One idea, drawn four ways
A section through the soil itself, a section through a food forest, a plan of water held on contour, and an axonometric of a shared garden. Four projections of the same argument, because none of them shows all of it alone. Drag and click: they are drawings you can operate.
What the ground does with an inch of rain
Soil that holds water needs less irrigation, and roots that can get down into it reach further for what they need. Everything else on this page rests on that: the planting, the swales, and the food worth carrying next door.
First drops. Both surfaces still dry.
Seven layers, fifteen years
A food forest is designed in three dimensions and on a fifteen-year schedule, which is what separates it from a garden bed. Every layer below is doing a job: nitrogen, mulch, shade, evaporation. Half the work happens under the ground line.
Select a layer to isolate it in the drawing. Every layer is listed in the schedule below.
Plant schedule · all seven layers
| Layer | Height | Species | Function |
|---|---|---|---|
| Canopy | 25–40 ft | Standard apple, Apricot, Bur oak | Sets the shade pattern and the wind break every layer below it is selected against, and drops the deepest leaf litter of the year. |
| Understory tree | 12–20 ft | Semi-dwarf peach, Plum, Utah serviceberry | Takes the light the canopy has not closed over yet, and carries most of the fruit the system produces in its first ten years. |
| Shrub | 4–10 ft | Golden currant, Elderberry, Buffaloberry | Holds the middle height where fruit is easiest to pick, and buffaloberry fixes nitrogen into the same soil the trees around it are drawing from. |
| Herbaceous | 1–4 ft | Comfrey, Yarrow, Wild bergamot, Culinary herbs | Comfrey mines potassium and calcium out of deep subsoil and hands them back as mulch each time it is cut, three or four times a season. |
| Groundcover | 0–12 in | Alpine strawberry, Creeping thyme, White clover | Keeps soil temperature down and cuts evaporation, which is what lets the rest of the system run on a fraction of a lawn’s water. |
| Vine | Vertical, on structure | Hardy grape, Hops, Hardy kiwi | Uses the vertical space between the other layers, taking light at the canopy edge without taking any ground. |
| Root | 0–4 ft below grade | Garlic, Walking onion, Jerusalem artichoke | Works the soil under everything else and hosts the mycorrhizal network: the fungal web the trees use to move sugar and nutrients between each other. |
Species are specified for zones 5–7 between roughly 4,300 and 5,500 ft. Growth rates are typical rather than promised. Aspect, soil, and irrigation move the whole schedule by two or three years in either direction.
Slow it down, put it in the ground
This is a fourteen-inch-a-year climate, and most of that arrives in a handful of storms. Conventional grading is designed to get the water off the property as fast as possible; a swale cut on contour does the opposite, holding it in place long enough to soak in. Same slope, same storm.
“Plant the rain, don’t drain it, to end the drought with passive water harvesting.”
Runoff concentrates and leaves. Topsoil goes with it.
A reason to know your neighbors
A garden is the rare piece of climate infrastructure that also gives people a reason to learn each other’s names. Shared ground, shared harvest, shared work, and a standing excuse to be outside at the same hour as everyone else. The layout below is drawn for about forty households.
Six zones on about a third of an acre. Hover or tap any of them.