From sod and rocks to an abundant food forest!! Tour our permaculture paradise.

good afternoon to you this is Angela with Parkrose permaculture I am coming to you with my 2020 permaculture food forest garden tour I've not made a full garden tour in a couple of years and I had got several requests to do that so I'm going to break it up into a number of videos because there is a lot to cover but today I'm going to touch on the front yard so I'm going to do my best to do a comprehensive look at permaculture in my garden the plants that I'm growing here and some of the steps that we've undertaken so if I show something in the video and I don't cover it sufficiently please feel free and leave a comment or a question and I will try and fill in any gaps so I I live in Portland Oregon and zone 8b I am up on the street so there will be car noise we bought our house 11 years ago and when we purchased the property the front yard was sod and the backyard was weeds and when we looked underneath facade what we had was no topsoil at all and subsoil and rocks so almost no organic matter whatsoever underneath the sod so the first thing we did is we sheet mulched the property with cardboard and brought in manure and compost that's the only time I brought in manure and compost and loads and loads and loads of woodchips and right away I started observing my property and looking at micro climates and where the water ran when it rained where the Sun was where the wind came from and thought about how I was going to plant based on that so permaculture I fell oh the 12 principles of permaculture and one of those is observe and interact right and another one is to make slow small changes so that first year I put in a fruit few fruit trees and a few pioneer species but mostly I observed after a sheet mulching that meant also to use the space initially I did a lot of annuals so this front bat up here was initially pumpkins and dahlias up by the street and it has slowly been cycling over along with everything else in this front yard - perennial food forest so I make no apologies for the fact that I love flowers I love aesthetic plants sometimes I get flak for having pretty plants as well as sort of functional plants and I really don't like that false dichotomy in permaculture there is a tendency culturally in in permaculture groups to focus on function over beauty and I don't think those two things are separate right here we're looking at an originate I can actually see a little tiny native beat on it it is a native in Oregon we are a certified backyard wildlife habitat so I have 20% native species in my garden here there are some holes so you can see there are baby plants there's a here which will fill in Rebecca and other herbaceous perennials and then also woody perennials in this bed that are all young that I put it in this year because I took out some quince and honey berries and things that were getting sunburned and or we're just not doing well in this location so I moved them so this bed looks a little sparse but that is because it is full of tiny babies which will get big and fill in the sort of keystone of this front yard bed is this plum tree here this is a stanley plum which is one of the first trees I put in as a tiny stick that I grafted it's a great Italian prune plum really productive I also think it's a really pretty tree it has a nice open shape underneath in this gild I keep peonies and honey berries and comfrey and day lilies so I'm looking for with that ascetic quality in the front yard in this front bed I'm thinking about a flower border cottage garden look to it because permaculture is often considered sort of a little bit fringe a little bit hippie even though that's not really what it's about because there can be that cultural over emphasis on function over beauty which again a false dichotomy there tends to be in permaculture a little bit of pushback from more highly manicured developments and getting permaculture in the city or in especially in suburbia so I really want to think about making the front yard look pretty so that it appeases my neighbors gives folks something to pause and look at and appreciate and then they look and see wait a minute this doesn't look like your typical front yard there's no grass there's tons of trees there's more than a dozen four trees here on the front yard and there's blueberries and currants and honey berries and joong berries and people start with the flowers and then they move in and realize there's a lot more going on so I used those front bed flowers as sort of ambassadors to do a little diplomacy in terms of making permaculture look more appealing and then also in terms of sort of being a gateway or a way to draw people into the garden so that front bed is getting reworked to serve that function more and I think diplomacy and education is a huge part of permaculture and it's not something that we want to neglect particularly if we are in a suburban or urban setting where we often have to teach people about permaculture in order to get them to accept the fact that our yard looks different than what we are used to seeing particularly in American yards okay so I'm standing underneath now a grape arbor please forgive my pruning job was not oh I was a little lazy in my pruning in the fall so I have two kinds of grapes under this Arbor and it is here because it's very very sunny and I needed a little bit of shade so I grow cannabis and Interlaken grapes both of which are table grapes in the front yard in the back yard I have other grapes so let's turn around here so Canada sand interlaken grapes they are really good table grapes really hearty they do well in my climate and underneath them so you see I have the plum