EDIBLE FOREST GARDEN · Grow Food & Heal the Earth · Lessons Learned

over the years we've tried to bring in every variety of persimmon we can get our hands on because that's what the land is telling us we should be growing on this spot [Music] oops puppy hey puppy all right so this is a young forest uh this piece of ground was a cornfield before we started the project in 2012 and now it's starting the transition into a forest and we're trying to work with the succession process that the ecosystem is producing here that means a lot of very thick growth this soil having been tilled for hundreds of years it was very beat up when we came into the property very low organic matter so all of this thick crazy vegetation that you see everywhere this is doing a great job of of building up biomass providing habitat for for insects and other wildlife and starting to get the the place uh more and more habitable for the fruit crops that we want to grow here when you're working in a site that has degraded soil building up nitrogen and other fertility in the soil is super important so one thing when beginning the project we seeded in a lot of nitrogen fixing species this is one this is red clover a nice broadly available seed it fixes atmospheric nitrogen and makes it into nitrate which is huge uh hugely important for the growing of of all kinds of trees so you have this red clover and then as a contrast here's another type of clover here this is the white clover and they each occupy a slightly different niche both really useful in the garden so the red clover can hang out in this tall meadow type vegetation and hold its own and grow in that type of location if we mowed the red clover it would die it can't take that kind of condition the white clover on the other hand this uh can take mowing uh that this this grows in our lawn pads and is adding nitrogen there but it can't survive in the shade of this tall meadow as a competition so each one occupies a different niche and they're both here fixing nitrogen and building up the soil so everything we do in the forest garden we're trying to learn from the forest itself when that was young that forest was all full of black locust trees and so with that in mind one of the first things that i planted out here when we started toward a forest was also black locust trees you can see one behind me here black locust is with the feathery foliage on it the sort of larger tree in the middle distance that is a pioneer species of tree so it is a nitrogen fixing plant it doesn't mind bad soil it gets in there and it starts to build the soil and it's the fastest growing thing in the garden so it gives a huge boost to getting this place started toward toward becoming a forest from a from a beat up old farm field so we planted those and at the same time those pioneer black locusts that were growing back in the woods they've done their job and died but they produce a highly rot resistant wood which we were able to pick up in the existing forest dead black locust posts and and that's how we built our deer fence here this is the most rot resistant wood species that grows around here and so we've been able to use it for a variety of things around the garden it's a neat local resource here in the eastern united states so one thing about a forest garden is there's a lot going on at any given time the mission is to reintegrate people and our lives and everything that we use with the forest ecosystem and that's a tall order what we found here is it's been a really great pleasure to involve other people with other skills in the garden including the beekeepers we have these really cool beekeepers that have something like nine or ten hives in the garden at this point they're producing a lot of honey over wintering well and providing their pollination services and i never touch them so throughout the project we've been looking for opportunities to bring in people with other skills like maybe an herbal medicine person or we have this one lady who weaves baskets out of some of the stuff that we harvest here a forest garden is is a big project and there are many skills involved and we find like every time we can involve another person with another skill set the whole uh system grows stronger so i didn't get into forest gardening to do a lot of mowing but i do have some opinions regarding trails i've visited plenty of forest gardens where the feeling of the place is on the claustrophobic side and where the trails may not be very well defined or very comfortable especially if you've had say a rainy or dewy situation and you have a lot of vegetation encroaching on the pathways it just makes for a place that's not that comfortable for people to be and to me it is very important to make a forest garden a comfortable place for people it is a it is a people habitat so i do end up doing a fair amount of mowing to maintain broad comfortable trails around the forest garden we still have of course tons of lushness and vegetation going on but in order to make sure that people are comfortable here i like them to be able to walk in the trails know where they're going not encounter too many spiders and briars if they do not want to do that um so for me the trails and the maintenance of them is important in a forest garden this site has a lot of wild blackberries grown growing here they're thorny and somewhat productive of blackberries taking a cue from that we grow these thornless varieties of blackberry where the fruit quality