Mediterranean Permaculture Food Forest - John Kaisner The Natural Farmer

hi i'm john keisner and you're watching the natural farm so what you see here is the top of our 6 000 square meter food forest here in the mediterranean if you check out our website at johnkeisner.com you'll see that we are located on the northeast coast of sicily which is basically right in the middle of the mediterranean basin this particular food forest contains almost 150 fruit and nut trees of almost 100 varieties it's about three years old it's got a water harvesting system i'm standing in the bottom of one of the swales that's why there's no weed growth really in this area because there's standing water for the most part of the winter here but all the other areas get the benefit of that water and then they grow up nicely really happy with the amount of ground cover i practice a combination of natural farming and permaculture which means that i allow nature to decide the ground cover i bring the moisture and she takes care of the rest so to speak the biodiversity here in sicily is amazing but i just wanted to take you through basically our food forest this back part of what we're doing here uh just to kind of give you an idea of of how we've laid it out uh we've got like i said swales running through the land that was the first thing that we did and then we've made paths so you can kind of see some of these paths running through here on both sides and then we come up through the paths we got another swale there we cross over the swale we come up and up and up and up through these pads in our food forest you can see i just love these early morning weeds with the light shining over them but you get really easy circulation all the way through this food forest and it creates such a amazing little environment just to be in and to take your kids around in and just spend time here and recharge get out of the house and recharge and as you can see here things are very very natural and this really saves time energy effort even money because instead of meticulously look at this what's grown in here this is lemongrass down here we've got these wonderful little yellow little flowers coming and it's just a very satisfying place to spend time because you get these natural expressions happening all around you and here in the mediterranean the key is water water water water and these these weeds are not only beautiful and pollinating and creating more density on the land but they're protecting from the sun at this point and then when we chop them and drop them they'll enrich the soil again and again and again every year and then when we stimulate that with animals it goes even further in enriching the soil so i mentioned animals this is how we keep our chickens the animals stimulate they benefit from the insects from the plants plants benefit from their stimulation here's a gel sole which is a mulberry tree white mulberry it's got a fruit set it's ripening up just a little ecosystem functioning but we do move them all around the food forest i mentioned the swales before i just love these flowers all this growth around here spontaneous growth this is a pond we've got six of them on the land here none of them have liners they're all just held waters held by clay this is a dry rock wall i'll get back to more of these later this is a temporary storage tank this pond won't last all summer while the water is here we pump some of it up into this tank like during the winter fills and drops and fills we keep that later for irrigating these young trees in the dry dry dry six months that we get here so that's another particular thing about the mediterranean but the the life boost the humidity boost the activity boost that these ponds give and their edges give are really really really wonderful wonderful things i highly recommend them they won't stay around all summer and that's just you know was expected when we made them but with their limited presence even they completely changed this landscape for the better so now it's time for a quick coffee break so now we have a couple minutes i'll take you over here and we'll have a little chat so i want to have this talk on this bench because i want to emphasize the importance of this bench this bench is essential and its placement is essential not because it's on this spot or not but because it's in this food forest and since it's in this food forest and i wait for my coffee and i sit and i look at the view i can appreciate the work that i've done i can stop find the balance between work and rest i can look around i can think about the next steps that i want to take maybe i write them down on a list in permaculture the rule of thumb is we reflect for 100 hours before we work for one hour now that's a bit exaggerated but the point is we do things in a thoughtful way when we do things in a thoughtful way we inevitably conserve time we can serve energy we conserve frustration we conserve money we conserve resources we can serve waste we can serve a lot of things our actions count for something right meaningful actions with reflection rather than meaningless repetition or maybe imitation or whatever that's what we're aiming for i think my coffee's ready so i mentioned earlier the dry rock wall over here this is a dry rock staircase with the weeds everything growing up through it uh really really lovely happy with the way that turned out we got another one over here i'll show you here's the other one you can see this this stone is a good sized stone huh they're actually kind of dry boulder staircases and they were moved with a baby excavator a friend of mine named nico fantastic excavator operator and it was abandoned rock pile here and we didn't know what to do with it for for years and that's part of this process as well is not everything in a master plan is going to turn out as you want sometimes there's we want to leave room for spontaneity we want to leave room for some adjustments and sometimes you have a big question mark you don't know what to do for a while but then you just kind of stay patient and things work out