From Dirt Lot to FOOD FOREST | Wood Chip Garden with 200 Fruit Trees in the Desert

[Music] welcome everybody to the 18th annual urban farm fruit tree program and today we're here with jake mays hey buddy welcome to my yard thanks for having us you know when you propose that we actually shoot a video out here it's like this is live action stuff no we're gonna jump in we're gonna see his yard we're gonna see the four stages of wood chip breakdown we're gonna see what he does with the wood chips we're gonna talk about mace mix you know i'm really sorry i can't be there with you guys in person but this is going to be a cool experience for folks out there watching to see my yard in person and i can show you guys out there watching what i'm growing how i'm growing it what's thriving what's not it's august in phoenix yeah it's hot and this summer was 120. yeah this you know what i've noticed the past couple of years is that it's gotten harsher in the summertime i think that it's getting harsher you think the colds are getting colder and the hots are getting hotter no i think the hots are getting hotter here but we didn't we haven't had a freeze for the past two years here in phoenix in the phoenix area yeah so that that's actually good for the tomatoes and the citrus and those kinds of things in the you know in the wintertime so i i have noticed that and one of the things that we really need to do i've seen over and over and over again is we need to shade your trees you need to put in nurse trees so uh you know trees that kind of cast shade yeah like she's like acacia there you go like that uh you need to put in lots of wood chips you need to cool your microclimates down don't try and put a fruit tree next to a block wall without six or eight or ten inches of wood chips through the entire space or three feet of wood chips like i've got here or three feet of wood chips yeah well i want to show you guys should we come on a journey let's do it let's go on an adventure in my backyard food for us food jungle for all of you gardeners out there who are beginners or experts there's a few things that i do that everybody should adopt when they're gardening especially where we are in the desert and one of them is using fruit trees with in-ground gardening with raised bed gardening using a lot of wood chips i put wood chips everywhere in my landscape using the native bushes and native plants with native trees with heat tolerant and drought tolerant plants in your garden so first what i want to show you guys is how i'm using wood chips to supercharge the growth of my fruit trees to conserve water to keep the mud and the weeds down and to also build healthy soil that will feed those trees when i get one to two years into the wood chip process i'm gonna show you guys how wood chips break down over time and i'm gonna show you the exact soil that i use for fruit trees and hopefully you guys will use it too and have a little bit of success in your gardens even if you're a beginner so first let's talk wood chips how i'm using wood chips where do i get wood chips and how the witch has break down into healthy soil over time this is the back corner of my backyard if you guys don't know i do an entirely edible landscape i have over 200 fruit trees here on just a third of an acre and i'm in the heart of tempe so my neighbors just have a traditional 1970s neighborhood with rock granite rock front and backyard landscaping cactus and native bushes and plants i've chosen to do an edible landscape with plants that will work in the desert and also some that i'm experimenting with and one of those experiments a few years back was papayas and they do really well here i'm finding out so my papaya trees have given me over 75 fruits this year so far and this is important for you guys to see because you can't just put a papaya in native soil native clay and then walk away you know it's an infant and you're trying to put the infant in manhattan and usually an infant will die if that's the case it has to have a parent to help nurse it along and help it to grow up strong in the city okay and trees are like that so when i planted these baby papayas i put them in the ground with some special soil and i put a ton of mulch around the trees so right now as you guys can see there's this kind of kind of a foresty kind of environment here and on top it's all this fresh mulch which i'll put in this hand right here if i dig down a little bit lower if you guys can see over here as i get down lower and lower you'll start to see some of the white that's on the wood chips and now my hands are hitting some moist soil there's even some stuff like grubs if you guys don't get grossed out from grubs he'll come alive in a second all those grubs and insects and you know beneficial fungus they're all necessary to make healthy soil so if i pull this handful from down low you can see how the mulch used to look like this in my left hand and now it looks like this in my right hand and if you guys pen back a little bit what you can't see or you can't feel is that in my right hand in this hand i can feel all the creepy crawlies hitting my skin right now and growing and crawling all around in my palm because it's full of life this preserves the soil that's underneath so one of the things i do one of the reasons why i can't be there with you guys in person today is i'm backpacking 40 miles in northern arizona right now and when i do my backpacking trips no matter where i'm hiking or backpacking i'm able to see how nature grows a garden and i dig through the pine needles and through the