is a little bit better and the plant is a little bit less aggressive and easier to deal with and this is a major principle for us if we find a native plant growing around here we want to either learn how to use that plant or grow with something that's closely related and and feature that in the forest garden [Music] yummy [Music] [Music] is the only native plant that has caffeine in it and as such it was super important to the native americans um so what you do is you harvest the young growing tips you dry it and uh and then depending on what flavor you're going for you can roast it for a little while pound it with a mortar and pestle and then make this lovely caffeinated tea tastes uh kind of like yerba mate if you're familiar with that but it's a lovely caffeinated drink and the plant itself as an evergreen looks beautiful in the landscape you can prune it into a hedge or or whatever you need works well in the front yard if you need a dressy kind of a look and it also produces berries that are not edible to people but are important uh food for for birds and other wildlife growing right here behind the yaupon holly is one of my favorite plants in the garden passion fruit this is our native passion fruit it's called may pops and many parts of this plant are edible including the flowers which are like in terms of edible flowers this is a very nice one it's it's crispy and sweet that the young tips of this plant are also edible that is a very nice uh salad ingredient that i would describe it as as sort of nutty and and hearty sort of a green very nice sauteed or in salad and then later like in in the season it makes it makes passion fruit like it's a sort of a green egg-shaped fruit full of absolutely wonderful sweet tart cells in there that you eat this is a vine so it tends to scramble and and run all over the place we're growing it here on this fence by the end of the season it'll cover this fence and the trellis structure outside every year it'll grow up the fence and then die back down to the ground so if you have a chain link fence or something like that it's a very good plant for for covering up something like that you wouldn't really grow a grape on a chain link fence because it's going to make a trunk that will get tangled up in the fence over time but this because it's a an annual grow and then start over again it's perfect for those type of situations one of my favorite edible flowers such a nice plant supposed to be an anti-anxiety as a as an herbal medicine too so here's a spot where you have an interesting contrast going on you have a plant that we brought in and then a native plant right beside which provides some interesting contrast here's an apple tree this is probably williams pride one of the disease resistant apples it grows okay around here we get you know decent quantity of cider quality apples off of these trees most years we don't spray any insecticides or herbicides anywhere in the garden so um without that kind of help your apples are going to be somewhat limited but but still usable now in contrast right next to the apple tree you have a persimmon tree a couple of them actually persimmon american persimmon is something that occurs wild here on this site it took us a couple of years into the project before we realized the whole place was growing up with persimmons that we did not plant when the persimmons in the wild woods are ripe you find fox poops all over the place here that are full of persimmon seeds so these foxes have been out here planting the persimmons for who knows how long before we even got to the property and what we do with these persimmons is we let some of them just grow as is and then some of them we graft so we will we will cut that tree and then graft it with an improved variety of persimmon and compared to the apples these things are incredibly productive and just trouble free they're always happy they are native to here they're completely happy with this soil and climate they occurred here without you know on their own in fact they even occur in the in the hay field next to this property where they mow that field and they mow down the persimmon trees and they persist through being mowed and they just grow back so it's an incredibly tough and well-adapted plant for this particular place and so while i wasn't all that familiar with persimmons going into the project the land is saying loud and clear this should be a persimmon farm so over the years we've tried to pay as much attention and respect to that as possible bring in every variety of persimmon we can get our hands on and really emphasize that because that's what the land is telling us we should be growing on this spot more apple [Music] so we grow vegetables in the forest garden and one thing we're very interested in is the lowest possible maintenance vegetables so we grow tomatoes and peppers and kale those kind of things but we also grow things like this jerusalem artichoke also known as sunchoke which this is in the sunflower family and it produces a root crop in great abundance and needs absolutely no care from us whatsoever we got this patch started a few years ago and now this plant just fends for itself it lives out here in the meadow and produces food without any care from people whatsoever also has a nice flower on it later in the season potatoes these white potatoes here they need a little bit more care but we're always interested in like what's the minimum amount of care that we need for these