The Shrub Layer of a Food Forest – 5 Reasons Shrubs Are Awesome

When you hear the term “food forest,” you likely start to think of, well, a forest. A place with tall trees forming a canopy. A place where you can walk under them and feel the cool air provided by their shade.

Most of us love taking hikes in a forest, and the idea of being able to create your own forest that also provides a ton of food is just awesome.

In tropical or sub-tropical areas, you can get enough sunlight to have a dense canopy and still have lots of light filtering through for abundance below.

But in temperate climates, the sunlight is much less intense. And it’s difficult to get a large food harvest from a closed-canopy forest, where the edges of the branches all touch.

Luckily, you don’t have to make your food forest with a closed canopy if you live in a temperate climate.

Instead, you can plant less trees and more shrubs. By focusing more on the shrub layer of the food forest and creating an open tree canopy, you leave space for sunlight to reach more of your plants.

The result is greater harvests—but less trees.

I call this sort of food forest a “recovering forest” type of food forest. This is because this type of food forest mimics a natural forest that is recovering from a large fire or windstorm.

After this sort of disturbance event, the canopy is opened, but there are still some tall trees remaining. The result is that a bunch of shrubs and non-woody plants pop up between the existing trees.

These shrubs and non-woody plants remain until the forest closes up again as the trees regrow. But in your own food forest you can keep it in this early state of recovery through design and management.

You can read more about this type of food forest (and 2 others) in the post—Types of Food Forests – Which is Right for You?

The key take-away is that if you live in a temperate climate and you want to grow a food forest that creates the most abundant food harvests, focusing on the shrub layer and less trees is your best bet.

Let’s dive into the 5 reasons why you should focus on the shrub layer of your food forest.

But before we do, keep in mind that the shrub layer is just 1 of 7+ layers found in a food forest. Don’t forget about these other layers when building your food forest. So make sure to grab your free and easy-to-print cheat-sheet all about these other layers so you can plant a truly abundant food forest.

Some shrubs like goumi berries and seaberries fix nitrogen into the soil from the air through a partnership with soil bacteria.

By planting nitrogen fixing shrubs near your trees, you can improve the fertility of your soil and help your trees grow.

This is a great way that your shrub layer can support your trees.

But many of your shrubs can also be chopped and dropped on a regular cycle to provide quick woody debris and mulch to add organic material to your food forest.

Fast growing shrubs that re-sprout after being cut are great for this. Hazelnuts can be grown as bushy shrubs and cut back every few years in this way.

This is a great way to quickly build up the soil in your food forest.

Shrubs can also quickly shade the soil around your trees and block some of the wind. This can help retain moisture and also reduce the stress on young trees.

One big reason shrubs are awesome is they can provide you a harvest much quicker than trees will. Many shrubs will start producing harvests for you within 2 years, and some even quicker.

Many shrubs like raspberries, currants, gooseberries and goumi berries will start to give you a harvest within a year or 2 of being planted.

But just a heads up—some shrubs like serviceberries can be slower, taking 3-4 years to provide a harvest.

While some fruit trees can start to produce in a similar time frame, many take much longer. It’s not uncommon for fruit trees to take 3-5 years to start to produce, and sometimes as much as 7 years.

And it can take a few more years for fruit trees to really start producing large harvests after they first start to fruit.

This is a big benefit to planting shrubs around your young fruit trees. You get to enjoy harvesting the berries while your trees are growing!

Birds just love hanging out in shrubs, and so do lots of other wildlife. Shrubs provide shelter as well as food.

While your trees will do the same eventually, they can take a while to provide much shelter. Plus, if you’re pruning your fruit trees for fruit production, they’re likely more open and won’t provide a lot of cover for birds and other wildlife.

But if you have a good shrub layer the birds and other wildlife will use them for cover. Anytime I look outside at my hedgerows and shrubs, there are always birds moving around in them.

These shrubs create dense cover that birds just love.

While supporting wildlife is great in and of itself, you also get a number of benefits from doing it.

Birds eat massive amounts of insects every year. So by providing shelter for birds, you can reduce your pest issues.

It’s true that birds will eat some of your fruit, but insect pests can be far more damaging than birds are.

And birds aren’t the only critters that shrubs support. They provide cover for all sorts of wildlife. The result is a more balanced ecosystem that will help keep your pests in check and truly provide an abundance for people, plants and animals.

But as awesome as shrubs are, don’t forget about the other layers of your food forest. The shrub layer is ultimately just a part of a healthy food forest—even if it's the focus.

Even the recovering forest model of food forest should have trees, groundcovers like strawberries, and non-woody plants like perennial vegetables. Plus, you can always mix in some annual vegetables!

But in temperate climates, if you give your trees more space and fill the gaps with productive shrubs, you can get more harvests than if you planted your trees close to each other.

It would even be possible to grow a food forest where the largest plants were all shrubs. This could be called a “scrub-shrub garden.”

This could be a great option for someone who has limited space and limited time. A scrub-shrub garden could provide you with an abundance of harvests in as little as 2-3 years, and keep producing for decades to come.

But in general, I would still try to mix in some fruit trees if possible.

In a traditional food forest, there are 7 living layers (canopy trees, sub-canopy trees, shrubs, herbaceous, groundcover, root crops, and climbers) plus 4 non-living layers (snags, logs, fallen branches and large rocks).

Whether you’re going for a recovering forest type of food forest or a scrub-shrub garden, you will still want to include as many of these layers as possible.

Each of these layers results in more harvests and an overall increase in the resiliency of the system.

Plus, the result is simply more beautiful and fun to be a part of than a system that only has 1 or 2 layers, like a traditional orchard.

Just make sure not to skimp on the shrub layer. In a temperate climate, this is key to creating a food forest full of abundance for people, plants and animals.