broken trees and through the mulch and you can see how nature is growing veganically using mulch like this to create soil like this so if you guys are going to use wood chips pile it on baby pile it on especially in the desert don't be afraid of rotting out the tree because we're in a very dry climate put the wood chips on top of the soil only and layer it like a lasagna month by month season by season year by year and over time you'll get this stuff which the trees love and the bugs love and then you can get papayas to grow in the desert right next my papayas still in the tropical corner of my yard are guava trees and i found that guavas or guayabas grow very well here in the desert i got a couple of these guavas from greg peterson's pop-up tree nursery and they take the cold very well and the heat very well so this is prime guava ripe season right now i want to show you guys how the trees produce the fruit so this one was from greg peterson pop-up tree nursery from about three years ago it was a little tiny like 10 guava tree and now it's this nice looking tree that's about i would say 10 to 12 feet tall and if i go down low here every morning i come out and there's little guava donations that the tree drops and gives to me i love that guava donations i'm not the white one kind of like a pear consistency but it tastes like tropical juice like if you were to get a tropical caribbean juice at the store when i'm done i give it to my tortoise leo or i throw the extra piece just back into the roots of the tree cover it with some wood chips and that becomes nutrition for the next season over here is the pink guava let me show you that one if i go down here you can see how this morning these guys dropped and these are the pink ones that are my favorite favorites if i chew this one oh my gosh it's pink on the inside these taste amazing they're so good and these guys ripen sometimes in the spring if you can overwinter it i've seen some mature ones in arcadia with the floodier gated properties that mature early in the spring and sometimes they mature in august so you might even get two crops a year out of them and that's the secret nobody knows about the coolest thing about gardening is not growing beautiful trees or plants it's eating the food and all my hard work comes to fruition right now petition it comes to fruition right now okay what i want to do right now is i want to give you guys about 10 trees that i think are vitally important for desert dwellers to plant in their gardens 10 trees they're all edible and they're really important so get out your notes and write down these 10 trees and before you ask me if papaya or avocado or banana will grow in the desert you must prove yourself worthy by successfully growing these 10 trees first and once you can you can up the ante and grow the more fun stuff so number one tree for arizona is date palms date pumps they grow in the middle east which means we can grow them too but they're notoriously difficult to find to cultivate and to get the fruit to come to harvest you gotta know what you're doing but if you find a fruiting female date palm that's the key fruiting female date palm you're able to produce 200 to 300 pounds of fruit per year potentially okay next on my list is the female fruiting carob c-a-r-o-b this guy was planted about two or three years ago and has grown very big he's in an area in my yard that's very exposed exposed to wind sun freeze and he does great this is going to be the biggest tree in my yard eventually and carob the female fruiting carob puts legumes off that are kind of brown in color and they taste like a chocolaty bean so they're a chocolate substitute so if you want to grow chocolate in the desert don't grow a cacao tree we're in the desert if you are in hawaii do that but in the desert grow carob because then you get a bean that works well it takes freeze and takes heat looks beautiful you can put a tree house in it eventually and it will produce chocolate like beans for you and your family to enjoy the next tree that grows so well here in the desert is pecan there are several varieties of pecan this one was a bare root tree which means it was just a stick with some roots hanging off of it i put it in the ground and now five years later we have this nice looking tree they do grow big but they do grow slow so you have to be patient with this i'm a very patient man i've been waiting hard and this year i've got about 20 or 30 pecans off this guy last year we only had three for the first time ever so every year that goes on i'll have more and more of a pecan harvest and come two three years from now i'll be making pecan butter and pecan pies for every vegan athlete in town next on my list is mulberry but here's the thing very important to get the female fruiting mulberry and of all the mulberries that i've sampled the pakistani one is my personal favorite it's a big long berry and it tastes like syrup in fruit form it's very delicious they usually fruit all of march in the phoenix area this one here is the purple pakistani mulberry they grow rapidly so if you want a parent tree and a shade tree the mulberry is also your best bet okay next on my list is anything native this is crucially important if you want to have a successful edible landscape when you guys go see greg peterson to find out what fruit trees he has in his pop-up tree nursery it's going to be important to protect those urban farm fruit trees with the native trees because the native trees don't need any water they can survive off native rains and they can take 100 of the conditions