My top 8 plants for your new food forest garden

Starting a food forest or a garden this spring? Here are the top 8 plants I suggest adding into your food forest. This is a combination of plants that will turn around VERY quick return on investments, propagate well, are dead easy to grow, are cold hardy and resilient, are almost completely ignored by pests, and also perform other functions besides just simply being food! What more can you ask.Show more

This video focuses on non-trees. For the tree layer (if you are starting a food forest), make sure to add your favorite fruit tree to this. Sure some will get up and producing sooner than others (apples are quick vs say hickory nuts which are slow). But overall, a tree will take a bit longer to produce. Get those started also (the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is today). However, this video is going to list some plants that (baring some kind of unique soil condition) should be quite easy to grow and will multiply. Plants that typically tend to have a large market - if you want to sell them, and are considered miracle foods (food is medicine).

Some of my favorite plants didn't make this list (Seabuckthorn is the most obvious one here), but only because I wanted to keep this list more "new person friendly". Mushrooms are one that should be in there (winecaps, oyster, shitake, pearl, lions mane, etc), but are one that deserve their whole proper video.

Also, I definitely welcome "you forgot _______ which is my favorite" kind of comments. All comments are welcome. Understand that I could make this list 150 plants deep, and that would make an equally useless video.

Last thing... if you really want "quick to produce and turnaround", that's something that annuals are great at. I didn't want to make this list a bunch of annuals, but for those, consider stuff like Potatoes, Carrots, Onions (which did make this list for a very interesting reason), Tomatoes, Zucchini, Peppers, Squash, etc. But for annuals, people will just grow their favorites, and call it a season. Perennials have a bit more of an "investment", because they stay around for longer. So I did try to focus this list on perennial foods.

If you grow nothing but annuals, try to start adding some of these perennial options to your garden - and ask for other amazing perennial options, such as red Russian kale vs traditional kale. So many gardeners focus exclusively on annuals, and that's a lot of work. It's nice when the season starts that 90% of your gardens are done, your only job is picking food. Oh and that food is already coming up in the spring, with some fiddleheads, ramps, asparagus, perennial onions and mushrooms.

Last thing - get ordering soon. Gardening is experiencing a massive renaissance, and nurseries are going out of sale quickly. Always try to buy as local as possible, not just to support local growers, not just to reduce transport emissions, but also to get varieties best suited to your local area.

Happy Gardening friends,
Keith

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Music credits:

Closer by Jay Someday | https://soundcloud.com/jaysomeday
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