Mini Forest at Home
Transform Your Garden with the Biggest Mini Forest Approach
Creating a Mini Food Forest at home is a fantastic way to enhance your garden, contribute to environmental regeneration, and enjoy the benefits of a lush and biodiverse ecosystem while producing food for you and your family, not only after a month but also for several years and generations to come. At Biggest Mini Forest, we have developed a unique approach to help you create thriving mini forests that can easily be expanded and customized to fit your space and needs.
In this article, we'll explore the advantages of our method, practical tips on how to get started, and how you can expand your mini forest over time.
Why Create a Mini Forest at Home?
Creating a mini forest at home offers a multitude of benefits:
Biodiversity: A mini forest attracts a variety of plants, insects, birds, and other wildlife, promoting a diverse ecosystem. The species initially used will eventually propagate and improve the biodiversity around it.
Climate Resilience: Climate change is making it harder to maintain healthy plants and trees. A mini forest creates a dense and biodiverse environment that is more resilient to extreme weather events. It grows fast, absorbs carbon dioxide, provides shade, and builds soil at a very fast pace.
Food Production: Grow your own fruits, vegetables, and medicinal herbs, providing food for your family, friends and neighbors, while helping create local food security and sovereignty.
Mental Well-being: Spending time in green and natural environments, in contact with plants and soil, reduces stress and improves mental health.
Aesthetic Appeal: A well-designed mini forest enhances the beauty of your garden, transforming unused corners into pleasant places to enjoy nature.
Biggest Mini Forest Approach
Our regenerative agriculture method is based on the principles of Syntropic Agriculture and the Miyawaki Method, aiming to create high-density and biodiverse ecosystems that can be done on a small scale by anyone anywhere in the world.
Here's why the Biggest Mini Forest approach is ideal for creating a mini forest at home:
Scalability: We start with a small 2m x 2m plot of perennial species, with a 0.5m stripe around it of annual specials that we call Veggies Wall. With that you can observe, interact and learn as much as possible and expand over time by adding more plots. Think of it as building with Lego pieces – you can simply add more plots next to the previous implementations at your own pace. That allows you to create them with all the knowledge acquired throughout the process.
Ease of Implementation: Our method is designed for anyone, regardless of their gardening experience. Follow our simple guidelines to get started, or go deeper by joining one of our workshops, getting the chance to learn a lot of the details that will successfully help you create your own Mini Food Forest at home.
Fast Growth: By combining fast-growing species with slower-growing plants and species that belong to different forest layers and strata, we create a unique and protective microclimate that accelerates growth and enhances resilience.
Soil Health: Our special soil preparation is initially done in a way that creates a soil that mimics the soil from a more advanced forest. Combining that with constant chop and drop, in which the organic material generated by the system is used to enrich the soil, we get our key for success.
Getting Started with Your Mini Forest at Home
1. Choose Your Location: Find the best location for it.
Identify an area with at least 16 square meters (4m x 4m) for your Mini Forest. Remember that you will need a 2m x 2m square in the middle, a 0.5 meter around for your Veggies Wall, and another 0.5 meter that you need as a path around it.
Select a sunny spot in your garden that is not likely getting waterlogged.
Ensure the area receives at least 6 hours of sunlight daily.
Make sure that you have chosen an area where you don't have the bedrock too close to the surface.
2. Prepare the Soil: This will improve soil structure and fertility.
Decompact the soil from 0.5m to 1m deep mixing 15 to 25% of organic amendments such as compost, well-rotted manure and eventually nutritional pellets for the veggies. Your soil type will determine the type of amendments you should use and the respective quantities.
After that initial kickstart you should plant a very dense and biodiverse system that can generate a lot of organic material that can be used for chop and drop, focused on constantly improving soil health and ensuring a sustainable and productive ecosystem.
Add a square spiral of drip irrigation pipe that will guarantee a more homogeneous moisture in the whole system.
Use tree trunks or wood to make a frame around the perennial species area and divide them from the Veggies Wall. They can also be used as an area to step on.
Add at least 4 flat stepping stones in the 2m x 2m part so that you can easily step on it without disturbing the plants and the soil.
3. Select Your Plants: This will define your unique oasis.
Choose a variety of trees, shrubs, and ground cover plants. Take into consideration the time of the year you are planting, making sure that if it is in winter, the little seedlings will resist the cold before becoming more resilient, or it resists the extreme sun exposure if it is summer.
Include at least two edible species per square metre.
Plan the Veggie Wall with species that are suitable to the season you will be planting it.
4. Planting Layout: Create your unique layout with your specific conditions.
Ideally we should plant all the species at the same time.
Place your selected species considering sunlight, wind, and temperature preferences of each of them.
Aim for high plant density, at least 3 species per square metre, if possible add seeds and cuttings.
Consider planting a high density of species, in order to have it available for your next implementations, in order to create backups for the existing plants or to simply use chop and drop feeding the soil.
Place your fruit trees that will take more space in the 4 corners of your Mini Forest, to have more space available between them.
Place in the middle the species that are more frost tender, or that require more shade.
If you lose many species during the first 3 months, you should add more to replace them and to bring back the high density and biodiversity of the system.
5. Maintenance: This is what brings the best of it.
Regularly weed your mini forest during the first 2 years to promote healthy growth of each individual plant.
Prune strategically to encourage healthy growth of the most desirable species.
All the weeding and pruning material should be used to cover the soil of your Mini Forest, taking advantage of chop and drop for nutrient cycling, promoting soil microbiology, and constantly building soil.
Any leaves and branches that look dry or sad should be cut and used to cover the soil.
As your forest matures, the need for weeding will decrease and will have more and more material to use for chop-and-drop.
Expanding Your Mini Forest
One of the unique advantages of the Biggest Mini Forest approach is its scalability. Start with a single 2m x 2m plot of food forest and expand by adding more plots over time. This modular design allows you to create a variety of landscapes, from intimate social areas, to biodiverse gardens and productive agroforestry systems.
Creating Social Areas and Beautiful Landscapes
Our modular plots can be creatively arranged to form social areas and enhance your garden, farm, or landscape architecture project.
Outdoor Living Spaces: Design spaces for relaxation, gatherings, or social events surrounded by lush greenery.
Pathways and Borders: Use mini-forest plots to create natural pathways and borders that add visual interest and functionality to your garden.
Garden Features: Incorporate water features, seating areas, and garden art to complement your mini forest and create a harmonious outdoor environment.
Practical Examples
Backyard Oasis: Transform a corner of your backyard into a peaceful mini-forest retreat that can also provide you with food.
Community Projects: Work with friends, neighbours and the local community to create shared Mini Food Forest systems at home that benefit the entire community.
Creating a Mini Forest at Home with the Biggest Mini Forest approach can be a rewarding and impactful way to enhance your garden, contribute to environmental regeneration, and improve your well-being. Start small, learn with it, expand over time, and watch as your Mini Forest flourishes into a thriving, biodiverse ecosystem.
Ready to transform your garden? Explore more our website, for more information, resources, and inspiration. Join the regenerative movement and create your own mini forest at home using one of the solutions we have available: