tied around the roots. No! They don’t.

Plant them together. In nature, trees rarely grow in tidy isolation. They will create a microclimate, which helps create a more sheltered growing environment. Or, sometimes they, themselves, choose to grow there, from seed.

You’ll find that you can grow non-cold loving plants in quite a cold climate. That super-tropical plant might actually succeed, because it is protected by the others. A shade lover will love being protected by the canopy of the other plants around it, and a sun lover will grow faster than you’ve ever seen.

Planting in groves creates competition and in plants that’s not a bad thing. The trees themselves will choose whether they reach for the sky, or stay protected below. I had a Fig Tree and a Bamboo planted right next to each other, and I’ve never seen growth like in these two.

They were truly having a race. The Fig would shoot up, a foot above the Bamboo. Then, Bamboo, not wanting to come in last, shot up a foot above the Fig. On they went, to 5m in 2 years. In poor soil, it was amazing to see such growth, and fully validated my wild gardening approach, in my eyes.

The idea of a grove is to start with the hardiest plants, and you only plant them a couple of meters apart. Then, once they’ve grown up a bit, you plant smaller or less hardy plants in between. Plant creepers and climbers in between them, so they can use the existing trees for support. Never build a trellis ever again!

Your final step is ground covers, the low-growing perennials and herbs. Things like strawberries, gingers, arrowroot, mint, basil, licorice, horseradish, and similar useful plants.

Read More!

• Layers of a Food Forest – Root Layers
• Layers of a Food Forest – Herbaceous Layers and Ground Covers
• Layers of a Food Forest – Permaculture Shrubs
• Layers of a Food Forest – Understory and Canopy Trees
• Layers of a Food Forest – Climbing Plants
• Layers of a Food Forest – Fruit Tree Permaculture

2. Replace Lawn With Edible Ground Covers

I mean, we all love lawn, the kids love lawn, the dogs… but there are always areas of lawn that aren’t growing well. Or maybe aren’t private enough, right on the road where you wouldn’t peacefully sit and read your book. Or those steep slopes where lawn mowing is risky business. Use those areas for harvest! 

Plant mint instead, especially in shady areas. Plant Pennyroyal – no, you can’t eat this, but it’s excellent for flea repellent in dogs’ beds, in cupboards to keep other bugs away. Swap out the grass for lucerne. The more you mow lucerne, the nicer it gets. You can cut lucerne and feed it to the chickens, horses, cows, goats, they all love it. You can make tea out of lucerne.

Plant strawberries. Yes, they won’t appreciate being stepped on, although they can handle a fair bit of treading on, but place some stepping stones with strawberries in between and they’ll grow beautifully.

Grow a lawn of thyme. A thymeless lawn for all eternity! Not only do they smell incredible when you sit on them, they might even help the dog get rid of fleas when it rolls on it. For a lawn of thyme, you’re looking for the small-leafed prostrate type, not the varieties that turn woody, as many of the culinary thymes do. Something like Creeping Thyme, Thymus albus or Thymus minimus.

Lawns of thyme attract bees, helping you get more fruit to harvest, and they’re drought hardy. And the good thing, once you are growing 1 thyme, you can rapidly grow more for free, from seed or cuttings! Both are easy enough to achieve.

3. Turn Fences Into Growing Space

For the self-sufficiency garden, it’s all about using all the space you can. No wasted space. We have a lot of fences, as many a homestead does. Obviously, you’ll have the use the fences where livestock and horses can’t get to your edibles, unless you’re growing the plant for them (there are some great edible plants to grow for animals!)

My favorite edible plants to grow on fences are passionfruit, raspberries (spiky, so only fences where there is no foot traffic), chokos, sweet potatoes, and grapes. An edible fence is amazing, and you’re using structures you’ve already built, no need to build another support, saving in resources.

Other plants for your fence:

• Any type of climbing bean, particularly perennial climbing beans. They’ll come up by themselves year after year.
• Chilacayote. These are super strong growers and they will cover a fence quickly. Their small fruits taste like zucchini’s, and that’s my favorite time to harvest them. The bigger fruits are not my favorite, but you might like them in stir-fries or stews. Chilacayote fruit doesn’t, in my opinion, have a lot of flavor on its own, but it will take on any flavor you cook it with, making it quite versatile.
• Hops. For making your own beer, making hops tea, or eating the young shoots. You can even make pillows from their flowers.
• Berries. Any form of rambling berry is great on fences. Choose non-spiky ones in areas where you might brush up against it, and put the spiky types further back.

4. Edible Hedges

Use fruit trees for hedges, no more standard conifers! Use pine nuts, avocados, citrus trees, pears, peanut butter trees, feijoas, plums… The options are endless. Cut them back ruthlessly so they grow tall and narrow, not wide.

These edible hedges give you privacy, protection from wind, protection from sun, and a decent harvest to boot.

5. Use Warm Microclimates to Grow More Food

You can grow varieties of fruit trees that normally wouldn’t grow in your climate in naturally warm areas in your garden. If you have a brick house, for example, the brick holds heat and will create a warm microclimate for plants.

You might be able to grow bananas there; they might not grow in your climate normally, but plant them closely together near a brick wall, and you’ll find that they perform wonderfully.

The same applies to rocky paths and big rocks you might have in your garden. Our farm has a pile of rocks down the back, they were already there when we moved in. At night, place your hand on them and you’ll feel that they’re still releasing warmth!

Common Backyard Food Forest Mistakes to Avoid

A backyard food forest doesn’t need to be perfect, but a few mistakes can make the whole thing harder than it needs to be.

1. Planting without thinking about mature size

It’s easy to get enthusiastic and plant everything a bit too enthusiastically, but in a food forest, closer spacing isn’t automatically a mistake.

In fact, that’s often the whole point.

Traditional fruit tree advice usually assumes neat orchard rows, wide spacing, and easy machinery access. A backyard food forest works differently. Trees planted closer together create shelter, shade, humidity, and their own little microclimate. That protection can help more delicate plants establish far better than they would standing alone in full exposure.

The key is understanding what you’re trying to create. Yes, some trees will eventually race upward to reach the canopy, and harvesting may become more creative as they mature, but productive layering is part of the design.

The mistake is planting randomly without considering how the space will evolve over time.

2. Choosing plants that Dislike your climate

It’s tempting to fall in love with exotic plants, but some simply won’t thrive unless you’re willing to create special conditions for them. Bananas, for example, Bananas, for example, won’t appreciate sustained cold in most climates.

Try to find alternatives that do love your climate. In our tropical climate, I’ve swapped sweet potatoes and taro for potatoes, and Chinese greens for lettuce. It’s all about planting smarter, not harder.

3. Ignoring water during establishment

A mature food forest garden can become surprisingly resilient, but young plants still need help getting established.

This is where pioneer species or nurse trees can be incredibly useful. Fast growers help shade the soil, reduce wind exposure, build biomass, and create better growing conditions for slower, longer-term plants.

As those pioneers grow, you can chop and drop them, using the prunings as mulch to feed the soil, hold moisture, and suppress weeds. It’s one of the easiest ways to build fertility while helping the whole edible landscape establish itself.

Even with clever systems like this, though, new plants still need watering while they get their roots down.

4. Planting aggressive spreaders without a plan

Aggressive plants can be some of the most useful species in a backyard food forest.

Fast spreaders help suppress weeds, cover bare soil, protect moisture, and quickly fill awkward gaps that would otherwise turn into maintenance headaches.

But they can absolutely get out of hand.

I’ve been battling my betel leaf (Piper sarmentosum) for years. Useful? Absolutely. Delicious? Yes. Respectful of boundaries? Not even slightly.

The same goes for mint, bamboo, vigorous vines, and certain enthusiastic ground covers. They all have their place, but it pays to think carefully about where you unleash them.

5. Forgetting access paths

This is huge. It’s the one thing I’d do differently next time. I’m trying to fix this mistake now, but it’s so much easier to plan your paths beforehand! It sounds obvious until your edible landscape becomes a jungle and you’re fighting through passionfruit vines just to harvest something.

6. Trying to make it look too neat

You’ll have to ditch the idea of how a ‘traditional’ garden should look. A food forest isn’t meant to behave like a formal ornamental garden. Some wildness is part of what makes it productive. People often comment that I’ve got my work cut out for me because my garden is so ‘overgrown’. That is until I show them around, explain the concept, and they get to taste all the deliciousness hiding in the ‘mess’!

Backyard Food Forest FAQs

Feed Your Family and the Wildlife

A backyard food forest doesn’t need to be perfect, neat, or expensive. Start with a few productive plants, stack layers over time, and let the garden evolve.

Before long, you’ll have a space that feeds both your family and the wildlife around you.

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