that phoenix weather have to throw at it so this one behind me is an iron wood tree i planted years ago it was a seven dollar baby ironwood and now in seven years has grown to this size the ironwood tree the same as the palo verde tree they all have edible flowers so the edible yellow flowers of the palo verde and the ironwood's flowers are edible and when they put up the the bean pod the legume it's also edible you just pop the pea out don't eat the skin pop the pea out when it's ripe but in green and eat the pea on the inside it tastes like edamame from a sushi restaurant especially if you put a little bit of pink himalayan salt on it you'll blow your friends minds with how much knowledge you have of your native environment so let's make a list mesquite for the edible pods you can turn into flower shoestring acacia for the edible pods palo verde for the edible flowers and pods iron wood for the edible flowers and pods and the desert willow tree for its medicinal value creosote bush which is used medicinally as chaparral for its medicinal value even the flowers of the ocotillo not to mention the fruits of all the different varieties of cactus like the nopalitos prickly pear of saguaro guys anything native you live in the desert plant desert appropriate trees that i just mentioned and you will see that they will insulate your food forest and make everything else you grow thrive hey guys so the next one is fig i think figs grow great in the desert you'll see them all around arcadia this one's a tiger panache fig mission fig go find yourself some fig trees they go dormant in the winter and they'll give you the most delicious fruit you've ever had in your entire life i already mentioned it earlier but guava is also my top 10. you can see this nice cluster right here we got the baby fruit the one that's still two weeks away from being a ripe and when they turn yellow like this one they'll pluck right off and then oh that's too good i got breakfast next is pomegranate or in canada where i'm from we call it a grenade or pomegranate has dozens and dozens and dozens of varieties find some that you like and plant one this one's angel red i also planted parfianca they go deciduous in the winter and they ripen the fruit around the same time that oranges ripen the next one is called chinese date or jujubee and this jujube also goes deciduous and loses its leaves in the winter but it takes the heat of the desert like no other tree it's amazing and the fruit of this one falls down onto the ground i just kind of bend down here and take a few jujubes they kind of look like dehydrated red giant raisins i'm crouching under the shade of this jujube tree this one's a different variety and if i pick a fruit off that looks like this and i pick one that looks like this same tree same fruit this is about a month behind this maybe like two or three weeks behind you can eat it like this it's crunchy like an apple it's sweet like an apple but not as juicy if you let it dehydrate to this where it's kind of spongy that's where i like it because now um it's like eating a donut hole with a pit in the inside do you suppose this is where the name of the candy jujube came from maybe i was wondering about that yeah it's so good and greg was even saying how has a slight chocolatey taste so as is customary you've got to share with the camera person so here you go greg thanks plant a jujube you guys will not be disappointed i would say four or five years ago i went to greg's nursery and i got a few citrus trees a mandarin a tangerine and a grapefruit and i wanted to create a citrus hedge like what greg has at the urban farm that's what i did now four years later we have this thriving citrus hedge full of fruits this one this tangerine is a clementine tangerine it's so delicious my favorite citrus tree in the entire yard what greg says and what i believe is that citrus are powerful because the fruit stays ripe on the tree for months and months and months if you plant an apricot you've got two weeks to pick it and then the fruit is over but a citrus can stay there for you know one-third the year and you're picking the fruit that whole time and the last one i know it's a little more than ten but it's really important are these guys that are towering above my front yard here once you guys join me i'll show you guys what they are these trees now that i've had them growing for four years are kind of like a native they put off these seed pods that inside there are the seeds and you guys can get these seeds from jakemace.com we sell a pack of moringa seeds and these moringa trees have leaves like this and this is the power of the moringa this like that i like that the power of the meringue this is the power of moringa this is one of the most nutrient-dense foods on the planet every leaf is edible and it's basically a multi-vitamin some research online says the cure to cancer who knows you can eat the leaves when the bean pods are green and small and young you can eat them like green beans the bark can be used as an antiseptic like aloe vera and the flowers are also edible so we're the time of the year right now where the trees begin to put off flushes of new green leaf growth because of the monsoon rains and all the seed pods they produce the amazing seeds that look really incredible and no joke if you guys were to plant this seed and start growing moringa tree in nine months the tree would be 15 feet tall i've had this experience at least half a dozen times so far so if you guys are interested in doing moringa only five bucks go to jakemace.com get a pack of