Syntropic Agroforestry System | 1 Year Update

HOH everyone it's Paulina here from offgrid hawwaii and in today's video we are going to show you an update of versent Tropic Citrus Orchard in this video we're going to share what's been working and what hasn't been working as well as address some of the questions and comments that we got in our previous video so right now it's spring so the orchard is definitely in need of its spring intervention and we'll show you guys how we do that as well and definitely stick around for the end of the video because we're going to be doing a really fun experiment where we test out four different fertilizers three of which are homemade and one which is store-bought we're going to test these out on some plants that are kind of struggling right now and it's going to be really fun it's we're going to have such a good time so definitely stick around and watch the whole video but before we get into all of that we do want to address the first question that we've received about the Orchard and Michael was going to answer it hey guys Mike here this first question came just as we were planning out this video so perfect time the question is from Heidi shm 9965 I'm super interested in seeing if you mapped out the plan things here on paper first can you show us the paper plan great question I did plan everything out on paper first so come on in here and I'm going to show you how I did it so the first thing I did when I was planning this out is I wrote down all the food crops and mulch crops that I wanted that's in this column right here here then in the next column was the time that they'd be in the system the P is for permanent that' be the Citrus and things like glar aidia but then there's other stuff like papaya and banana they'll only be in the system for part of the time in the beginning this third column here is the size of all the trees now the citus trees might want to get bigger than 10t but I'm planning on pruning them to 10 ft I don't want them to get any bigger they are all DF trees so they shouldn't get too much bigger than that um but this is the room that I allowed them in the Orchard and everything else is kind of like that's the size that they're going to get at their full maturity this next page here is kind of like just the layout of the trees this is the size that they would be at their full maturity uh each block equals 2 feet so each tree is 10 ft and then really the only other thing in this that's on the paper is these which is the glar ayia and they've been staggered with the uh Citrus just to give more room um very basic on this one here this design so this last page here that I'm going to show you is what I predicted everything to look like 6 months from when I planted it so the Citrus here are still small the bananas are going to get much bigger um everything underneath this is like the under story same here this is uh other row which is uh mainly for mulch it's going to have the Glaros cdia pigeon pea there's also going to be some food crops in there but this pretty cool because you guys will get to see like what it looks like in real life um and what I envisioned it would look like when I was planning it out um the main thing is to just see if everything's going to fit and the different layers so we have kind of like an overstory with these crops and then an underst story with um pineapples so that's the drawings what I planned out thank you for the question again I had a really great time answering it could have been a much longer video but you guys probably want to see the orchard so let's get [Applause] going [Music] summer all right so here we are in the orchard right now and we're going to address some of those other questions that we had so if you saw our last video about the orchard you'll know that we harvested a ton of caboa pumpkins and those pumpkins were grown volunteer and we had a beautiful Harvest we pretty much sold half and like ate half and right now we just have one tiny pumpkin left that we're probably not even going to eat but the question that we got was actually by somebody called offgrid Neighbors 808 which is actually another YouTuber on an island that whose videos we started watching which are pretty good um definitely check out his channel offgrid neighbors 808 the question goes do you guys have any issues with pickle worm or Blossom RW with the pumpkins thanks for the video you're welcome and the answer is no we didn't have any issues with the pickle worm or Blossom rot that we noticed up here we definitely have had it in the past with um other patches of pumpkins but it's never been a significant issue for us we've always been able to have like a good amount of pumpkins growing now not sure why but when we've tried growing things like cucumbers and zucchini we have seen a lot of pickle worm so they're there but for some reason the pumpkins that we were growing didn't really get affected by that and then there was another comment we got which was kind of funny it was by team cautiously extreme 872 who we have met in real life hey nice meeting you and they're com comment was super cool guys great video but it's killing me you weren't pulling out the Mimosa Pika it is my sore an enemy and I Must Destroy it and I wholeheartedly agree because that plant is so annoying and it really really hurts