Food Forest Guild Examples

Here is a simple plan for temperate zones. Found on Facebook Permaculture group: webpage

Thank you for the visual!

Here is a guild for the tropics that I created for my ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian language) class. :-)
If you'd like translations you can use the online Hawaiian dictionary wehewehe.org

The diagram Hendrica Regez is beautiful. Thank you for posting it.

1. Did they include any indication of scale? It would be helpful if people had a good sense of the footprint it would like.
2. Some of those plants prefer to be cross pollinated. For example, one would need to choose different varieties of blueberries - although I have some recollection that someone's come up with a variety that will self pollinate. Similarly true of the pear tree. This can be solved by grafting two varieties on a single stem, so this is a totally fixable issue, but a detail than needs attention.
3. It's great that they've listed compatible ground cover as too often those steps get glossed over.
4. Traditionally, the point of the climbers is to get their support from the other shrubs and trees. This is valid in an established food forest, but don't feel like you have to be a purist the first few years when pole beans could totally smother a young tree with bean love! (If you don't think that could happen, you should have seen my Scarlet Runner beans climbing my corn, which is a recommended procedure, but I stuck some bamboo poles in to give the corn a fighting chance - we have cold, cloudy June weather and that year was particularly bad, so the corn just didn't get off to a good start to begin with, and they couldn't handle supporting the beans!)

I did a bit of research with those beans up the corn stalks and for my area in Western Washington they recommend not starting your beans until the corn has started growing a bit, especially since corn seems to take a bit longer in this cold weather.  It worked out pretty well, I think I did lima beans on mine, which is probably a bit less prolific than the scarlet Runner Beans, so that probably helped too.

Kelli Boggs wrote:I did a bit of research with those beans up the corn stalks and for my area in Western Washington they recommend not starting your beans until the corn has started growing a bit, especially since corn seems to take a bit longer in this cold weather.  It worked out pretty well, I think I did lima beans on mine, which is probably a bit less prolific than the scarlet Runner Beans, so that probably helped too.

Exactly - my spring is soooo... long, that even starting the corn inside well before the beans, the cool June we had that year resulted in *very* unhappy corn. Scarlet Runner beans on the other hand, think cool weather is just fine and they took off, out-paced the corn, went to the top of 6 to 6 1/2 foot bamboo poles, crossed over to the deer fencing and tried to take over the universe!

Here's my sketch of a potential Pacific NW mixed conifer-deciduous guild with native plants and introduced plants. The idea is to utilize the benefits of large native conifers' thermal biomass, biodiverse soil, wind break, condensation formation, rain slowing-spreading, and fertility shedding nature for plants downhill on a south-facing slope. On north facing slopes its tougher to compete with the well adapted native conifers and shade loving understory plants.