seeds and you won't be disappointed it's definitely one of the keys of growing a food forest here in the desert one of the lifebloods of my garden is right here this pile of wood chips that was just delivered because we had some pretty intensive monsoons last week and the tree companies decided that they had an overabundance of wood chips so i tell them that instead of dumping them at the landfill where it costs them money and it just produces methane and carbon into the atmosphere bring it to my house and i'll turn it into black gold compost people often watch my vegan athlete youtube channel and they comment down below my videos jake why are you always sweating all the time well i'm doing videos like this for you guys when it's 120 degrees outside this tree tends to like that heat it's called an acerola cherry or barbados cherry i planted it in the ground about three or four years ago and it's really an important tree because i want to show you guys the four kind of stages of wood chips and i show this demonstration when i do live gardening groups or tours of my landscape and people really see how witches break down it's very impactful to them so i want to show you guys right now so the fresh load of wood chips i just spread is on top and it looks like this it's in my hand right here see how it's all full of sticks and wood chips big chunks it's looking pretty raw and not broken down let's hold it in this hand then if i take my hand right here and just brush the top layer away like a little brush like a lasagna or a cake or an onion there's another layer so when i grab this layer i see some mycelium in there you do and look at how they look different so this one here is about three months in and this one's fresh and new so this one in this hand has been through a full season so far and look at how they're different this one in this hand i'm kind of crunching right now is all broken down and this one's still raw and one of the best ways you can break down your wood chips is to have dogs because the dogs and the friends and family that walk on it their weight their body weight breaks it down from this into this and the coolest thing about all that white inside this hand called the mycelium or the mycorrhizae is that it can talk to other parts of your yard so it bonds to the roots of the trees and it allows your trees to communicate share nutrients and kind of talk together we think that we're the first people to invent electricity on the internet but plants have their own internet and electricity called mycelium now i'm going to take the second handful put it over here and we're gonna dig a little bit deeper so let's go through that layer and go a little bit lower in here now we're gonna go about a foot down oh it's getting warm in a good way so now as you guys can see the coloring begins to change the texture is less coarse and more fine almost like coffee grounds this hand is getting black and getting more broken down this hand is still a little bit brown and raw and this hand what you guys can't feel is that i can feel roly-polies and worms crawling on my skin because they're trying to hide underneath the soil that's in my hand so this one now is full of life and this one is still preserving that life much like you put a sun shade in the windshield of your car this is the sun shade that protects all the vital stuff that's on the inside okay this is the third handful let's get the fourth stage i'm gonna dig right next to the tree a little bit deeper in here and go lower oh my gosh look at all those roots and now that is very fine and this is what the tree is growing in this is what the roots are growing in this one in my right hand here is the lifeblood of my trees and so when i say to you that you want to water your trees effectively you also want to feed your trees effectively and this is the food right here this is the beginning of the food right here let me put all four stages together so you guys can see them side by side and see how the witch has break down over the course of about a two year period okay it's powerful when you guys see them side by side so here's the four stages we just talked about this one is the raw wood chips look at how we've got chunks we've got chips we've got some leaves we've got some bark this is called growing veganically when i go on a hike in the forest this is what the forest does trees fall down guys the bark falls off leaves drop as the seasons change and it forms this and this is the top layer that protects everything that's vital down below this also conserves a lot of water i would say about three or four months in this is what happens this one and now we can see how it's starting to have some white mycelium the mycorrhizae i still can see some of the chips and some of the chunks and some of the leaves but it's significantly more broken down than than this this four months later that but then we go about six months later and boom now some of the chips fell down below but you can see how the coloring changes and this now all that black in there if i were to sift this in a sifter that would be the compost that you buy from the store so this is like worm castings and compost made by mother nature through breaking down wood chips and see how they're different in color and then boom this is what the trees roots are growing in look at all this white that is the pure mycelium full of bugs full of beneficial bacteria and fungus full of worms full of feeder roots because the feeder roots thrive in this of the tree and what's really powerful about this is it's really spongy and we