different plants squash we've found has been one of the best where we can start it in a little pile of compost in the meadow and just leave it alone for the rest of the season it goes crazy wanders off into the meadow all we have to do is come in there at the end of the season and you find all these huge squashes in there it's fantastic so we're doing this type of an experiment with the potatoes this year we are hilling them from time to time as you do but we're we're not giving them like a premium uh very well cared for vegetable site we're giving them more of a more more of a marginal it's like a pile of compost uh with a meadow all around and we want to see can we produce potatoes under these conditions how are our yields in forest gardening it's very much about how can we sort of work with and massage the local ecosystem to produce food for us but without having to do a huge amount of disturbance a huge amount of labor [Music] so one thing we deal with here as with many landscapes is invasive plants we have you name it there many of them are here uh this is japanese stilt grass we we have japanese honeysuckle uh many other things once in a while we find a native plant that can hold its own or even take over a niche from one of these invasives and this is one of those discoveries much of what you're seeing and i i unders like this location it is a little hard to see what's going on this is a plant called american ground nut apios americana it's actually a domesticated crop that the indians developed as a high protein tuber so it's a legume it's making that nitrogen making that protein and it's a vine and what we found is on this fence situation and in this meadow situation even though we have the presence of japanese honeysuckle throughout the growing season this will grow over top of the japanese honeysuckle that also grows on this fence so it's a kind of a somewhat rare example where we can introduce a native plant that wasn't here previously and it can take back over from this uh from the invasive plants that were here so that's been exciting to see we also do come through here in the winter time and cut the japanese honeysuckle because while the groundnut is dormant underground the japanese honeysuckle is evergreen so that gives us a chance to set back the invasive plant a little bit further so down here in this patch it's a little bit wetter than some other areas in the field so we're trying out some things that like that type of wet condition this is high bush cranberry it's a very happy native plant plenty of wildlife benefit that the berries are pretty nasty unless you like process them with a whole lot of sugar at which time you know they make a decent cranberry sauce whoever the salesman is for cranberries does a great job but you know nice native plant for what it is you got your nitrogen fixation happening in this patch from the black locust trees uh this is our future canopy tree this is an oak i believe this is a swamp white bur oak cross which is one of the most productive of acorns we grow a lot of different species of oak here because of their potential for human food it's actually one of the most forgotten and overlooked foods in america right now but it was tremendously important to the native americans the quantity of food produced per acre is comparable to wheat and it has the potential to play a major role in our diet we that live in the the forested ecosystem of the eastern united states need to stop ignoring acorns and uh and make use of the amazing food that you can make out of it we've made many um cool different acorn foods the chef that does the forest to table dinners here has made acorn falafel acorn granola acorn noodles um different acorn breads uh acorn jelly like the way the koreans do it so many different cool dishes so we're really excited to be able to share these things with people and to grow the dozen or so different species of oak that show the most potential to contribute to the human food supply [Music] so there are a bunch of plants that um can grow in the shade for quite a period of time waiting for their opportunity to emerge into the sun as they get older hickory is one example of this this is shell bark hickory which is one of the nicer tasting hickory nuts they do take a very long time to begin producing but as a way of transitioning a forested area towards something that is more productive of nuts that are useful to people hickories are a nice example of that and this one's well underway over on the other side here this is a smooth alder plant which is just a nice native nitrogen fixer building up the soil a little bit smaller than your black locust and and things like that produces many stems but can be cut back to the ground whenever necessary and it will re-sprout so as a chop and drop source of nitrogen-rich foliage alder is a it's a great native plant over here you have another plant that i i'm excited about uh that is butternut which is or also known as white walnut this is uh native to this region and the the quality of the fruit is quite pleasant a little bit um more mild and and easier to shell than the black walnut uh we have not uh had nuts on here yet but the plants seem to be growing well and and i'm excited to see whether we start to get some some butternuts off of this with a name like that it's got to be good right this plant back here is uh american elderberry your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries um with the big white