Food Forest Before and After: Overhead Edition

It’s time for another “Food Forest Before and After” post – this one thanks to Google Earth.

Back when we bought our property it had a few oaks and a bunch of weedy lawn. After the first year, we’d cleared out some of the more dangerous and shade-creating oaks and got going on our gardens.

Here’s what the yard looked like in 2012, a little while after we moved in:

You can see straw mulch around some of the little trees I planted out front and in the backyard there’s the quarter-circle of the goat fencing we installed for our stint with dairy goats.

Behind the back of the house are a few garden beds and my trusty greenhouse. We were growing as much as we could, but the food forest was just getting started.

Now look at the most recent Google image taken within the last couple of months:

The gardens are loaded with perennials, the front yard food forest is a verdant jungle, the bananas dominate the back corner of the house… and there’s very little grass in sight!

The two white rings in the back yard are a couple of the “hot tub ponds” I discuss in my movie 13 Tips, Tricks and Lessons from Homesteading an Acre and in my book Grow or Die: The Good Guide to Survival Gardening.

The little white square near the bottom right of the image is our bee hive.

The greenhouse is gone at this point, sold to a gardener friend, and the old goat enclosure is now a sea of cassava and fruit trees.

A Food Forest Before and After Graphic

Here’s a cool graphic I created to pass around. I’m not on Facebook, but if any of you are, please share – I’d love to see more people doing this.

You can see more in-depth food forest before and after photos of this food forest via this link.

And if you live in Florida or a comparable climate, you’ll benefit from my short (and quite affordable) book Create Your Own Florida Food Forest, available on Amazon in audiobook, paperback and kindle versions. It’s worth it just for the cheatsheet and species lists in the back!

Tomorrow I’ll post a side by side view of the Great South Florida Food Forest Project from above – see you then!