so i'll show you the rest of this and continue the story so back from the staircase things move around on this band we keep these pretty clean okay obviously temporary water storage tank pond in the middle we added abandoned pile of rocks when they opened up the land here and down below they had to take out a bunch of boulders these boulders didn't know what to do with them so they threw them on here we tried to barter with them they're not valuable enough to be really of any worth to anyone here they're not pristine rocks and so for some years i had no idea what to do with them it would cost money to take them away i knew they could serve something we dug this pond over here we discovered some rocks started stacking them up and then the aha moment came and we decided to do some dry boulder walls here we're very happy with the way it turned out this tank will go there'd be space for structure up here parking etc it's got a view of the sea but these dry boulder walls really add a whole other dimension to the land that wasn't there before so layer after layer we add these things in and it really enrichens the experience here i'll take you down below at the entrance so i'm walking down the gravel driveway toward the entrance of this back part of the land food forest and we've got again this dry boulder wall which has now grown up quite a bit we don't keep this as polished we don't keep it as clean we could we're going to make some decisions about that but when a person now before it was just a slope now when a person enters they get this big like a prowl of a ship boulder encountered it sets a good boundary here and you've got that sweeping line up and then the pond is hidden back there we're gonna have trees grow up and you've obviously got these wonderful wildflowers growing here and as you can hear there's the street we live in a residential neighborhood so how to negotiate these decisions when you're surrounded by three neighbors takes precision it's not just out in the middle of nowhere where you can do this or do that nobody's really affected to be really think about the gestures we got a pond right there just on the other side of this person's wall that's got to be precise got to be done well these rock walls have added so much to this land in just a simple usage of what was already there they would have cost a lot of money to import would have cost a lot of energy to import they were there we used them it didn't occur to us how to do it immediately but over time we figured out how to use them and we're really really quite happy with the results now and of course no food forest visit would be complete without showing a little bit of food at least these are the almonds uh they're almost ready let me see if one of these this is my favorite thing to do with my daughter in the food forest we walk around she says that almond and i break them open and inside there's a little tender almond that i give to her we'll see if it's jelly still in time yup still too early we've had a very late spring but kids fruit trees learning growing up together is a amazing combination feel very blessed and grateful for that so um it's all here ready to happen so the last thing i want to end with here and i hope it's not too funny to have my coffee here but i do have the coffee i want to finish it since we started it together um i want to emphasize the point that all of the stuff that you've seen here was done by one guy that's me i designed it executed it i maintain it i don't have a team of people out here volunteers or otherwise okay i don't have a landscaper this is possible because i knew that that would kind of be the situation here from the beginning and so i designed it that way you can design it that way you can design low maintenance by working with nature you can design these things and then with the help of an excavator operator we were able to realize these things okay that's not to say you can't invite people absolutely invite people and enjoy the land with as many people as you possibly can but what we really learned during the pandemic was the fact that since we had such independence set up in the design from the beginning that even in a pandemic we're still okay even when nobody can travel nobody can help us that's important makes a big difference in terms of stability in terms of independence that's the first thing second thing is we have not yet used any city water or any well water we've only used rain water here i did that because i used to work in india and i used to see borewells 300 meters deep dry in certain areas abuse of groundwater and i made a decision many years ago that i was going to make a demonstration site even in the mediterranean where it's dry where we're not going to take any ground water we're not going to take any city water so the ponds pump up into the holding tanks that gets used later on okay when i finally get a building permit have a big cistern here those temporary tanks will disappear sustainability independence um comfort i won't lie to you it's a lot of work in the beginning like raising a kid right raising a child takes a lot of work a lot of time a lot of dedication a lot of love a lot of patience you put that energy into it and then slowly they gain independence they grow up and as the system stabilizes as the trees grow up and the shade comes etc etc you get that's why i'm drinking a cup of coffee right here because you get the time to chill out a little bit and stop running and running and running and stabilize and benefit from that stability so we're very happy with this um you know our website now contact me write me down below uh when things loosen up come visit it's a pleasure for me to do this work it's a pleasure for me to to give this information to you so um i think that's it my name is um my name is john kaisner this has been another episode of the natural farmer i'm really happy that you're here and i hope to see you again real soon you

Channel: The Natural Farmer

Views: 103,752

Keywords:

Id: EDhEs4ZRGbc

Length: 14min 50sec (890 seconds)

Published: Thu May 20 2021