flowers on it it's got a couple of cool uses uh this time of year we are harvesting flowers which are edible and just nice as a decoration on top of of any kind of a salad uh people make them into fritters or cordial and then once the berries ripen you can see the berries starting to come along here they'll ripen up into a deep purple colored berry that is actually used medicinally as an immune support and this plant is again very well adapted to this environment we found wild elderberry growing in this woods edge with us not having planted it so taking a cue from that we got a few selections of of elderberry where they have uh they're extra productive of the berries and we planted them into adjacent locations figuring that the wild one there is indicating this would be a good spot to grow that plant that's american elder so a lot of the maintenance we do this time of year is in the summertime is scything when we have a small plant especially like this little pomegranate here uh we we need to go around and remove the the tall vegetation before it completely swamps it and this has been a really good tool for this this is a european side with a with a ditch blade on it and it allows you to get right up close to the trunk of your plant and cut away the vegetation that's starting to encroach and then once we're done moving the vegetation back away from the perimeter all that remains is a little bit of hand weeding right in the center of that plant this pomegranate is looking a little sad because of the cicadas right now but it does have plenty of life in it and i'm just going to come in here where these grasses are growing too close to the plant for me to reach with a side and like here is a trumpet creeper vine for example which will cover this if i let it if i leave it so so that's pretty much the summer maintenance regime we also come through and add mulch from time to time sometimes cardboard and mulch which also helps reduce the weeds [Music] uh so this is mimosa or albezia which is a an invasive plant it's all over this area so we didn't plant it here but it just occurs it is however a potent nitrogen fixer it's one of the the most productive adders of fertility to the soil so what we do with these is you know you know it wants to become a full-size tree we let it grow up a little bit and then knock it down a permaculture technique called chop and drop where we'll come through here and just like break all of these things off each of those is full of fertility to add to the soil and the plant will grow will grow right back the way it was after it's been after it's been cut so here in the eastern united states in the mid-atlantic near d.c um as any of you from this area already know we have this plant called the bradford pear which is a crazy invasive the bradford pear was brought over here from china in about the 1950s and planted aggressively for many years and then it went feral and it pops up and grows like crazy in any empty field that is let go including this one so they pop up by the thousands in this location a bradford pear produces a small bitter inedible fruit but what we found is that we can cut the bradford pear and graft onto it with a selected and very good variety of fruiting pear so we have all these wild invasive root stocks already in place and we can top work them and produce a good crop of pears this has been one of the most easy and trouble-free fruits for us to grow here working with this invasive that we have found here on site the uh this is a european pear variety you can also grow the asian pear which is a round and crunchy juicy type of pear and they've just been a great uh crop for us and it's no longer invasive once it's been top worked to uh to produce this kind of good fruit also in this patch you have jujube or chinese date this has been a very very neat crop for us i'm pretty excited about this it's a fruit kind of midway between a date and an apple so this is where we grow our delicious shiitake mushrooms there's the piles of logs with the hockey's growing in them when they're ready when we're ready to have them fruit we soak them in a tank for a day and then pull them out these logs over here have just been soaked and they are just starting to fruit they're pinning which means just emerging and uh by the time they start to grow they they ripen pretty quickly so these tiny little little mushrooms that are just emerging here they will be ready to harvest within about a week or less spicebush is a really nice shade crop it grows wild in the forest around here quite a lot and you can see the the young berries developing here they'll ripen up and turn red in the fall and at that point you harvest the berry dry it and grind it into a powder which people use the way you would use allspice and to me it has notes of cinnamon in it and it's a very cool thing to add either in baking or or to a drink or something and it's just it's a native plant that uh produces in great quantity so pomegranate is a relatively new plant to us we've been growing it for a bunch of years but this is the first time we've seen any flowers on it i have friends in in dc that produce pomegranates like crazy so i'm pretty excited about potentially getting our first little crop of pomegranates off of this so if you think you don't like mulberries or you find them boring i would definitely recommend that you try out some of the selected varieties this one is called illinois ever-bearing mulberry and in my opinion