call this the hummus the forest hummus this is the stuff that's really expensive when you buy it from a store you guys don't need to buy it you can make it yourself just by putting wood chips on your landscape i've become over the years kind of a connoisseur of soil and wood chips and my family thinks i'm a psychopath they come over and i'm like let's go outside and check out my dirt and they think i'm crazy but it's really cool process when you're a gardener and you create this out of this in just about a one year period look at before and after this is a free resource that they're going to throw in the landfill anyways and i've just told them come dump it at my house boom from this now we have this and this that's the good stuff baby right there you know everybody is asking greg and myself the same questions when it comes to wood chips where do you get them scorpions do they bring in the scorpions and do they bring in the termites and my answer is i don't know no no no just kidding i'll give you guys some inside track where do you get wood chips many different ways okay one way is you can just open your ears and listen to when you hear people around landscapers chipping trees i've had at least three or four loads of wood chips delivered to my garden here that i just found some landscapers who were chipping trees and i said hey those look pretty good do you want to dump those at my driveway instead of the dump and they're like yeah because we'll save two hours of time and 150 bucks they have to normally go down to the dump wait in line pay money and they lose that time when they could be chipping more trees so they dump it at my house to save some money number two is you can go to craigslist or to aps or srp and see if you can find somebody on craigslist or the power company who's offering wood chips number three is this new website or app called chip drop dot in and i have been managing i'm the moderator of my urban gardening and arizona facebook group speaking of that if you want to join please do it's a great facebook group for gardeners urban gardening in arizona we have 30 000 members and the members talk about chip drop dot in being a great resource for getting wood chips takes about two weeks number four is to be cool like fonzie because if you're high maintenance the wood chip guys who are the salt of the earth guys will never drop chips at your garden again okay if you have demands on them like it's got to be here i only want half a load those aren't that good they're not going to come back you've got to trust them a little bit you've got to clear your driveway out and then once they're dumped you got to move them into your landscape within a week or else your neighbors will complain so the goal is to be cool with the landscapers make it easy for them to drop the entire load when they drop a load of wood chips it'll be a four or five foot tall pile that spans the whole length of your driveway so make sure that you guys realize it's a lot of chips i have dumped over 55 loads of wood chips so far on my property that were that size what you're looking for to tell them is you want a clean load write that down do you guys have a clean load of wood chips hey do you guys this week have any clean loads of wood chips because that tells the chippers that you want just the wood chips you don't want sticks and stumps and rotting citrus and trash all that other stuff you want just a clean load of wood chips and typically when the wood chips come to you they're not from diseased trees typically they're from trees that just got cleared out of an area or a monsoon just came through and they're chipping up all the debris so they're usually freshly chipped trees and folks often ask me jake how about oleander or citrus trees it's all good i think that if you were only spreading oleander for years and years and years you may have a problem but when it's a potpourri of different kinds of chips natives oleanders the ficus trees when it's the eucalyptus when it's the palo verdes and the mesquites and it's all potpourri of different kinds of chips it will all break down into the black gold hummus that you want now the other two questions that greg and i are both getting are does wood chips bring in termites and my answer to this is no the wood chips don't bring in termites but everybody in phoenix has got termites regardless right so even if you are living on the sidewalk you have a rock landscape in the front and you have no wood chips you still might get termites so i have found no evidence so far that wood chips bring in the termites i have a few theories one theory is that the wood chips bring in such a well-balanced ecosystem of insects and bugs it helps to kind of balance out the bug kingdom the other question is scorpions i have kids or i'm afraid of scorpions does the witch's bringing scorpions well my brother john who lives in phoenix bought a new house for him and his family and he didn't have any wood chips he had grass and granite rock on his landscape like everybody else does and he had so many scorpions he had to make it almost a sport for three weeks to go out at night and kill scorpions i have been spreading wood chips in this way for five years i have three feet of wood chips all over my property i have only seen one scorpion in the past five years and that's it and so i have found that wood chips create a more well-balanced ecosystem they don't bring in the pest bugs they bring in a well-balanced bug kingdom that's going to help you pollinate your fruit tree flowers pollinate your garden it's going to help you