tree here on the north side of the plum tree where it gets quite a bit of shade I have a current this is a pink champagne currant currants do very well and produce fruit in a lot more shade than most most plants so if I have a fruit tree that gets quite large I tend to plant a currant on the north side of it because I know it will still be productive okay moving on so if you look at some of my bed's over here you'll see that I have wood chips everywhere again deep wood chip mulch I use chip drop I also get them from the electrical utility I've gotten more than two-dozen loads of wood chips and as those break down they turn into humans so fruit trees and nut trees like a fungal dominated soil the best way to bring in beneficial fungi is those kind of fungi enjoy wood chips and tree leaves and things like that so I'm using all kinds of wood chips whatever I can get a diversity of them and then I'm also inoculating with mushrooms that I want to have including morels and king stropharia mushrooms and then those beneficial mushrooms that feed off of the woodchips will naturally come in with the wood chips that I'm getting so underneath that you can see I use a lot of ground cover and those plants in permaculture we and in food forest planting we think about the seven layers so I have one quarter acre here it's a big lot for the city but it's not a big lot and one way you can maximize your production is to think about planting in layers so in permaculture the bottom layer is going to be those ground cover plants like the native strawberries oh there's a little spider right here in my face okay so the native strawberries down here make a great ground cover I let them go wherever they want and they spread by runners and I'm always kind of sorry for the delivery noise I'm always pushing those runners around and trying to spread out where my strawberries are two kinds of native strawberries here I use a lot of cranesbill geraniums because they also make a great ground cover and they spread in they're not fussy um I use things like clover which is a nitrogen fixer and I use annuals like nasturtiums and Nigella that will sell so everywhere and are very carefree annuals so these protect the ground from evaporation from water loss and they also provide biomass as they die in breakdown so and they bring in pollinators or they provide food sources so that ground cover layer is the beginning of the first layer of the seven layers and then we want to talk about the the root layer so I grow things like radishes and beets around the edges I grow perennial leeks and I grow Egyptian walking onions and those things produce a harvest for me and sort of that just below the surface layer I also let as you can see here a lot of radishes go to flower because hummingbirds butterflies and bees really like them and then my radishes become a functional self-sowing annual I let them go to seed and I don't really plant radishes anymore above that layer we have the herbaceous layer where we grow things like comfrey and rhubarb and other herbaceous plants that are a little bit bigger provide a yield for me above that we have the shrub layer which a lot of times in permaculture that's going to be a fruit producer so berry bushes like blueberries but you can see here it's too early for them to be ripe but I have blueberries everywhere this blueberry bush is just loaded with blueberries it's things like honey berries here goji berry it's cousin wolf berry in front of it I have behind me pan slowly pushed cherries I have short Juneberry is actually June berries for my breakfast yesterday one in the backyard is more ripe than this one June berries are a North American native above that layer we have sort of a sub canopy layer and in my garden that includes some things that are still in that lower layer because they're not mature yet like feet joah I have three feet OS and those are very slow growing but they upon maturity will really be in that sub canopy layer but right now they sort of exist in that kind of lower Sharabi layer and mine are not producing fruit yet they did flower last year but I have not gotten fruit yet and they are this one is five years old and I have two others that are four years old so going into sixth year and bringing this stuff fifth year other fruit producing shrubs European currants and then I also have using my kids old trike to kind of prop it up because they get floppy have a number of Crandall currents which are native they're also called clove current so I keep one by the front door because they smell lovely when they're flowering so bug that layer we have the sub canopy layer which like I said eventually will be free Java for me right now that also includes paw Paw's and my Oregon curl free peach which is right here which is loaded in little peaches peach trees don't really get very big and then above that I have the canopy layer and that includes things like I have a purple robe locust which is also kind of a pioneer species and as a nitrogen fixer and it will not be here permanently I've gotten a lot of comments about that like do you know that these plants get really big and I do so it is here as a pioneer species it will get cycled out its here to provide some shade while my other canopy trees that are still in the sub canopy like my paw Paw's are not yet mature other canopy trees are things like Hudson's golden gem Apple the plums behind us things like that so those are the seven layers of permaculture food forest planting but there's also the fungal layer which I think we don't think about enough again I mentioned I've planted morels they love to grow an apple trees and king stropharia mushrooms there are other edible mushrooms you can think about