How To Ensure Your Food Forest Feeds You Fast (And Becomes Your Backyard Emergency Food Supply)

[Music] ready in the old gardens looking for potatoes and i noticed there's some potatoes here oh what is going on with these sweet potatoes oh no something hungry was underneath the ground there look at that look at these chewed two bits let's try this purple one right here maybe you want better luck maybe they don't like purple ones that's a little better often with sweet potatoes i wait until the very end of the season like right before frost but i don't have a garden set up at my new place yet and i really have been kind of craving you know some homegrown stuff so came back over here today to get some cuttings and check on the harvest and see what's going on and so i'm going to pull a few potatoes and see what we got maybe maybe they will get some more we'll get some more than our chewed up something else chewed that something is going through here and feasting on the sweet potatoes i came over here and buried all these got them from the ethnic market just buried them all in here and now now i'm digging them up for youtube keeping it real oh look at that what a surprise at that how do you get how do you get potatoes this big in one spot and then you get a scary monster one like that look at right next to it there's a bad one something ate the bad one left me the good one that's fine i'm okay with that that's awesome we'll just bring a few home for now i'm gonna let them continue to get bigger because i'd like potatoes that are about twice as big as these i'll just pull enough so we can eat them for the next couple of days meals [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Applause] [Music] i just figured out the point of this video the point of this video is definitely i planned this out ahead that i that today we were going to talk about the root layer the rhizosphere of a food forest or grocery road garden system so now that we've pulled some sweet potatoes i figured out what the point of this video was which i had planned ahead definitely this is galangal a ginger which has a remarkable aroma it smells like the frangipani tree and i want this in our new gardens and this was planted a year and a half ago my friend elizabeth who i call liz even though nobody else does she says nobody's called her that in years and years and years and that's not what she prefers to be called so liz gave me this the long goal and i think it's gorgeous stuff we could wait until fall and pull it up but i want to put it in my garden right now let's see what the roots look like this clump has been spreading from one little piece over the last bit really loves the grocery road gardens let's see what we got come on go galangal kalangalpa oh i can't see anything at all there we go there's the there's the galangal right there that's the ginger and all we have to do is chop these pieces and plant them and it'll continue to spread each one of these will become its own clump and you know they take up a little bit of space but they bring a lot of beauty and you get these delicious ginger roots from them and if you get tired of them and you got way too many you can always use the tops for chop and drop because there's a lot of leaf mass there but even if you just had an ornamental garden these blooms when they really start coming in they smell amazing and it's very pretty tropical it's kind of in decline at this time of year and it still looks good one of the things that gets overlooked in a food forest system or grocery real garden system which is what i call my food forest under control system in a food forest system we often miss the calories of starches you know somebody might talk about oh you could get some you could grow nuts you know chestnuts or hazelnuts things like that and you can kind of replace grains with those which is true but you're talking about years into the future usually before some of those things start to produce and a lot of food forest systems are really heavy on fruit apples and pears or oranges or if you're down in the tropics jackfruit and mangoes which is great but a lot of us are not fruitarians we don't really want to be fruitarians you you can fill in a lot of other dishes if you have roots roots are the fast way to produce calories particularly you know if you're talking about doing a survival garden and your survival garden plans are based on a food forest you're looking at 6 8 10 12 years before the nuts and starches of that service system comes in unless you're in a tropical climate and can do bananas and plantains and harvest them green you're pretty much looking at a long-term thing but in this very young system which is less than two years old we have already harvested hundreds of pounds of turnips early cold season turnips rutabagas and daikon radishes granted you can't live on daikon radishes but it is a root and then a little later in the year we had potatoes in here white potatoes red potatoes they're fantastic now later in the year we've got this taro or malanga as they call it in central america and we have cassava in here we have our sweet potatoes in here we have the gingers in here we've had uh onions and garlics there's a lot of there are a lot of roots that we've pulled out of this system and a lot of meals can be made that will keep you full no matter what and you know this mulberry hasn't produced the first mulberry yet and this is a fast growing tree we're just waiting waiting waiting and there are a lot of other trees in here waiting waiting waiting we got a couple of peaches that's it but roots wheelbarrows full of roots so the food system is actually producing before and it's and it's easy to grow the greens the greens are a nice layer in here we've got all kinds of greens we've got chaya and we had turnip greens and we've had the sweet potato greens we've had other greens coming through here during the year but those don't really fill you up so the stuff that's going to fill you up that's the roots the root layer is really really important let's look at a few more got some onions right here onions are a root they don't fill you up per se but they're very good for you and they're really good to add to soups we've got our turmerics over here turmeric is very very healthy very very good for you and it produces pretty quickly there's the galangal that we were just pulling from more sweet potatoes coming through here more malanga slash taro coming through here if you're from jamaica you might call it dashing these cannas that my daughter sells in her etsy store we use them for biomass but the roots are also edible you could stew them and that is a decent carbohydrate source right there if you come back here i have yams crawling up this trellis this is diascoria pentaphilla from derrick claussen's nursery this is a rare yam that i'm testing out that will make an edible root beneath the ground you could put in apios americana the ground nut there's another good one you can grow the greater yam the lesser yam grow all kinds of yams one of my favorites if you are in a colder climate you can grow the chinese yam there's more turmerics in here somewhere in here oh i walked right past it somewhere in here i was gonna say we have some arrowroot this is arrowroot arrowroot's an easy to grow and a good edible very digestible starch it'll fill you up that's good stuff this is a cool part of the root layer this is actually the above ground root layer which is pretty weird these are the diascoria bulbifura the edible variety the cultivated version of the horrible dreaded air potato that's invaded florida this one you just harvest