you that's the Sleepy grass that when you touch it closes up so in the last video we said how we weren't picking out any of the weeds we were just going to let everything grow I was telling Michael that we should definitely pick the mimoa because it's awful and he's like nah just let it grow it's all good but lo and behold as time went on and we tried uh getting in here and like actually doing work intervening in the orchard the mimos Pika was just like so annoying and scratching and just getting in the way so Michael and his mom ended up coming in and like pulling it all out and yeah definitely pull that out if you have it growing anywhere where you intend to be growing uh a garden dead so yeah I didn't want to pull anything out in the beginning but it was a mistake in the beds there was a lot of other weeds and while I was trying to weed that to to get more Mulch on the ground every time you stick your hands and you get pricked by the stuff and it doesn't really hurt that much but it's just really annoying and so we had to pull it all out of the beds anyway there's probably some still in the pathways that I didn't get which I don't really care about because I'm not weeding in there by hand it's just mowing in the path what about walking barefoot so if you want to walk Barefoot just watch your step so as for the other weeds here like the pathway they get mowed every other week and it's starting to get really thick in here it's got good grass I mean there's a lot of weeds too but I can just mow everything in here and works out great allows us access to everything else as you can see it's really getting thick the cotal area is burying our trees so that's why we're doing an intervention today to see what's on the other side of these cious this one's [Applause] really so right here we have some of the sugar cane growing as you can see it looks beautiful this variety was given to us by our friend Ashton Comes Who just has a gift with plant propagation and maybe that's why they're doing great or maybe it's because we are taking good care of them and these would be ready to press um we don't have a juice press though so if you want to give us one let us know in the comments just kidding or if you know where we can get a pretty cheap one somewhere let us know and we love them [Applause] this cotal area is doing really well and the only thing we wish we did was put it a little further away from the main crops the Citrus when I laid out the rose I did about 4T sections and maybe like a foot deep of uh our soil Cinder soil compost I intended for them to be 2T away from the citrus trees but they ended up being like a foot because the way the soil was which made them a little bit too close to the Citrus so before these are even at the height where I'd want to cut them they're already really crowding the Citrus so in the future when we plant more of this or do more of these projects we're going to definitely move the cotal area out a little bit two maybe even 3 ft from the the main crops so this hedro would be further away that would allow us access in between the main line and the mulch line and then we could just like work down chopping and dropping real easy rather than working from this side and then um going in so here I am in the row where we planted all the bananas in between some of the citrus trees and as you can see they're doing pretty well and and they're about like 15t tall right now um we've even gotten some kis out of these mother clumps and planted them in the other rows as well and these bananas are here primarily for mulch purposes but they'll probably start producing a rack of bananas within the next year which is really awesome cuz we like to eat bananas especially with smoothies so in this spot in the first video there was a tomato cage here and we had Tomatoes they did really well we got a lot of tomatoes which is nice but now it's taken out we took that out and we did have ginger planted here and here that Ginger we we um harvested and it was really nice to have it's one of our favorite drinks to make is just like ginger tea so it was really nice to have our own so instead of bringing the tomatoes back this year I took I harvested the ginger and put one ginger in the mid middle now with the turmeric over there um one other thing we found that was maybe a negative is it was planted too close to the citrus tree and when I harvested it it was really big clump of turmeric and I feel like I was um you know messing with the roots of the Citrus too much so I don't think I would plant turmeric as close to the Citrus uh again so this a pretty good example of a niche in time where we still have time in between this tree and this tree and the space here we're going to hopefully get another nice Harvest of Ginger right here I don't feel like it's too close to the Citrus if we're digging around in here the roots probably won't be here too much yet also if you notice this is the row that does not have any cotal area it just has the county mulch we do need to add something so I have planted behind me a row of Mexican sunflower and it's spaced really far off so that I can be walking in between here and then just grabbing the Mexican sunflower putting it down on this row here instead of it being super close I think it's going to be much easier to manage and I might even put