A food forest stacks plants by height so a quarter acre yields what a monoculture row would need several acres to produce. Every plant on this site is tagged with the layer it occupies, so you can filter the catalogue by the gap you are filling.
The layers, in warm-climate terms
Canopy. Mango, avocado, sapodilla, longan, lychee. Twenty feet and up. Plant these first and plant them on the north side so they do not shade everything else.
Understory. Smaller trees living in filtered light: jaboticaba, guava, dwarf mango, papaya, peach.
Shrub. Blueberry, mulberry, cranberry hibiscus, katuk, chaya. Waist to head height, and usually the layer that actually feeds you week to week.
Herbaceous. Cuban oregano and the soft-stemmed herbs at ground level.
Root. Turmeric and ginger, occupying soil space nothing else is using and happy in the shade beneath the shrubs.
Vine. Passionfruit climbing whatever structure you give it, using vertical space that would otherwise be wasted.
The mistake everyone makes
Planting the canopy at final spacing and filling the gaps with more canopy. A mango at ten feet looks lonely. At fifteen years it is thirty feet across and has shaded out everything you planted beside it. Space the canopy for maturity and use the fast, short-lived layers, papaya, banana and moringa, to fill the space in the meantime.