have a thriving edible landscape and you got to imagine these trees are going through a chipper like that movie fargo they're going through there so nothing alive is getting through that wood chipper and if it does when it goes in your landscape you know the geckos come in the lizards come in the butterflies come in the worms come in the millipedes come in the cockroaches come in the flies come in when you guys were kids i know for a fact that you all had lizards or fish and if you had fish you had to create an aquarium and if you had lizards you had to create a terrarium you had to create a living ecosystem for those animals and when you're gardening you have to create a living ecosystem for your plants just like you were a kid if you guys stick with me to the end of my presentation i'll show you guys one of my favorite parts of my yard which is my koi fish my koi pond that i installed which is an integral part of my edible landscape as well but i want to talk about what i call mace's mix not because i'm arrogant but because it's the soil that i use in my garden for fruit trees and growing a raised bed garden i'm gonna leave the wood chips here as a visual aid for you guys but behind the wood chips i'm gonna put the components that i use in mesa's mix when i'm planting a new fruit tree i of course use some of the native soil so when you guys dig the hole you want to dig the native clay or whatever is in your ground out of the hole and save it on the side in a wheelbarrow it's very important when the hole is dug here are the things that i put back in the hole with the tree one is this stuff right here this is locally made organic we call it the biodynamic active compost and this was made here in town in phoenix and so wherever you guys are at if you're in phoenix i would recommend trying to find western organics grow well compost or any local person you can find who's doing their own compost in town the reason why it's powerful as a gardener to find a local person who does compost or to do your own compost is because when you put the compost in the hole with the fruit tree it's alive when you go into a big box store who i will not mention in this video you'll find that corporate america exists on the shelves even in soil and there's 20 different kinds of soils there they're mostly just a bunch of dust because they're just dead in a bag they've been sitting on the shelves for months and months and months they've been shipped across the country there's no power in that soil you're gonna pay 20 for dust find somebody local become a local vore support local but also for the betterment of your garden you want living soil that was just created hit up greg peterson's pop-up tree nursery he's got all the stuff you need right there and include compost as a key component when you plant your fruit tree i just recently had some expert gardeners come through my garden tour and they told me that they were told not to put compost in the hole with a new fruit tree because that might train the fruit tree's roots to stay only in the hole so they were taught that you want to use 100 native clay so that the tree gets used to it and is encouraged to grow out and then i asked these expert gardeners well how many fruit trees have you guys planted at your house so far and they say well we haven't yet we just got certified i said well come back to me in three years when you've killed every tree that you put in your yard and you'll put some compost in there so trust me i'm no certified expert i'm a school of hard and lux guy you guys can see my resume on my youtube channel through videos i'm vegan athlete but what i'm doing i'm thinking is working so far because i'm eating the fruit off the trees and to me that's success the next key component for fruit trees is this stuff right here it's this black gold and look at the difference of texture and color between this stuff which is called worm castings as opposed to the compost so the compost is like a very nutrient dense stew if you were to eat a really nutrient-dense stew that was incredible tasting full different kinds of foods that's the compost it's the stew but the worm castings is the wheatgrass shot i want you guys to all leave this class today and go to whole foods or a juice bar and get a shot of wheatgrass and knock it back that is nutrients for your blood this worm castings is nutrients for the tree and the roots and the soil and this is going to be a potent way to feed your trees what greg has got here he brought some worms and worm castings from his own vermiculture setup at his urban farm and look at the worms in there dancing around so this is also what you can do at home you can do your own worm bin you don't need to paint anybody anything you can just do your own stuff and be completely diy self-sufficient and these guys will do all the work for you i used to have a worm tower and now through my wood chips the worms just find a way you know like jeff goldblum said in jurassic park nature finds a way the worms find a way into the soil so now my entire landscape is one big worm bin next is this really important product that's inside this bag you guys can get this from greg here today it looks like chalk if you guys forget you can also get some of these gardening products at my gardening store at jakemace.com so go check it out let me know how you guys like the gardening store but greg has got the mesa mix right here today if i pull my if i pull some of this out of here you'll see how it looks like white chalk like the chalk you would use when you were rock climbing at the rock