in that kind of fungal layer oh the last layer excuse me I forgot is vines so here in the front yard that is my songs burrow that is my blackberries while these are canes and not truly vines and I do have productive vines in the backyard this serves that function because it is a vertical grower across a trellis I also have things like clematis and roses that are vines so in this front yard I have a really nice a microclimate because my neighbors have this big hedge and a pan across here so I bought the house I thought how can I use this hedge what is this gonna be good for I'm not like a chick in general a big fan of arborvitaes even though it's frequently used here in Oregon but it this hedge makes such a wonderful windbreak I'm really really grateful for it because it has produced a microclimate on this side of the yard so that I can grow goji berries very easily so that might be gelas which really do much better in a subtropical climate can handle the winters here I will note if it gets below 20 degrees Fahrenheit I do cover my feet Jo is in the winter because they're still fairly little it prevents my honey berries from getting wind burned because they're very prone to wind burn so when we're designing a permaculture thinking about those microclimate its having a windbreak for me that prevents slows down the wind coming in from the Columbia Gorge in the winter this way has allowed me to grow some things in this part of the garden that I couldn't otherwise grow so I want to talk about two more things up here I'm gonna walk through my lady's mantle there are a ton of bees out right now and I am in sandals and I'm trying not to squish bees so if I'm going a little slow that's why so this isn't a very pretty part of the garden um like I said we live in the city there's a bus route so in this part of the garden I actually had a sinkhole that I fell through a few years ago almost up to my waist so my neighborhood doesn't have very good storm drains and the city has been promising to put them in for a really long time but there's not good storm water control in my neighborhood and we live in Portland so it rains nine months out of the year so that's a really big concern so in permaculture we're designing for solutions so there's a cul-de-sac uphill from me across the street and there are water for all of those houses shoots down the main street and right into my yard and that because there wasn't a good storm system storm sewer system that ran into my yard and created a sinkhole right here which I fell through so the city came out and they took a bunch of measurements and they didn't do anything they just said oh we've got plans to put in more storm drains and redo the street beds in a few years and that has not happened so I decided to work in permaculture with taking a problem and making it a solution so I had a big hole in my yard I filled it full of tree stumps and logs and woodchips and made a giant Huggle bed and i mounted it up really high and you can see how it is sunken down and that's really increased the fertility in this area but it means I haven't planted anything actively in it because it's just logs but underneath here I finally have some so enough soil from the breaking down of the woody material I put in a Cali campus I tried for years to find Cali campus locally and couldn't it is Carolina allspice also called Carolina sweet Bush I think and it is a native in the eastern United States and it has beautiful beautiful flowers so that's gonna have some curb appeal you'll be able to see it from the street when it gets this tall so yeah not everything is perfect I'm going to show you one more thing that is kind of like I said I'm going to do a comprehensive tour so we got some good some bad some ugly I'm working up to some not pretty areas um in this part of the garden I have a young persimmon it is a Nikita's gift persimmon um actually it ended up having one of the main leaders I had two leaders broke and the tree has got some lien to it so I'm working on retraining it and propping it up figuring out what to do with it it is covered heavily with blossoms this year I can show you so if you look at my beds they are all built around one main fruit tree each bed is you can see here looks like we are gonna get a lot of fruit if all of these pollinated and it may drop it may drop these or we'll see so each bed I do have paths it can be kind of hard to see but I do hand pads and the raised beds are either Huckel beds or they are mounded beds and in the center of each of those is a fruit tree and in permaculture you create what are called guilds which is where you have one main keystone kind of tree in each bed and you support it with support species from those seven layers that we talked about throwing in annuals when I have space in a bed and as I'm cycling through moving from annual agriculture to perennial agriculture over time as I have space I still put in annuals this bed has Tomatoes winter squash summer squash beets there are also perennial vegetables in here there's herbs there's things like sea kale but while there's still a lot more sunshine I'm trying to grow a lot of annuals and even in some of my most mature perennial beds I tuck in annuals so have a straight like six bed system in the backyard where I grow just annual veggies but then I also am hiding them around and that means that my tomatoes are dispersed throughout my yard so there's less disease pressure because diseases have to hop farther versus intensive agriculture where you are a monoculture there is a very short distance for disease and pest to spread but in permaculture if my tomatoes are tucked in and there's a persimmon and an apple and an aronia berry separating