Beginner · 28 lessons · 7 hours
Plant once, harvest for decades — on a quarter acre, with a job and kids.
Design and plant a seven-layer perennial food system on a quarter acre or less.
Sound familiar?
- Your annual garden eats every weekend and still fizzles by August.
- You've planted trees that died and you never found out why.
- You want food that comes back without you replanting it every spring.
Four seasons of footage from our hillside plantings plus three community sites, including the Vermont family who hit 240 pounds of fruit in year four. You leave with a scaled planting map for your own ground.
The method
The Seven-Layer Guild
- 1
Read your site before you buy a plant
Sun, slope, water and soil decide the plant list — not the catalog.
- 2
Anchor, then fill
Set the canopy and nitrogen fixers first, then layer berries, herbs and ground cover into the gaps.
- 3
Feed the system, not the plant
Chop-and-drop, mulch and fungal soil so the guild carries itself by year three.
What you'll walk away able to do
- Read sun, water and wind patterns on your specific lot
- Choose guild species that actually fruit in your zone
- Sequence plantings so you harvest in year two, not year seven
- Build soil with chop-and-drop instead of imported inputs
- Prune and manage a maturing forest garden
Curriculum
Module 1
Reading your site
- Sun mapping across the seasons
- Water flow and where to slow it
- Soil tests worth paying for
Module 2
Guild design
- The seven layers, honestly assessed
- Nitrogen fixers that earn their space
- Choosing rootstock
- Drawing the planting map
Module 3
Planting
- Bare root timing and technique
- Sheet mulching a new area
- First-year watering
- Protecting from deer and voles
Module 4
Years two to five
- Chop and drop
- Formative pruning
- Filling gaps
- Harvest and processing
From someone who took it
"Two beds and four hens. I stopped buying eggs in March and produce in June. My grocery bill is down about a third and my kids eat things they used to refuse."
Marisol Reyes
Bloomington, Indiana
312 lbs harvested · 128 jars canned
What you get
- 9 video modules, 7 hours$600 value
- Guild design templates by zone$160 value
- Plant selection database$140 value
- Year-by-year establishment schedule$120 value
- Pruning and chop-drop calendar$90 value
- Lifetime access and updates$200 value
Total value$1,310
Your price$179
Questions before you enroll
- How much space do I need?
- A single guild fits in 400 square feet. The course scales from one guild to a quarter acre.
- What if I'm in a cold zone?
- Templates cover zones 3 through 9, with species swaps for each.