Planting Your Kooyman Food Forest

1. Prepare the ground for planting by keeping a flock of chickens fenced in on the area for a week or two. Feed the birds on-site and allow them to fully turn up the soil and root out all vegetation.

2. Plant a matrix of short-, medium-, and long-term support trees with productive food trees being 10% of the total number of trees planted.The mainstay of a Koooyman food forest is a cell of three valuable, fast-growing trees (25 to 30 years to maturity) that compete for light and therefore grow straight.One or two should be hardwood, and one or two could be a fruit tree. If you’ve got space for more than one cell, you can alternate different trees in different cells.These are carefully transplanted 4 meters (13 feet) apart in a triangular pattern.

3. Within the triangle, transplant eight slow-growing animal fodder crops, fruits, and leguminous support trees. (Slow-growing means up to 50+ years to full size.) Cram them in there, most will be removed as they grow.

4. Plant the ground with leguminous ground covers and vines, leguminous bushes and plants.

5. When you’ve planted the space fully with trees, cover the ground around the them with mulch and add fast-growing ground covers and nitrogen-fixing green crops.

6. Plant in layers—follow the chart above to create seven layers of plant levels. Monocultures are highly inefficient, and, as you can see from the illustration above, it’s possible to get seven different types of crops from one very limited area of land.

7. The height of productive trees is important—they should always be able to reach further heights. Remove small support trees as they get shaded out and replace with small understory trees.

8. In the end, only productive trees and long-term support trees are left and these form a highly productive self-sustaining, self-nourishing system that requires mere hours of maintenance per acre every year. The majority of work is done by your animals: mulching, weeding, and removing pests.

Repeat this triangular planting pattern until the entire space for your food forest is filled.