Welcome back everyone to the Epic Gardening podcast cabinet spirit here. We have Chris from Fluent Garden. She's a horticulturist and a garden consultant up in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Chris, we talked about a low maintenance garden, something that really lasts for the long term. I remember you had done a series on Instagram about the different layers of a food forest, which is sort of a permaculturist technique, but it seems like like myself, you don't necessarily, you know, completely subscribe to one gardening philosophy sort of mix and match from a bunch of different places. So when we're talking about layering your garden, what would be like the overall framework to look at?

Right, and you're absolutely right, I mix and match like I don't, I don't stick to one philosophy or one like method, like, you know, every garden is different and every person's experiences are different and like how I apply certain techniques to my garden is going to be like naturally very different from another person's, but with this layering and what I mean by layering is, you know, thinking of looking at your garden as, you know, a space.

Where you can grow in different vertical tiers and you mentioned food force and I've talked about food force as well. With the term food force, I don't really get so fixated on like all the small prescribed like you should plant this with that or that with that, like I find that too stressful, I really want to just read my garden and just keep it open.

Like, oh, like I want to grow this or my client wants to grow this, like, and just I use it as a framework, like a very visual framework to help me really get a good amount of plants into a garden, because I think before I started thinking about vertical layers, I was just planting like, oh, here's a garden bed. I'm just going to fill it with like a layer of, I don't know, like annuals or like kale and I just kind of left it at that.

I didn't take advantage of growing vertically like up trellises. I didn't think of using other plants to help climbing plants like get some height and get like air circulation.

So when I talk about layer, a layered design to help maximize yields, it's to help people understand like, hey, you can grow in a more loose way. You don't have to feel like you have to grow in a grid or just on one plane.

And I think it's really fun. And the result is a garden that is more like nature, like you kind of let things sprawl, you let things climb and it's actually really, really pretty.

So I don't know if we want to go into like specifics of plants or like examples of what goes in what layer.

Maybe just an example in your garden, I think would be cool of a combination of plants that would make up this layer to approach that you have.

Yeah, so one bed that I have out in my front garden, I call the apple tree bed, like people in permaculture or like food force, they would call it like a guild.

So sometimes it's like a very prescribed like selection of plants that you should plant together because they're like beneficial elements of each one that kind of feed like the system, like which is the planting for me.

That's a lot of brain work. I just kind of read my space and I inject things that makes sense.

So for this apple tree bed that I have, it's like one single apple tree, I was thinking of putting in like a blueberry shrub in there, but the timing just wasn't right.

I may put another shrub in there, but for like a size like that, I don't have the square footage in mind, but it's not a huge bed.

So there's like a dwarf tree, you can fit a shrub. So that would be like two layers right there. If you're going by like the food forest, seven layers, and then I have a whole bunch of herbaceous perennials, which are like height wise, the next level down.

So I have some like garlic chives, some mints, a whole bunch of mints, and then the ground cover layer is really what I feel the highlight of this bed, like it's covered with creeping times and different low growing plants like strawberries.

And it just knits everything together and makes the planting look very cohesive. And at the same time, it's providing a lot of benefits to the soil and the planting because with a living ground coverer, like for this bed, I don't have to weed.

I don't remember the last time I had to weed that bed just because things are knitted together and they're smothering out any weeds that are trying to pop up.

And they're preventing annual weed seeds from landing on the soil and germinating, which I think is really, really great. And more people should, you know, think about having these living ground covers.

And then in terms of climbers, I mean, my apple tree is quite small. So I don't expect anything to like climb up this like five foot tree yet.

So that's why I have like a very simple trellis that I train peas and beans up. So that's like another vertical layer to really make use of the space.

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