Gardening is a lot of work...and, because of the way I did it, I had to start over every year. I recently moved to Butte, Montana which is in zone 3. Last year, my return on investment was essentially zero.
Well, I did my homework and found the idea of a "food forest" to be appealing. I can't recommend the 
I'm going to call my garden an "Investment Garden". So far, I've planted mostly perennial fruit bushes (see diagram), so "food forest" isn't accurate. I've settled on "Investment Garden" to emphasize that I don't have to start from scratch with the planting of annuals each year.
My main goal in the garden will be to invest heavily in perennial crops as my primary asset. With each passing year, the crops should provide a larger and larger dividend. Meanwhile, annual crops will be interspersed among my perennial plants. Since I have such a short growing season, the annual vegetables will be in the category of high risk, high reward.
My investment garden is less than one week old, so there will be plenty to follow up on. From my other posts, you can see that I'm a scientist, so I'll bring some of that training into the garden for experiments of all kinds. Thanks, again to James