up in the air so this is great if you can have them climbing on your trees or you can make a simple trellis like this one cattle panel trellises work really well and you can pick these off and if we come down here past this other route this is jerusalem artichoke which is another edible root though it will destroy your digestive tract it's amazing worst experiences ever good to feed pigs and then you eat the pigs or cows these are the other the other one that i showed you in the previous video where i had my killer clown lens these are the chinese yam as eric tonesmeyer calls them yamberries these can be cooked and eaten just like potatoes but the additional benefit of this species is that if you dig up beneath the ground it has a big edible root beneath so you're getting these above the ground which you can eat during the season you can eat these early then when it dies back in the winter you can dig up a long snakey root which is so far as i know it's the only yam that you can eat raw the other yams are a little higher in oxalic acid i think it's just raining i need a uh an umbrella to put underneath to catch these guys in but it's a it's a multi-purpose so you're getting your starch above the ground and then you get some beneath you gotta be careful with these guys these are crazy they're invasive unbelievable eyes terrible i don't even know who would plant these things awful they just showed up here but it's a dual purpose food here beneath the ground and above the ground and as the years go by they make more and more bull bills because they get happier and happier and they get a bigger and bigger root so if you never harvest the root beneath it gets stronger and bigger and stronger and bigger and there you go good thinking my children brilliant so we just bounce them in here they could get dinner pretty easily off of how many of these there are here they're small but they're prolific it's like a berry starch here there's a whole bunch look at this i've been wanting to do this last year i let them all grow and i just took a few to plant and they dropped a few on the ground they started a few babies but they didn't make a ton but this year they already had a pretty good sized root in the ground so they're really popping and they're very pretty just don't plant them someplace where they're going to escape put them in the middle of your garden so they don't end up taking over your entire yard see i used to wonder why in the tropics you often saw a lot of food being eaten green like why would the thai eat green papaya why did hondurans eat green bananas why did you see so much stuff harvested early when it's starchy rather than when it's fully ripe and sweet where i would think oh that's the best and then i realized moving to the tropics there's sweet stuff everywhere there's sugar everywhere there's so much sunshine there's so much sugar that you kind of just want to eat something starchy for a change you want something that is is hearty and filling without always being sweet so you harvest some things earlier you grow lots of big roots that you could feed yourself on you know you can get tired of mangoes there are thousands of pounds of mangoes falling absolutely everywhere and thousands of pounds of papayas thousands of pounds of bananas you're like you know what i would like some starch that's some good starch right there especially in new food forest systems i like to tuck in cassava which is also known as yucca why y-u-c-a not y-u-c-c-a don't confuse it with yucca totally different yuka cassava tapioca manioc manahat escalenta this is a sweet variety of cassava i have multiple different types they're all sweet varieties and these guys fit in really nice especially in new food forest systems where you have a bunch of little trees you can tuck these guys in all around through the system so they catch lots of sunlight they like full sun but no matter where your food forest system is you can add roots as a matter of general principle now i know some some people will watch my videos and say but that's so easy you live in almost a tropical climate you know you're you've got like rain forest out there alabama is not really super super friendly to some of these tropical roots but i i make it happen because i love them but i'll tell you that generally if you can grow white potatoes you have a root available you can grow beets and you know those big mango mango versailles you can grow giant radishes you can grow rutabagas you can grow turnips you can grow all kinds of roots in your food forest system that will fill your stomach parsnips carrots i mean start thinking about roots figure out how you can fit them in and you may have a season where you can grow them all the way through the summer because you have a cooler summer my cool season vegetables are out and done may june it's over and then july august september october too hot sometime in october we start planting again usually near the end and then november december we start to get those cool season roots again and we only get potatoes in the spring and only if the spring is nice to us it gets often too cold and then too hot too fast so think about where your roots fit in and what your climate is and just apply it as a general principle if you add roots to your food forest or your grocery road garden system you've got those calories earlier on and they make a lot more sense in most cases than grains you can fit them into a smaller space you can get more calories if you're in a very very cold climate grains may be able you know that might be the only thing you're able to do except for maybe white potatoes and jerusalem artichokes but general as a general principle fitting those roots in they give you starches and calories so if you're interested in creating a florida food forest check out my giant massive book on creating your own florida food forest the hugely expanded second edition i think you'll enjoy it and it'll help you anywhere up into zone 8 but it's generally targeted specifically to florida it's generally specifically florida and the other book if you're interested in how i created the system of food forest under control that's the grocery roll garden system that is an inexpensive little booklet it's 9.99 it's called grocery real gardening and i'll put a link to both of those books below thanks for joining me think about your calories when you plant your food forest systems and what you're going to be eating this year not five years from now plant all this stuff for five years from now from 10 years from now plant like you're going to live forever but you want to get food in right now in case we have a bad fall if we have a bad spring if things collapse it feels really good to have a bunch of calories in the ground and i know that i have lots of calories in the ground and i want you to do that too catch y'all next time and until then may your thumbs always be green [Music] this one beautiful white potato and that's it where's it where's the rest of it that's it you

Channel: David The Good

Views: 123,470

Keywords: gardening, composting, David The Good, tropical gardening, food forest, permaculture food forest, permaculture design, permaculture food forest florida, david the good survival gardening, survival food forest, secret garden of survival, survival garden, survival food, survival food supply, emergency food supply, florida food forest, alabama food forest, forest garden, grocery row gardening, how to grow food, fast food supply, grow food fast, survival crop, easy gardening

Id: 42Rih3OWrhc

Length: 19min 30sec (1170 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 01 2022