2 years ago we planted an edible forest

two years ago before we planted our first trees this used to be an old Olive Grove after a devastating fire turned this place to ashes the land was completely clearcut when we decided to bring this place back we knew it was going to be a big challenge but after building these massive water harvesting swells and planting close to a thousand trees and over 100 different species things have changed the idea was simple plant a wide variety of fruit and Nutri to create an ecosystem that functions as a forest but feels more like a modern day version of the Garden of Eden it is now April the beginning of Spring and this place has a really undergone a big transformation in the past two years we are finally reaching a point where it starts to feel and look like the beginnings of a young Forest the whole swell is now covered in plant growth we have all sorts of branches organic matter starting to break down mushrooms are popping up here and there the trees are starting to wake up from the short winter Siesta and we even have already harvested our first fruits of the year one of the trees we're really excited about is this flat Peach Tree there are literally dozens and dozens of little fruits growing on this tree unfortunately as you can see it's got Peach Leaf curl which is a disease caused by a fungus that that creates these ugly distorted leaves that damages them and make them fall prematurely now we could remove all the leaves and burn them to reduce the number of spores of this fungus but in the winter and spring it can be really humid here and we've got so many different species so many different edible trees that we just try to focus on creating the most vertile and healthy growing conditions for them to grow in that in the end of the day if this fungus continues to bloom and persist and it affects the trees too much we will simply compost the tree down and we will grow something else instead it's one of those things when working with nature sometimes you have a lot of success and sometimes Nature has other plans and that's all right that's why with everything we plant in this food Forest we mostly use a strategy or a concept called stun which was uh developed by Mark Shephard stun stands for sheer total other neglect and the idea is as humans we're good at killing things that want to live and we're trying to keep things alive that want to die when we are planting trees with the stun method we first look at the larger biome and look for the types of Woody perennials that are already proven to work within the region from there we can then select the types of trees that we want to grow and that are most likely to succeed and we plant those trees in the native soil without much else inputs and basically we'll see what works or not the idea is to give us little maintenance or care and attention and whatever dies dies but whatever works we will plant more of and will form the foundation of the ecosystem some of the trees that work really well here are pomegranates apricot Citrus mulberries and this tree the Almond Tree I mean look at it when we planted it it was nothing more than a tiny Whip and in just two short years it has grown into already a decent sized more than 2 m tall beauty of a specimen and in fact every single almond we planted two years ago has grown as much or more as this one can't wait to start harvesting our first almonds it won't be much yet but it just keeps on getting better and better every year now that is a good investment if we walk a little bit further on the sale we are greeted by this beautiful black malberry tree and this is another one of those trees that just seem to love the conditions here as you can see it is completely loaded with berries at the moment we planted this one during our first fall which is roughly a year and a half ago now and since then it has grown amazingly fast this is actually one of the trees that has been used uh for more than 5,000 to 8,000 years in China in the production of silk which is made by the silk Worm but that's not why we planted them here we are after their berries which are super sweet and juicy and we are definitely not the only ones who love them during this time of the year we get a lot of Aur winged Mac pies that can literally strip an entire tree before the berries are even ripe they normally eat a lot of uh acorns pine nuts insects and I guess they come here for dessert so since we share the love for these berries so much with our fellow earthlings we decided to plant another 10 of these with all sorts of different varieties and eventually there should be enough for everyone in the worst case we'll start maybe a little macp Sanctuary who knows and that is what I really love about this system initially you are planting this food forest for your own consumption and that it can provide you with all the fruits nuts and essentially all the food you and your family will ever need but as the system is evolving you start to notice that it goes far beyond that we have tons of insects birds amphibians and all sorts of Life starting to create little habitats and calling this place their home so what started out as a dream to provide for our own needs is now turning and evolving into something much bigger than ourselves into a place that supports and provides for all sorts of Life which in my mind it just can't get any better when we arrived on this land one of the first things that we did was build these massive water harvesting swells this property used to be essentially an old Olive Grove but since the last forest fire completely turned this place to ashes the entire land was clear cut of trees as you can imagine during the following heavy winter rains most of the top soil washed away Into The Valleys leaving the ridge completely exposed to erosion and one of our main goals is to reforest this Ridge so when we started digging our first holes for the first trees in some cases we Bedrock 10 to 20 cm down not exactly an ideal place for trees to grow in and this is what I mean as you can see here this is where we dug the trench of the main sell and you can clearly see the rock layer right here on the ridge with only a little bit of top soil on top of that now it's not everywhere like this but in most places it was either rocks like this or a near impermeable compacted hard pen so you might have been wondering from wow you know like that's a big sell and indeed you're right it's not very usual to see them this big we duck the trench about 1 and 1/2 M wide and in this particular sell we went down 40 to 50 cm the idea was to then create the burm with the excavated Earth and back fill the trench with organic matter like wood chips but as you can see the wood chips is still on the to-do list now I definitely don't recommend using sells everywhere and if you want to know uh whether or not swells might be a suitable water water harvesting strategy for your land I've written an entire article on that over on our blog I'll make sure to put the link down in the description box below now apart from being able to stop erosion Harvest rain water and let that water slowly sink into the soil to recharge the groundwater we essentially built these swells simply uh to increase the top soil for our tree systems essentially creating a large raised garden bed to provide enough soil for the tree roots to grow in and so far the SRS have done their job quite well whenever we have a very or an extremely large rain event where water would normally Rush down the slope with all the potential consequences now it is slowly infiltrating in the soil and watering our young Food Forest but this is the only sell that we built so large and others are much lower and shorter so let's have a look at those especially on this sell we didn't have to dig too much as the soil was already amazing here