climbing gym and this is really finely powdered chalk and what this is is called rock dust and rock dust can be a different combination of different kinds of rocks that are all powdered up and this brand is called azomite that's the brand name a to z of minerals including trace elements so the rock dust is crucially important because this is the minerals that the soil needs to be effective and so all the microbes all the bugs they're processing and eating and breaking down this rock dust into nutrients that the tree will use to grow so when you guys eat food from your raised bed gardens from your in-ground garden or from your fruit trees that has rock dust in it you're now eating food that's been remineralized it's more healthy than donald trump can ever purchase even if you're a billionaire you can't possibly purchase food as healthy as you can garden i say this in all my gardening tours and talks because that's the power of gardening even if you're buying organic food from the organic grocery store who knows if the soil was mineralized you guys can mineralize your soil using products like this rock dust and this azomite has over 70 different kinds of minerals in it next this is how you can jump start a newly planted fruit tree this is called the mycorrhizae or mycorrhizae or mycelium and this brand is also at jakemace.com it's a really good brand because it has different kinds of mycorrhizae in it what happens is that you put this in the hole with your fruit tree and when water hits it the microbes begin to live and their civilization begins to explode so this is a way you can jump start the life in your soil and create that white web of mycelium in your ground the cool thing is that this bag only costs like seven or eight or nine bucks and you can use it for like seven or eight trees you just go in here and take about an ounce or like a spoonful and put it in the hole with your fruit tree that's all it takes to supercharge the earth that the tree's gonna be planted inside now then i have this little chunk of brown goodness here and this is really important because this is an alternative to peat moss if you guys have heard of peat moss my mom told me a lot about gardening growing up and she used to say you got to put peat moss in your soil but the problem is my mom didn't know is that peat moss is like oil it's not renewable once it's gone it's gone and i want to use renewable things in my soil so coco peat or coconut pith or coconut core c-o-i-r is a great product which is spongy it's renewable from coconut husk and they make it so that it conserves water in your soil so this does not have nutrition in it for your plants it just is built for water preservation so when you guys put some of the coconut core or coconut peat in your soil it's going to help reduce evaporation which in the desert is very important i want to show you guys what the native clay looks like in my garden so here's my native clay my native soil it's just pretty much clay because this is old farming community out here that they built this suburb on back in the 1970s so we have the native clay all here that really looks kind of like kind of dusty great for cactus great for natives but not the best for fruit trees so now you guys know what the secret mace's mix is when i plant a new fruit tree i put a combination of the clay the compost the worm castings the rock dust chalk the microrhizae and the coconut pith when i dig the hole for a new fruit tree i use the native clay to create a berm around the hole so that the water stays in the tree's root system okay so like a raised little mound around the hole with the native clay what greg is suggesting to do is like 40 native clay and then 60 percent the other organic matter which can include a combination of the compost the worm castings the rock dust the mycorrhizae and the coconut peep but here's the thing when you plant a new fruit tree only like one spoonful of this mycorrhizae only about one shovelful of this coconut peat only about two shovelfuls of the worm castings and only about five six seven eight nine tangible shovelfuls of the compost so you gotta kind of eyeball it and know how is your soil is it rocky is it clay-like contact guys like greg go to his tree nursery and ask him in person what does he suggest maybe bring him a shovel full of your own soil to show him what you got if you guys want to know exactly what i do if you go to jakemace.com there's a green card you can get that has the exact breakdown of what i put and how much of what i put in my new fruit trees once the fruit tree is planted it's crucial that on top of the soil on top of the soil you put the wood chips don't put the wood chips inside the soil put it on top of the soil and let them break down naturally over time the cool thing about my urban gardening and arizona facebook group is that i get to see pictures of you guys gardens on there and a lot of you guys plant a new fruit tree and put a little tiny a little tiny bit of wood chips on top it's not enough at least six to eight inches up to three feet pile the wood chips on and make the wood chips go really really big around the tree and when you think you have enough triple it once the fruit tree is growing and established and you're watering it you want to water it more frequently when it's newly planted and young and then less frequently but deeper as it grows and becomes more mature i have organic fertilizers that are heavy with sea ocean plants like kelp and seaweed that i will add to my fruit tree seasonally this is from jakemace.com i have a foliar feed