Permaculture for Beginners: 10 Simple Techniques We're Using to Start Our Food Forest
10 Simple Techniques We're Using to Start Our Food Forest
I'll be honest with you. A year ago, if you'd told me I'd be standing in a field in blazing heat, talking lovingly to a mulberry tree while a flock of chickens destroyed everything in a five-metre radius, I'd have laughed. Politely. Because I'm Scottish, and we're too repressed to actually laugh out loud at things.
But here we are. Four of us — me, my husband, and our two girls (oh, and a very large dog called Wilson and a very small turtle called Bob) — in the early, chaotic, deeply humbling stages of building a food forest from scratch. We are beginners. Enthusiastic, slightly obsessed, occasionally bewildered beginners. And this blog is our attempt to document it honestly, share what's actually working, and maybe help a few of you avoid our mistakes.
So — permaculture. What even is it, and why does it sound like something a geography teacher would say?
At its core, permaculture is about designing systems that work with nature rather than against it. Instead of fighting your land into submission (a losing battle, trust me), you observe it, understand it, and build something that largely takes care of itself over time. A food forest is the ultimate expression of this — layers of trees, shrubs, herbs, ground cover and roots all working together in a self-sustaining ecosystem that produces food, builds soil, retains water, and supports wildlife.
It sounds almost too good to be true. And in year one? It mostly does still sound too good to be true. But the foundations are there, and we're building them one technique at a time.
Here are the 10 we're starting with - and so should you if you wish to come on this journey... you can do it with even the smallest piece of land.
1. Observation Before Action (Yes, Really Just… Watch)
This is the first principle of permaculture design and also the hardest one for action-oriented humans to follow. Before you plant a single thing, you're supposed to observe your land through the seasons — where the sun hits, where water pools, where the wind comes from, where the soil is compacted, where things already grow naturally.
We did a version of this. Not a full year — we were too excited for that — but we spent several months watching before we dug. And it paid off. We noticed that one section of our land holds water after rain while another drains almost instantly. We noticed where the afternoon shade falls in summer (critical in a hot, dry climate).
That information shaped everything that came after. Even if you can only give it a few weeks, slow down before you start. Walk your land at different times of day. Take notes. Take photos. You're essentially reading a book before you start making plans — and it's a book written specifically about your plot.
2. No-Dig Lasagne Beds / No Dig Garden Method
This was our first real act of permaculture faith, and we are converts.
The idea is simple: instead of digging up your soil (which disturbs the soil web, brings weed seeds to the surface, and is — let's be honest — absolutely exhausting), you build up. You layer cardboard, compost, straw, manure, wood chips, and organic matter directly on top of the ground. The cardboard smothers existing weeds and grass. The layers break down over time, feeding the soil below. Worms and microorganisms come to the party. By the time you're ready to plant, you have rich, friable soil without having done a single back-breaking hour of digging.
The best time to set out these beds is autumn, and the transformation over winter will be genuinely exciting, but we wanted to get started in spring. Things that were scrubby, hard, root-tangled ground became soft and alive. The girls helped layer the cardboard — which, if you're looking for a way to get children engaged in the garden, I highly recommend. There was something wonderfully satisfying about watching the beds go down layer by layer.
A note: source your cardboard carefully. Remove all tape and staples, avoid heavily printed or waxed boxes, and make sure your layers are thick enough — at least 5-6 sheets of cardboard overlapping generously so grass can't sneak through the gaps.
3. Mulching Heavily (and Then Mulching Some More)
If no-dig beds were our first act of permaculture faith, mulching is our religion.
A deep mulch layer — we're talking 10 to 15 centimetres — does an extraordinary amount of work. It retains moisture in the soil (transformative in hot, dry summers), suppresses weeds, regulates soil temperature, feeds the soil as it breaks down, and protects the root zones of young trees. In climates with intense summer heat and low rainfall, mulch is not optional. It is survival.
We mulch around every tree, every shrub, every bed. We use wood chips, straw, and composted material. We keep the mulch away from direct contact with the trunk of trees (to prevent rot) and we add more whenever a layer starts to thin out.
