I’m in the early stages of a long-term food forest garden project on my property, starting with a wooded area adjacent to the garden proper.  Forest gardening is a system that involves planting communities of food plants to exploit various canopy levels – basically creating a food rich forest based on natural plant tendencies.  This GNU Free Documentation Licensed diagram by Graham Burnett illustrates the idea pretty well:

In the initial phase of my particular project, I’m working on integrating plants into an existing forest infrastructure – tall cedars, mostly – filling in the lower canopy levels with smaller trees, shrubs, and ground covers.  There are other parts of the property that were clear cut years ago, and in those areas I will be basically building a forest community from scratch, but based on resources and time, that will be a couple of years down the road.  You’ve got to start somewhere, and I’m starting nearest my garden, where I have easy access to water and tools, and where I can initially fence the area to keep the deer out, giving the new plants a chance to get established.

There’s a lot of good information in the two-volume set Edible Forest Gardens by Dave Jacke and Eric Toensmeier.  Stay tuned.