that's cold pressed and organic made from kelp and seaweed extract that i mix with water and i spray on the leaves of my trees seasonally because trees can absorb minerals and nutrients through the leaves what do you think that the haboob is the haboob the dust storms that's nature blowing minerals into your garden for your fruit trees what i want to do now is i want to show you guys some of my favorite areas of my yard and show you some before and after shots of how my yard looked before and what it looks like now this is my favorite area of my garden it took me three years to build this i had no idea how to do this i just basically took some classes with some pond people and watched a lot of youtube videos and i have this koi fish pond with all my babies in it and i don't have kids right now so these are my kids and they get stuck on my fingers you guys scared them they're all rescued toy fish from families who couldn't keep them anymore off craigslist the cool thing is i'll drop a small pump in there about three times a year and i'll pump the nice healthy fish poop water into my fruit trees and the trees love that and the combination of wood chips all the nutrient-dense soil and the koi pond is how i get my avocado tree to grow pretty well here been the ground two years he started out one foot tall and now he's over 14 feet tall and he gets beat up in the summer and then thrives in the winter in the spring one of my other favorite areas of my yard is right here because i can look out and see the date palms and the neem and the carob and the mulberry and the pomelo trees the citrus and it's just really good for the soul to see fruit trees and you get to enjoy the fruit at the same time that's why i put my vegan athlete training system out here so i can keep getting strong as i'm growing a thriving garden i also love this area full of dates mulberries and mesquite and that's why i put my ninja warrior chorus out here so i can get strong and enjoy nature all at the same time i also love when things like this happen one of my date palms got its first cluster this year i pollinated it with male pollen i thinned it out and braced it on this branch now i'm about to bag it protect it from birds and then about two months from now i'll be eating my first ever dates that i grew my backyard it's been a two and a half year process to learn how to do dates i'm so excited to eat these ones and you know when they're ripe i'll eat them with you guys on the vegan athlete youtube channel hey you guys out there i call my followers who love to garden my triple because you guys are the fruit tree people and we have to show the rest of humanity how to grow food at home so that we can live organically and locally in our front in our backyards what you guys will find is that when you become successful growing an abundant amount of food in your front your backyard it saves you so much money it allows your health to skyrocket you need less pills less of the western medical system you don't care about the affordable care act as much anymore if you're eating healthy food that you grew yourself as i close out i want to thank you guys for your interest in gardening i hope you guys decide to grow a front backyard food forest full of gardens and fruit trees because in today's world i believe that voting with your dollars is the most important thing you can do and when you spend your money on your front your backyard on yourselves you're giving power back to yourselves and you're becoming the best example of what a local person can be so guys take your money invest in a fruit tree invest in the trees i mentioned here invest in a garden if you guys want to grow from seed i have this great company that we started called seed bank box go to seedbankbox.com and we'll ship seeds right to your door it's only 20 bucks sign up for it and try it out thank you guys for coming into my yard today i hope to meet you someday in person get out in nature and hike grow a garden it'll keep you healthy it's good for your soul and it's good for your stomach and your muscles and your skin and your organs your blood and your entire well-being at the same time if you want to follow me on a day-to-day basis of what i do and how i garden come to my instagram jake mace tai chi join my urban gardening and arizona facebook group and you can find all that stuff at jakemace.com including my vegan athlete youtube channel just go on youtube and type in jake mace or the vegan athlete you'll find almost 500 videos about gardening living healthy and growing a food forest from scratch right now i want to show you guys some before and after shots of different parts of my yard i only have about a third of an acre here so it's kind of bio-intensive but it's really amazing on the process of how this place has been reshaped the last seven years so let's cut to some before and after some more pictures from our videos and i hope it will inspire you [Music] do [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] do [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Off Grid Athlete

Views: 93,944

Keywords: garden, gardening, vegan, gardener, backyard, arizona, phoenix, compost, soil, desert, urban farm, urban garden, wood chips, woodchips, azomite, rock dust, fruit tree, fruit trees, jake mace, vegan athlete, vegan garden, veganism, veganic, permaculture, raised bed, raised beds, raised bed garden, raised bed gardening, raised-bed, food forest, urban farming, urban gardening, tour

Id: QfK2mIposr4

Length: 47min 58sec (2878 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 05 2017