Here's where it gets fun: we have 12 chickens. They are not yet laying — they are at that adolescent stage where they eat a lot, contribute chaos, and act like they own the place — but they are already pulling their weight in the mulch department. We collect their soiled bedding, let it sit and cool for a week or two to avoid burning plants with fresh nitrogen, and then it goes into the mulch mix around our young trees. A closed loop, right there in the backyard.
The chickens also scratch through wood chip mulch looking for bugs and grubs, turning it over and aerating it naturally. Infuriating when they do it somewhere you've just tidied. Brilliant when you remember that's exactly what you wanted them to do.
4. Planting Your First Chop-and-Drop Tree
If there is one single thing I'd recommend to anyone starting a food forest, it is this: plant a fast-growing, multi-purpose tree early. Not because you'll eat from it immediately (though you might), but because it starts doing work for the whole system straight away.
Our first tree was a white mulberry. We chose it deliberately: it grows fast, tolerates heat and drought, provides shade for understory planting, produces fruit (both for us and for the chickens, who are going to lose their minds when those berries drop), and is excellent for chop-and-drop — meaning you cut the branches back periodically and leave them on the ground around the tree as mulch and green manure. The leaves are high in nitrogen and break down quickly, feeding the soil.
One tree. Planted early. Already earning its place.
Read More About our White Mulberry
Think about what tree makes most sense for your climate and your goals. In cooler climates, elder, walnut, or hazel are wonderful multi-function pioneer plants. In warmer, drier climates, mulberries, figs, and nitrogen-fixing trees like honey locust or tagasaste do incredible work. Choose something that gives to the system, not just something that takes.
5. Building Guilds (The Plant Friendship System)
In a conventional garden, plants sit in their rows, minding their own business, competing quietly for resources. In a food forest, plants are organised into guilds — communities of plants that support each other.
A classic guild is built around a fruit tree at the centre. Around it, you plant:
- Nitrogen fixers (like clover, vetch, or comfrey) that pull nitrogen from the air and make it available in the soil
- Dynamic accumulators (like comfrey or yarrow) that draw up deep minerals with their long roots and make them available at the surface when they're cut and dropped
- Pest confusers (like aromatic herbs — rosemary, lavender, thyme) that mask the scent of the tree from pests
- Pollinator attractors (like borage, phacelia, or calendula) that bring beneficial insects to the system
- Ground covers that suppress weeds and retain moisture around the root zone
We're in early days with our guilds — mostly we're building the tree layer first and filling in the understory as we go — but even rough approximations of this work beautifully. Planting rosemary and thyme around a young apple tree isn't just pretty. It's functional design.
6. Swales for Water Harvesting - Permaculture design for beginners
In climates where rain comes in bursts and summer brings long dry spells, water management is everything. Swales are one of permaculture's most powerful tools for this, and they're simpler than they sound.
A swale is essentially a level trench dug along a contour line of your land. When it rains, water runs across the land, hits the swale, slows down, and sinks into the ground rather than running off. Over time, the area downhill of the swale stays wetter, deeper into the dry season. Trees planted on the downhill berm of a swale have access to this stored water during summer.
We've put in two small swales so far, and even in our first wet winter we could see them doing their job — filling with water during rain and then slowly releasing it into the soil over days rather than letting it rush straight off the land.
Swales are most effective on sloped land (which we have), and it's worth doing some research or taking a short course before digging, as a poorly placed swale can cause more harm than good. But as a concept, capturing and slowing water on your land is foundational — especially as summers become longer and drier across much of Europe and beyond.
7. Trench Composting (Because Sometimes a Bin Just Doesn't Cut It)
I'll tell you why we don't use a traditional compost bin: heat. In a climate with long, scorching summers, keeping a compost pile at the right moisture level is a constant battle. Too dry and it stops breaking down. Too wet and — well, you're watering a compost heap in a drought, which feels absurd. We tried. We moved on.
Trench composting is exactly what it sounds like. You dig a trench or a hole, bury your kitchen scraps directly in the soil, and let the worms and soil microorganisms do all the work underground where conditions stay cooler and more consistent. No turning, no monitoring, no mysterious liquid at the bottom of a plastic bin.
Our method is simple: we dig roughly a spade's depth, about a metre away from the base of a fruit tree, bury the scraps, and cover them back over. That distance matters — close enough that the tree roots will find the nutrients as they become available, but far enough that you're not disturbing the root zone or creating conditions that could affect the trunk. Over the season, we move around the tree, effectively feeding the whole root system in rotation.
