7 Winter Tasks for Your Backyard Food Forest

Winter has its charm, but if you’re like me you’re looking forward to spring when things start growing and turning green when you can finally plant things and watch your yard transform. The idea of creating a food forest and turning a patch of brown grass into a backyard food forest is exciting but also a little (or a lot) daunting.

Want to learn more about food forests (forest gardens)? Go here >> What is a Forest Garden? And How to Grow Amazing Food in Your Backyard

In this post, I’ll give you seven actionable ideas to keep you busy this winter and prepare for a productive spring.

1. Plan Your Food Forest Design and Projects

This is a biggie. For me, it’s the most overwhelming step, but also one of the most exciting times because it is so full of potential.

When planning, it’s easy to either over-plan or under-plan. I know I’m guilty of both. To help with this, I look to one of the Permaculture Principles, Design from Patterns to Details. Keeping this in mind helps avoid overplanning. As long as you have an overarching vision for your property, you can plug in details as you go. If you don’t yet have a big-picture plan, winter is the perfect time to start. Do some dreaming. Think about what you want your property and your life to look like in three years.

Here are some questions to get you thinking

• How can your backyard support your ideal life?
• Who is your garden for? Your partner, children, extended families, friends, or just yourself?
• Do you want your permaculture garden to supplement your income?
• Or do you simply want a beautiful edible landscape to enjoy for yourself and your family?
• Maybe you want to start a market garden and sell produce at the local farmers’ market.
• Or maybe you want to delve into food preservation and build up a stock of preserves in your pantry.

While dreaming (or before, after, or in-between) take stock of your resources, both on your property and off. You can do a site analysis to help you understand particulars, such as where are the sunniest places, where water collects, and what your soil is like.

If you already have a big-picture goal for your property, then take the winter to plan smaller projects that will help get you there. Some smaller projects include things like building structures.

Design your…

• grape arbor
• chicken coop
• garden shed
• raised garden beds
• wicking beds
• herb spiral
• fruit tree guilds
• annual garden beds

There are so many different possible projects, and you probably have lots already running through your mind. So pick a few that call to you the loudest and get planning.

2. Set Your Food Forest’s Foundation

A great thing to do the winter before starting your backyard food forest, if you haven’t already done it in the fall, is to spread out sheet mulch. Mulch holds in moisture and protects the soil surface from drying out. Not much happens in dry soil. Moisture is needed for quicker decomposition of organic material and soil building. Spreading mulch in winter (or the fall before) gives the mulch a chance to soak up any moisture from snow or winter rain and start decomposing and building your soil for spring planting.

Basic sheet mulching for a food forest

Trees and other food forest plants thrive in fungal-dominated ecosystems. Putting down woodchip mulch helps build up a network of fungal mycelia in your soil that your trees and future trees will love.

There are several different methods for sheet mulching. The simplest is to just spread out woodchips. You can often get these for free from tree trimmers or arborists who otherwise have to pay a fee to dispose of the material.ChipDrop is a great resource in the US. In Australia, there’s a similar system called Mulchnet, and I’m sure other countries have similar services.

If you’re covering grass, you may wish to lay down cardboard or newspaper underneath, before putting down mulch, as a barrier to completely block out light and kill the grass. The cardboard or paper layer will eventually decompose, as will the dead grass roots, adding organic matter to the soil.

Other methods of sheet mulching include layering in compost or other organic material such as straw or grass clippings. This can be a great way to build up the soil for a garden bed, which brings us to the third item on our list.

3. Build Garden Beds for Vegetables

If you want to grow annual vegetables in your permaculture garden, you’ll likely want to put them in their own garden bed, along with beneficial perennials. Although some annuals do well intermixed within a fruit tree guild or food forest, most need full sun and may produce better if they have their own space.

Depending on your preference you may wish to build raised beds or simple mounded garden beds. With either type of bed, a great way to build up fertile soil in your garden beds is with a type of sheet mulching called lasagna gardening.

To build a lasagna garden bed, layer compost, straw, and soil. Do not mix the layers together, because mixing mulch into the soil can tie up nitrogen for your plants. Just layer materials on and let nature take over. It’s best if this sort of bed has a month or two, or at least a couple of weeks to begin breaking down before planting. So, building them on a sunny winter day is ideal.

Once your lasagna bed is built, it can be used for many seasons, just cut down old plants to mulch in place, add more compost, straw, and soil on top to replenish the soil, and plant again the following spring. It’s a super simple no-till garden method.

4. Order Seeds

Because of the large quantity of plants required for starting a food forest, you can save a lot on upfront expenses by starting plants for your food forest from seed. Many perennials and even shrubs can be started from seed indoors right alongside your annual vegetables.

Ordering seeds online is a good idea because of the greater variety available, particularly for less common seeds, versus most local stores. This year I ordered seeds from Botanical Interests. So far I’ve been really happy with the company. Their seed packets have lots of information to help with planting, and they have beautifully drawn pictures of the plants on the package. Some people may prefer actual photographs of the mature plants, but I’m a sucker for botanical drawings.