another row on the other side so in the last video I had a pro tip for you to take all the lemons off this is another very important thing thing you must do with grafted trees see this right here this sucker it's a below the graft so what this is is the root stock it's not a lemon H this is a this is a Myer lemon I think the the uh check mark faded off but I'm pretty sure it's a Meer lemon this right here however is not a Myer lemon it's a trifoliate and you could tell by the leaf it has three leaves there and all you got to do and it's very easy if you catch these before they get out of control is you just go like this pluck it right off say goodbye in the last video we mentioned we were going to be planting pineapples in our mro our mro consists of glare city as the long-term crop but also we put in some papayas and pigeon peea to fill in that space while the cidio is getting going we also planted this pineapple in these other plants are kind of like an overstory which is going to protect the pineapples from like the really hot midday Sun but in the earlier like not early morning but morning and after afternoon uh light is going to be able to penetrate in and we can always uh trim the canopy a little bit to let more light in kind of um we have control over how much the pineapples are getting in the the past I've seen when you give them full sun they kind of get bleached out I know a lot of people grow pineapples in full sun though but it's a bit of an experiment growing them in a little bit of shade we've had experience with getting good pineapples that were grown in partial shade that's what kind of gave me the idea to do this here but anyway they all got in we got about 30 pineapples mostly white pineapples there's some yellow ones in here too um also in this row is lemon grass and it's filling in pretty good it's been helpful to have this as some mulch um we have you know these other plants around they give us mulch but the lemongrass is also a nice one to tuck in there and keep uh the weeds down the weed pressure a little bit lower so the question that's probably in everyone's mind is how are the citrus trees doing and to answer that they're not doing amazing they're not doing terribly but they're not doing amazing and what we found is that most of them have been putting out a lot of flowers and like trying to set fruit and they're not really putting out much new growth and more leaves so right here I have one behind me this is a Fairchild tangerine and you can see still pretty small pretty short um it hasn't really had any new leaves since we planted it and and it did try to set some flowers at some point um so what we're thinking is that they need more nitrogen so today's intervention is definitely going to involve feeding them more nitrogen Rich fertilizers and adding in more of that mulch from The Mulch crops and hopefully that's going to help out and we'll see some good results in our next update video what are you [Applause] mixing mixing what we're going to be feeding the trees so I don't know if I want to tell you guys yet what they are cuz this is part of the experiment too but basically this is all of the things that we're going to be using in the experiment later but to feed all the citrus trees we're just going to mix everything together and give them a little bit of everything I know all these work and they're all good the experiments to see which one's better but for now we're just going to feed all the trees a combination of all those things looks nice write in the comments if you want to guess what they are before we tell you yeah this is one of them can you guess what it is this is another and the other one I did mix in there it's more chunky like this so three things is there home homemade three homemade fertilizers or plant foods are you going to put any starbot no um the store bought stuff is a backup plan in case what we do here doesn't really get the trees going then I can go over later it's it's a liquid fertilizer and we can just do a drench soil drench with that later so that's our backup plan all right these trees are hungry let's get to work there get a closeup what is this stuff what is this gooey stuff I'm so hungry give it to me give it to me another thing besides fertilizers that is really going to jump start the growth of the citrus trees is what is called a pulse prune this is when you mechanically prune plants in order to simulate a natural Windstorm this intervention triggers the pruned plants to send carbohydrates and exat to the ground th feeding the microbes which in turn will make minerals by available to plants also the pruning is believed to trigger the release of growth hormones that send the signal to the neighboring plants to grow link below for more information so we're just going to take one blue bunny tub worth of our Magic Mix and spread it around the tree over there over here WID spread and then we're going to be covering it with the mulch we're getting from the cotal areia and anything else that we've been mulching here so we cleared everything out first just so we can get in there to spread the uh the mix and then now we're just covering it kind of like a hot dog we got the bun we got the Buns on each side and the center row is where all our food crops are the Citrus the cassava sugar cane all that so it's like