Kitchen scraps, vegetable peelings, fruit waste, crushed eggshells — it all goes in. The soil breaks it down quietly and efficiently, and the tree sitting above it is essentially getting a slow-release feed delivered directly to its roots. It is, frankly, a very elegant system for a hot climate, and it requires almost no effort once you're in the habit.
The chickens contribute here too — their rested bedding goes into the trench along with the scraps, adding nitrogen and organic matter. The loop closes itself.
8. Nettle Tea as Liquid Feed
Bear with me on this one, because I know it sounds like something from a medieval herbalist's recipe book. But nettle tea — liquid plant feed made by steeping nettles in water — is genuinely brilliant, costs nothing, and works.
Nettles are extraordinarily high in nitrogen, iron, potassium, and trace minerals. Steep a bucket of freshly cut nettles in water for two to four weeks (covered, please — the smell is special), dilute the resulting liquid about 10:1 with water, and apply it around the base of plants as a liquid feed. Your plants will thank you. Your nostrils will not.
We make it regularly through spring and use it on young trees and productive plants. It's become a bit of a ritual — harvest the nettles (gloves on, obviously, I learned that lesson on more than one occasion), fill the bucket, wait, dilute, apply. Free fertility from a plant most people consider a weed.
If you have nettles growing on your land, do not rip them out. They're a sign of nitrogen-rich soil and they're a resource. We actively move them to corners of the land and harvest them regularly, both for liquid feed and occasionally for cooking and tea.
9. Seed Saving (Starting Small)
Seed saving is the long game. It's the practice of collecting, drying, and storing seeds from your best plants to grow again next year — and over time, selecting for plants that are genuinely adapted to your soil, your climate, your conditions.
We're just beginning with this. Our first experiments are with easy seeds — tomatoes, beans, squash — things where saving seed is straightforward and the results are reliable. But the principle is powerful: rather than buying new seed every year, you gradually build a seed library that is uniquely yours, adapted to your land, and completely free.
It also reconnects you to a rhythm of growing that most of us have completely lost. Our grandparents saved seed as a matter of necessity. We're rediscovering it as a matter of intention.
If you're new to seed saving, start with open-pollinated or heirloom varieties (not F1 hybrids, which don't breed true), start with easy crops, and keep good records. Label everything. I say this as someone who has a small bag of seeds labelled "green thing, summer" that has become a mystery even to me.
10. Stacking Functions (Making Everything Do Two Jobs)
The last technique isn't really a single thing — it's a way of thinking that runs through everything else.
In permaculture, the goal is for every element of your system to perform multiple functions. The chickens don't just produce eggs. They control pests, fertilise the land, turn the compost, and provide endless entertainment. The mulberry tree doesn't just give fruit. It provides shade, chop-and-drop mulch, chicken feed, and habitat. The nettles don't just sting you when you forget your gloves. They're a liquid feed factory, a habitat for butterflies, and — if you're brave — dinner.
Before you add anything to your system, ask: what does this do? Does it do more than one thing? Can I position it so it does even more? This thinking changes how you see your land. You stop seeing problems and start seeing resources. You stop seeing weeds and start seeing mulch, medicine, or food.
It's a shift that happens slowly, and then all at once.
Where We Are Now
We are very much at the beginning and these are our first food forest techniques. Our food forest is more of a food optimistic cluster of young trees and hopeful beds at this point. The chickens are teenagers. The swales are new. The mulberry is small but growing fast, and on a good day I walk past it and feel something I can only describe as proper pride as i send it some good energy vibes.
Permaculture is not a quick fix. It's a direction — a way of relating to land, to food, and to the natural world that gets richer the longer you stay with it. And the beautiful thing about these 10 techniques is that you don't have to do all of them at once. Start with one. Observe your land. Build a lasagne bed. Plant one chop-and-drop tree. See what happens.
We'll be documenting every step here at Home & Harvest — the experiments, the failures, the moments where it all clicks. If you're at the start of your own journey, we'd love to have you along for it.
It's going to be a bit wild. It's going to involve some smells. And if the mulberry is anything to go by, it's going to be worth it.
Are you starting a food forest or experimenting with permaculture? We'd love to hear what techniques you're trying — drop a comment below or come find us on Instagram