the fruit the taste and the texture is way better than your average wild mulberry it's extremely productive extremely easy to grow we've already been in here probably harvested maybe 20 or 30 pounds of mulberries off of a few shakings we just lay berry harvest net on the ground here and shake the tree and you get all these amazing fruit one of the easiest things to grow in the garden definitely a favorite among kids and other visitors so in year 10 on this site we've pretty well finished planting the tree canopy layer of the garden and just letting those trees grow out but we still are actively planting into the shrub layers and the the smaller plants in the garden uh here's an example a row of blueberry bushes that we just put in this spring and it shows a technique that works pretty well for us uh we'll put down a thick layer of cardboard on the ground you can see putting sticking out a little bit there and then we'll cover that with a lot of wood chips and you can see some weeds coming through but it really does slow down the weeds you see compared to the background rate of weeds growing back here it just slows everything down enough that makes it a lot more uh easy to maintain using this cardboard plus mulch combination coming back in the fall i'll be picking up bags of leaves from my neighbors when everybody collects their yard waste into those big paper bags and i'll be bringing those out here and whenever i find a bag like that that's full of pine needles those are designated for the blueberries because blueberries like that acidity that's provided by pine needles so that will be the next layer of mulch that will be going on to this planting to try to give them the conditions that they like so one thing we try to promote in the forest garden is as high a diversity of plant life and the associated insect and animal life that goes with the plants there's a variety of reasons for this some of the plants are beautiful of course which is nice but it's also the fact that many insects specialize and they need a particular type of flower for their nectar source their caterpillars need a particular type of leaf to eat so the greater the diversity of plants in this landscape the greater the diversity of insects and that in turn leads to a reduction in pest issues on the property right now we're looking at cone flower which is a nice source of nectar you can see these butterflies using it right now by the time they go to seed that then becomes a source of food for finches and other birds that eat the seeds but these nectar sources they are also an important part of the diet of predatory wasps so predatory wasps very often they'll need nectar from their particular favorite flower as an adult and then having gotten as much nectar as they need they'll go find a pest insect and prey on that pest insect so you need a good supply of nectar in the landscape to have that population of wasps that are very beneficial in helping control the pests so these are japanese beetles and in the first year or two of the garden they were a major problem for us it was a big empty field and we had just planted tiny fruit trees into the field few you know tiny little saplings with a few dozen leaves each the japanese beetles descended you'd have hundreds of them on every single little seedling and they would eat every leaf and then the tree would struggle and push out a new set of leaves and they would eat every leaf all over again i lost some trees this way despite the fact that i was out here shaking the beetles off into a bucket of water removing them as fast as i could so that was an issue as time went on though the diversity of the garden began to increase including a bunch of predators that eat some of these japanese beetles when you're managing pests this way you're never going to eliminate every last beetle like that's not how nature tends to work but you definitely can blunt the population spikes in in insects like this and the net result is you just don't have the terrible pressure put onto your little plants so part of how this works is specific habitat for the predators that consume these beetles that includes importantly the blue wing wasp and this insect needs nectar from particular plants including goldenrod and things in the mint family that's what it needs when it's an adult but then when it's done being an adult it goes in the soil it finds a japanese beetle larva and it lays its egg into the japanese beetle larva the wasp larva consumes the japanese beetle we didn't have these wasps in the landscape for the first couple of years because there was no goldenrod which is a necessary part of their habitat but as the goldenrod started to grow every time it blooms you see it covered with these wasps and the number of japanese beetles on our our young fruit trees has declined significantly we have never had another set of young plantings knocked out by japanese beetles the way we did in 2012-13 in the subsequent uh however many seven or eight years we have never had an issue with japanese beetles and i think that's partly due to the increase in diversity and the helpful predators that now have a habitat suitable for them out in the forest garden here we have um coneflower and wild bergamot having germinated from seed providing important uh bee and other insect pollinator habitat the bergamot the one with the with the lighter pink flowers is also a very lovely tea it makes a slightly peppery tasting tea so a lot of the diversity