there was a natural depression and all organic matter had accumulated here over the years and created a sponge like soil already and you can see that back in the ground cover vegetation which is one of the most abundant and Lush on our entire property here we haven't nearly planted as many trees as we would like yet but you can see the abundance of vegetation quite well in between all of this dense vegetation we have all sorts of trees growing um here we have the Fig Tree just next to it we've got a citrus just a little bit further we've got a pomy granite and then you've got the Almond over there and over there there's right there is an avocado tree so this avocado tree we planted last November and it survived the winter it's not in great shape anymore because we had several really chilly nights that went down to minus 3° C but it's still alive it already started flowering and growing new le leaves so the goal is to remove these flowers or any fruit that might develop so the tree can focus all of its energy on developing a strong root system but for now I don't want to interfere too much with it yet with removing anything simply because I want to make sure that I don't accidentally remove too much and damage the tree if we walk a little bit further on the swell there are another a couple of exciting trees that we planted and one of them is this young Carib tree the Carib tree is an amazing long-term nitrogen fixing tree while the PODS of this tree can be used as a much healthier substitute for caca it is something that we nearly consume daily as we really love the taste of it we planted quite a bunch of these trees all over the swells and the land and the goal with this specific one is that once we cut down uh these huge eucalyp trees the goal is to let this one take over and become the larger canopy tree of this area and eventually provide shade for another tree that that we're triing out and we planted this last winter and that is the pawpa tree I'm not sure if you can actually see it because it's just a tiny little twig in the ground for now but the paa tree is native from North America it's actually one of the only members of the normally tropical fruit trees like costard apples and Cherry Moya but this one grows in the cold climate pretty fun Evolution I've never tasted the fruits before but from what I've read and seen this is something I'm really looking forward to trying out hopefully these little guys will make it and grow into abundant small trees they're not exactly known to like excessive heat or harsh direct sunlight so we planted them in the shade of the eucalypt trees and eventually hopefully they will be shaded by the Carib tree we'll see how that is going to work out now what you see here is not only planted by us and there are many herbaceous plants and weeds that start to come into this system and one of these weeds is tial now tial are great indicators of compacted heavy and acidic soil which is pretty much the case for us and probably one of the reasons why all the blueberries that we've planted here are doing so great but I'm not the biggest fan of having these thorny little plants in the food Forest so since they're proven to work here without our input we decided to copy this and instead grow a tiol that we do love and that is native to the Mediterranean and grows an abundant amount of food so this right here is an Arty choke shalan has planted this one as a little seed in the greenhouse and we've planted well over 50 so far A little bit all over the place this Arty choke is a beautiful and delicious perennial plant that provides abundant flower heads which are exceptionally nice when steamed for a bit and even raw and since tiol seem to love it here so much we thought why not replace most of them with this one instead now normally from seed it won't flower in its first year but in the years to come I hope they will produce abundantly unfortunately we do have some that have already been eaten by slugs which we have surprisingly a lot of this year so we'll see how many Will Survive honestly it is easy to go on and on about the beauty of this system I mean things are still small and young but I think that now that we've reached this stage we really start to have a small and emerging young food for us that will only get better from here on right now our job is simply to maintain what is already in place and try to keep filling any gaps as time goes by it's still not that the density and diversity that we ultimately want to have in this Forest but hey there's only so much that you can do with the time and resources that you have but one of the plans that we did plant this winter and we are quite excited about is the alder tree now we've already planted quite some support species and biomass trees and we started a lot more in the greenhouse but we haven't had this one yet this is the alus Cordata also known as the Italian Alder and this tree doesn't produce any fruits or nuts well at least not for us but the great thing about this tree is that it's a deciduous nitrogen fixing tree they are fast growing super helpful and provide a ton of shade and biomass and all sorts of goodness to the soil and as you can see I planted it right next to this massive eucalypt tree that just doesn't seem to stop growing I mean just look at it they really love it here but my goal is to cut down all the eucalyp trees in the coming seasons and then slowly let the other trees and other beneficial species take over and become the more long-term support at biom trees of this system now I'm not entirely sure how the eucalypt will respond to such a hard cut but I'm guessing that it's going to take several seasons before the Alder and the other trees have completely replaced them a couple of months ago we had a visitor on the land and she accidentally drove on this eucalypt tree and broke it and as you can see it already starts growing a lot of new Sprouts from the bottom of the stem and that is essentially what what I'm going to try and imitate I'll just keep cutting it down until it doesn't have enough energy left in its root system and the other species are large enough to start taking over the space I'm pretty curious how that is going to evolve over the coming seasons one thing is for sure we will continue to keep adding more diversity uh more layers more trees and shrubs and then eventually keep expanding this ecosystem outward towards the edges of our property we've noticed that now that we have a bit of a foundation in place and the system has had a little bit of time to mature it becomes much easier to keep on adding different plants and different species that can go grow together in the same space over the years we will see more Wildlife making themselves at home it will provide an abundance of diverse fruits berries and nuts and many other things and hopefully things will keep getting better and keep on thriving for generations to come throughout this process we start to realize that we're merely short-term passengers or stewards of the land and we're just trying our best to give nature a little bit of a helping hand wherever we can and in the process create abundant ecosystems that will continue to expand long after we are gone we often overestimate what we can do in a year but it's really about the day to day over many years that counts this is going to be our journey for as long as we can because why not I could go on about all the different plants and species that we've got growing here for maybe hours and if that is something that you would like me to dive deeper into just let me know in the comments for now thank you for watching and I will see you next [Music] time

Channel: The Dutch Farmer

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Id: WPm2oOufnZc

Length: 17min 9sec (1029 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 06 2024