Planning Your Site

The single most common mistake in food forest planning is skipping this step and going straight to buying plants. Resist it. A food forest is a decades-long system — the hour you spend watching how your land actually behaves before you plant saves you years of fighting a design that never fit the site.

Observe before you plant

Give it at least one full season if you can. You're watching for four things:

• Sun path. Where does full sun actually fall through the day, and does that change with the seasons? A spot that looks sunny in one afternoon visit might be shaded most of the day.
• Water. Where does rain pool after a heavy storm? Where does the ground stay damp longest, and where does it dry out first? This tells you where drainage is a problem and where you might not need to irrigate at all.
• Wind. Is there a prevailing direction, and does anything already break it — a fence, a slope, existing trees?
• What's already there. Existing trees, slope, soil type, any erosion already happening. On a sloped site, especially in a wet climate, erosion control isn't optional — it's the first problem to solve, not an afterthought (see Soil, Water & Establishment).

Write it down or sketch it as you go. A phone photo from the same spot every few weeks does more than memory will.

Think in zones, not in one big plan

Permaculture design uses a simple idea called zones, numbered by how often you'll actually visit that part of the property:

• Zone 0 — your house
• Zone 1 — the area you pass through or check daily; the highest-maintenance, most-harvested plants belong here
• Zone 2–3 — visited less often; this is usually where the bulk of a food forest goes
• Zone 4–5 — rarely visited, closer to wild

The point isn't to memorize the numbering — it's the underlying logic: put what needs frequent attention or frequent harvesting close to where you already walk, and put the lower-maintenance, established parts of the system farther out. A food forest's tree layer, once established, needs little enough attention that it can sit in zone 2 or 3 without becoming a problem you forget about.

Map it

You don't need professional design software. A hand-drawn sketch of the property, or a printed satellite image (Google Earth works fine) with notes written directly on it, is enough to start. Mark:

• Existing structures, trees, and slope
• Sun/shade patterns and wind direction from your observation notes
• Where water pools or drains
• Rough zone boundaries

This map is what you'll lay the layer design onto next — see Design: The Layers & Guilds.

If you're planning at a larger scale

Everything above still applies, but two things get added weight: how the site's water and slope behave under real volume (a drainage issue that's a minor annoyance in a backyard bed can undermine a commercial-scale planting), and how the zone-1 logic changes when "daily visits" means a crew working the site rather than one household. A site assessment worth doing once is worth doing carefully — this is the step that's cheapest to get right early and most expensive to fix later.

Downloadable: a printable site-assessment worksheet covering all four observation categories above is planned for the Resources section — check there before starting your own from scratch.