Seed catalogs can be overwhelming and exciting all at once. They contain so much potential.

Here are my tips for ordering seeds

• Resist the temptation to browse seed catalogs and just order without a plan.
• Instead, before you order, think through what you want to grow.
• Start by thinking about what you buy at the grocery store regularly and would like to replace with homegrown produce.
• Next, determine if each of those food items is a good fit for your climate and growing season.
• Think about how you will grow each plant you’ve selected. Will they be in traditional rows in a garden bed? Or will you group them into polycultures?
• If you want to plant polycultures, read up on some simple tried and true combinations, such as the three sisters, corn, beans, and squash.

5. Order Young Trees, Shrubs, and Other Plants

Along with seeds, you can order plants online. I recommend doing this early because many online nurseries start selling out early, particularly for the more difficult-to-find plants. 

I’d love to provide you with a list of online nurseries that I can personally recommend, but since I’m just starting my own permaculture garden, I don’t have experience with many.  I have ordered plants from onegreenworld.com, and my experience thus far has been great. For more nursery recommendations for both plants and seeds, check out this list of nurseries from Edible Acres.

Here are a few points to keep in mind when ordering plants online

• Have a location for each plant in mind before you order it.
• Read the plant description carefully to make sure it’s suitable for your climate and your site, and that it’s what you’re expecting.
• Pay attention to details including how much sun or shade it prefers, if it prefers acidic or alkaline soil, and if it requires winter frost protection.
• If you can, order bare-root plants. This saves a lot on shipping and plants sold this way generally do very well when transplanted.
• Before you buy, ensure the species you’ve selected are not invasive in your area. For the US, you can find invasive species lists by state at the National Invasive Species Information Center. https://www.invasivespeciesinfo.gov/subject/lists 

6. Start Seeds Indoors

If you’re going to be growing any plants from seed, many of them will benefit from being starting indoors. Some seeds can be started as early as eight or sometimes even twelve weeks before your last expected frost date. My last frost date in zone 6b/7a is May 6th, which means I could be starting some seeds indoors as early as February 11th. 

To start seeds inside, the secret is warmth before germination and light after germination. Using a seed starting heating mat can improve germination rates dramatically. Do read up on the specific seeds you’re germinating. Seed packets might even provide a preferred temperature for germination.

For light, a sunny south window will work, but for stronger, less leggy seedlings, use a greenhouse or grow light. For a great tutorial on seed starting, check out my seed starting tips.

7. Research, Read, and Learn

When you’re getting into something new such as permaculture, there is a great deal of information to learn and absorb. Sometimes it’s hard to find a balance between learning new strategies and implementing them. These winter months when you’re stuck inside is a great time to dive deep into a good permaculture book. 

Here are a few permaculture books I love

Gaia’s Garden: A guide to Home Scale Permaculture Second Edition by Toby Hemenway.

Gaia’s Garden is pretty much what the title says, a guide to home-scale permaculture. And it’s so good. Reading it makes me giddy with excitement about implementing the things Hemenway talks about, from polyculture annual gardens to food forests. It is written in an accessible, digestible way, great for reading a chapter here and there or cover to cover.

Edible Forest Gardens by Dave Jacke

This is a two-volume set, the first volume being background theory and all about the “why.” The second volume has more practical information, detailed charts, and lists for reference. The second volume of Edible Forest Gardens is my go-to resource for plant selection. The most used part of my book is the appendix which lists plants by species and contains loads of useful tables, organized by different uses and functions. This is a highly valuable resource, and definitely worth the high price tag. If you’re only going to get one of the volumes, get Volume II.

Retrosuburbia: The Downshifter’s Guide to a Resilient Future by David Holmgren

Retrosuburbia is dense with information and very much like a textbook with an academic writing style and focus on education. Although it calls for slower reading to absorb the content, it’s inspiring and a pleasure to read with many pictures and color graphics. David Holmgren is the co-originator of permaculture and one of the teachers of my 2021 Permaculture Design Certificate class. Published by Melliodora Press in Australia, it’s targeted to an Australian audience, but the ideas within are applicable to any suburban area in the world.

The main idea is about how society is changing as we enter “energy descent” (the other side of peak oil) and face potential doomsday scenarios. Holmgren provides a hopeful perspective, discussing how retrofitting suburbia with permaculture solutions will help us survive, and even thrive, the inevitable changes we are facing.

Take Action On These Winter Food Forest Tasks

Winter may seem slow when it comes to permaculture and gardening activities, but there is actually a lot to do to prepare for spring planting. You can plan your projects, prepare your planting areas with mulch, build garden beds, order seeds, and plants, and spend some time learning and absorbing permaculture concepts. 

This year, my dreams for my yard are big. Maybe yours are too. So let’s give those horticultural dreams their best chance of coming to fruition (no pun intended), and start planning and prepping our future food forest sites for spring. 

What urban permaculture activities do you do in winter? Let me know in the comments.

Until next time, happy planning!