uh native perennials that are out here were grown from seed like this uh black-eyed susan here uh and then additionally we do also plant some plants with it from division this is maryland senna which is a nice native nitrogen fixer with this you can dig that plant up cut the roots into like 20 different pieces and plant each one and the root will grow and it competes well in the in the meadow matrix so uh we planted things like this different asters comfrey uh just generally beneficial plants all over the property uh whether by from divisions or uh from seed [Music] so for the life of the project so far we've been in this location which is sort of a high-end dry top of hill type of location good for growing various fruits but more recently we've added a wetland location down in the woods which allows us to grow a whole set of other cool plants that prefer that wet soil and even growing in the water itself [Music] so this is the new wetland portion of the forest garden we just last summer dug this small pond that allows us to grow plants that like to grow in the water and in addition to that the the whole valley has a variety of different swampy soils that will be suitable for growing a range of plants that are adapted to that type of environment so we're very excited to see what we can grow in this new situation this is pickerel weed likes to grow in just a few inches of water and produces a very pleasant seed crop apparently i haven't had it yet as is the case with a lot of these plants but it comes highly recommended and i'm excited to try it we deliberately created the pond with a variety of different depths that give us a variety of different growing conditions to experiment with it gets about four or five feet deep over here which in theory can be more suitable for things like american lotus root which is another very nice crop and also provide habitat for you know some of the frogs and crayfish that like to live here here's a little water swale that comes in it gets sort of boggier and boggier as it goes along from a little bit drier up there and then wetter and wetter and wetter until it gets into the water we're very excited about these type of conditions so let's say if we try to grow ostrich fern here for the fiddlehead shoots by planting it all along this this little drainage way we can find out where its optimum growing zone is from a moisture point of view and then based on that information we can we can do our next plantings here we have some kind of frog or toad eggs which has been neat to see we built this pond and then immediately it became full of frog eggs and toad eggs which all hatched and and you had thousands of tadpoles i the water is a little murky at the moment from the recent rain but i can see many tadpoles in here from where i am they're kind of at the phase where they they have their back legs and uh still a tail and no front legs yet so we're looking forward to planting a whole lot of wetland loving plants down in here paw paws we've already got some of those started aronia swamp oaks of various kinds very excited to see what we can learn what we can grow as we continue to develop this new section of the forest garden [Music] so [Music] [Music] one of the things i love in the forest garden is the community garden area it wasn't something that i had planned on from the beginning but some of my neighbors asked if they could do some veggie gardening in the forest garden and it's been so great to have them here i've learned a lot about veggie gardening from them and they're out here bringing the place to life producing all kinds of great veggies it's been it's been a great partnership so forest gardening is not going to feed the world tomorrow that said i am quite convinced that we need to move in the direction of forest gardening and other agro-ecology practices that will bring us toward a future where ecosystems are restored and people are actually eating better than we are currently i'm grateful for the industrial ag system that provides us all this incredibly cheap food but it is displacing ecosystems at a global scale and we need to reintegrate with the ecosystems where we live small forest garden projects like this are not going to individually change the world but i think every project does have a role to play in increasing our knowledge and increasing the conversation about how we can better work with and benefit from the ecosystems where we live in this particular 10-acre spot in bowie maryland we have started to measure more systematically the yields that we are harvesting from this place so that we can learn how much food we're getting from this place and what works and what doesn't work so well we do need to move towards systems that both supply the food and restore our ecosystems we can't afford to continue indefinitely growing our food in ecologically dead zones it's a lifetime of discovery and excitement to figure out the plants and then the culture around those plants that can take us to a future where hopefully our ecosystems are restored at the regional scale wildlife habitat is improved water quality is improved and people are eating better so that they are more healthy and more integrated with their local ecosystem the amazing forest of the eastern united states [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Forested

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Length: 44min 2sec (2642 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 12 2022