my two Tomatoes those diseases have a harder time hopping easily okay so when we're looking at this part of the yard again it's all between the youngest tree up here I want to say is three which is this Nikita's gift and we're looking at some trees like this Hudson's golden gem Apple and the Crandall current underneath it and the rhubarb underneath it that are 10 11 years old so let me show you what it looked like when we first moved in also we have a really with a 1922 house that it has needed as much renovation as the garden has so that is an ongoing labor of love for modeling our house slowly I know I will get comments on it so I'll just say briefly yes we have two minivans I have four children and part of the planning of our property was that we are carbon neutral we sequester so much carbon it offsets the fact that we have two cars that are not incredibly energy efficient so I wish I lived in a part of Portland or had a situation or we could use public transport all the time but that's not feasible for our family right now so yeah I know I'll get comments about how can you be permaculturist and have a minivan but that's we bought our car used and we're driving it till the wheels fall off and we do sequester enough carbon actually for our entire family including some of a couple of plane flights I have to take a year and also we sequester enough carbon for my parents as well so that's important to me to be carbon neutral so this is what permaculture looks like when you first get going in these beds this is a Huckel bed so a year ago I'm gonna stand here and this is very not gorgeous view this strip here was the other half of my driveway so we took out half my driveway to deal with the water runoff problem from across the street and also to make more room for gardening so this was all a year ago driveway I had to dig out a ton of gravel and to bring in wood chips I buried a ton of logs I have a video about creating that the Huckel beds and I have little baby plants in here lowbush blueberries I'm growing some annuals like pumpkins in here Rebecca this is going to get a fruit tree in the middle of it I just don't know what yet and so because I'm thinking about designing for slow small solutions I want to plant something that we're gonna want the fruit off of and it also will fit well in this small area so 11 years ago this looked like this okay and one year ago so right here this will be a covered area for our recycling garbage doesn't look great now and this will be a greenhouse so this was a driveway last year so we're reusing the blocks they aren't squares so getting them to kind of fit together is a bit of a puzzle piece but they will form the foundation for the greenhouse using old windows old wavy glass windows and I'm going to work on that curb appeal so it looks a real sharp but I need a place to keep my citrus and my succulents that is not my parents greenhouse which is where they are currently living so and also so when I start Inca berries and tomatoes and tomatillos in February they don't take up my whole sunroom of my house I have a place to grow them so this bed here was driveway last year and it has artichoke and rhubarb a comfrey and cost meri volunteer potatoes which came in on the compost from a different part of the yard because I cold compost well let the bus pass here I have a bush chariot transplanted from another part in the yard so I made a video about bush cherries I'm struggling a little bit with them having brown rot this year but you can see they are almost ripe I do have quite a lot of cherries on this especially down low also supported by in blue false indigo which baptisia which is a nitrogen fixer other baby perennials in here so this bet I'm hoping will look really lush will overgrow the urbanite here and also it captures water so water runs off from across the street along here pools here when it overflows it runs down here collects here when this overflows it goes to there and so far we haven't stopped all of the water getting into our basement so in permaculture again we're designing for solutions I have a problem excessive water when it rains coming off me bring properties how do I deal with that I created a way to slow the water and sink it into the soil and I create plants that will happily drink up that water so that has solved that problem for us without needing to put in French drains or do some other work we suddenly no longer have water in our basement and we have more garden space and more food so that's a look at my front yard I'm sure I missed some things this is the smallest part of the garden so tomorrow I will come back and work on my side yard Gardens and then we will start going through the main part of the orchard and that's why I keep my bees and my chickens on my ducks and the rest the other 30 fruit trees that I have in the garden so I will be back I hope you all got something out of this tour of our 11 year old food forest the first part of it and I hope you come back for tomorrow's video please please like this video if you got something out of it and please share it with your friends please ask all the questions I'm really trying to get those questions answered in the in the comments or in another video so I am going to check out here before my neighbors get their power tools going and I'm going to go feed my chickens and check out my bees and I'll be back tomorrow thank you

Channel: Parkrose Permaculture

Views: 19,431

Rating: 4.9486632 out of 5

Keywords: permaculture, food forest, forest garden, polyculture, perennials, cottage garden, fruit guilds, abundance, resilience, organic

Id: ak7ZIt4jq90

Length: 26min 46sec (1606 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 11 2020