How to group plants together to make layers of function, space, and time and make the most of whatever garden space you have available!

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Partial video transcript:

Hi, it's me, Heather Jo. And I want to talk to you about guilds, companion plants, and polycultures. I'm out here in the garden in the dark. I wanted to remind you that one of the many functions of plants is to smell wonderful at night, which is what I've got going on here with my patio. So let's talk about guilds, companion plants, and polycultures. What's the difference between a guild companion planting and a poly cultural food forest? Here is a guild, the Three Sisters is a classic guild, corn, beans and squash. So there's three annual plants that support each other while they're growing. The corn grows straight up and creates a support system for the beans, the beans fix nitrogen for the corn and the squash provides a ground cover to sprawl out underneath the corn. So this would be considered companion planting.

And, you know, you can create companion planting sections that are lined up together and still have a pretty manageable traditional row crop situation but much more diverse than a mono crop. So this is a guild. A guild tends to include perennials and annuals. And the plants will be stacked in space and time and function. So there's you plant trees to create a windbreak, and to create habitat and to provide nuts and to provide shade for smaller plants. And you do fruit trees and you do medicinals and insectaries to attract pollinators and repel pests. And you do ground covers to create a living mulch and to hold moisture in the soil and so on. So this would be a guild. OK. Now, so we have a companion planting here. And then we have a guild and companion planting plus guilds, so you can line guilds up just like you line up those companion plantings. And when you combine them in a whole systems design, then you get a polyculture. And you can have groups of companion plantings in between different types of guilds that have different types of trees according to the microclimates that they're in. And you can get pretty chaotic if you do that. So it's important to create some sort of order so that you can still manage the place.

So what I recommend is a system called alley cropping, and that's where everything is still built on contour and you have these rows of perennial guilds. And in between, you have sections where there's companion plantings. And then together, it creates the whole system, perennial permaculture garden. So now on a slope sideways. This is what this would look like. So these are your swales. Your water comes in. And it percolates through and down and ideally, you know, you would send the water back and forth across this as it goes down the slope, you've got your berms, you've got your swales and you've got your mixed polycultures and guilds to create your system.

So to review layers in a polyculture, layers in time, layers in space, and layers of function. So how many different ways can you use plants? How many different functions are there for a plant? Layers in time, plants that succeed each other over time. Some are perennial and they have their peak periods in the seasons. And then when they're dormant, then you can grow other things and some plants die after a year or two and you should have other plants coming up behind them and then layers in space. So you've got your trees and your shrubs and your ground covers and so on. So in a multi-layer food forest. So we've seen some drawings, let's look at some photographs, so in a multi-layer perennial polyculture you'd have all of these layers happening at once. Layers in time, layers in space and layers of function. And then you would group those by microclimates.

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