Forest Garden Layers in the Forest Garden:

Most farmers that join the Forest Garden Program are initially cultivating an average of two monocrops on their land. When looking at the land in terms of layers, this means the farmer has just two layers of crop production. As a result, farmers lose a lot of potential production across their field. With the Forest Garden Approach, farmers are trained to think about both the horizontal and vertical spaces available to them. Our approach works with seven key layers: canopy plants, subcanopy plants, shrub plants, herbaceous plants, vining or climbing plants, groundcover plants, underground or rooted plants. Farmers can grow a diverse array of crops within these layers that can not only provide regular harvests, but also additional benefits to the crops growing around them.

You can read about the 7 layers of the Forest Garden here.