you get two Buns of mulch with your hot dog in the middle so we just finished up one of our rows of citrus we don't have enough time to do the video and do everything so we're going to get right to the experiment but before I do that I just wanted to share the types of tools we use this is a sickle and some people call it a rice knife but this helps out a lot the one downside is I haven't found a way to carry it conveniently on my body maybe I got to get some kind of holster um but also we got pruners from Falco these are the cheapest ones they make but they are really good and we both have a pair really like them and the last thing we didn't use much of but a silky saw links to all of this stuff will be in the description if you are curious about them maybe want to pick them up but yeah basically pretty much all we use or need most of the [Music] time and now the moment you've all been waiting for our fertilizer experiment so our first one here well let me tell you about what we're going to be fertilizing about 2 weeks ago I planted these tree tomatoes and they really haven't greened up I have some back that are still in pots which I fertilize and they look really green and they grew a little bit but these ones I guess I didn't put enough down or may I don't know if I put any thing but they're not looking as good as the ones in pots so we're going to fertilize them with these four uh fertilizers and see which one does the best first one up worm castings these are pretty much pure worm castings these worm castings came from somewhat of a Johnson shoe uh static compost pile basically put everything on top and what's coming out from the bottom it's just kind of spills out is all these worm casting it's pretty much made from the Indian Blue Worms that are not native but they're they've been here for a while established and also the invasive jumping worms which which I guess aren't too bad here because we're in a subtropical environment I have not heard anybody really talk about them much until we put out our other video where some people saw them and that's what got me curious about worms so I had to do a little research and I found out they're really bad in some areas but they don't seem to be a problem here but basically the Indian Blue Worms will go and get the really rich like nitrogen rich food sources and then the Asian jumping worms will come in after and eat you know everything that's um left over they're more of like carbon eaters and the blue worms are more like nitrogen eaters anyway so we got here basically two cups of worm castings and just going to sprinkle it around like so later on we're going to come through and put Mulch on top of everything we're not going to just leave this exposed it's going to seal it in there and help it to last longer also protect it from getting washed away in the rain because it's been raining quite a bit so next one up here is a fertilizer I make using chicken manure and biochar I don't want to get too much into detail about this cuz we plan on making a video this is what I think is our most powerful homemade fertilizer so video about this is coming up but basically it's chicken manure and biochar and it's pretty strong so this one may be the winner we don't know I don't know same amount I'm using just filled it up halfway in 16 oz or two cups definitely it has a uh chicken manure smell next up is one you guys might know of we made a video about this the only difference is this has been made in a dry environment so this is our urine mulch ferti izer the one you saw in the video that's been out in the elements it gets wet it's not as strong as when you keep it dry so if you just use the urine and dry Mulch and keep it covered it's a lot stronger so that's what we have here same amount as the other ones same thing here 16 oz of urine mulch Bo so for this one I'm going to put a little bit of mulch down first because this one is a liquid fertilizer and this is something that I have brought plants and trees back from the dead just by using this you know like I think trees are about to die use this and they come back to life they grow leaves so what it is is a combination of fish hydracy and kelp liquid kelp so I used probably a tablespoon of fish hydrate and maybe the same of the kelp actually it smells a little bit like what was in here it was what is it blueberry Elderberry cranberry juice but also smells strong like fish and kelp so we're just going to do a similar thing around and then cover that with more mulch smell [Music] it all right guys the Sun is setting and we need to close out the video so thank you so much for watching all the way through and definitely let us know down in the comments if you have any questions or anything you'd like to see in our next update video which will most likely be in the summertime and in the meantime don't forget to like share and subscribe to the channel if you want to see more videos like this from us in the future it really really helps us feel happy all right [Music] bye

Channel: OffGridHawaii

Views: 5,827

Keywords: offgridhawaii, Syntropic agroforestry, Permaculture, Puna, Hawaiian acres, Fern acres, Fern forest, Fruit, Orchard, Garden, Organic, Permaculture design, Citrus tree

Id: WaQknBNiUS4

Length: 27min 42sec (1662 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 07 2024