THREE Permaculture Systems (You’ve NEVER Seen in Real LIFE)

here in Montana where zone 4 we're going to see negative 22 negative 30 even negative 30 - but we believe that harnessing keys from Mother Nature we might be able to produce Gro zone 6 zone 7 plantings by protecting them from those harsh winters through various design strategies ok whoa black rats where you want to pull this one there you go pal Oh give it a tug you like that thumbs-up thumbs-down yeah and she goes up lingers up here with mr. Brown and Tim South well ABC Akers we're going to find out what a fed you as well I think we just found out sort of or at least we saw the fruit of it blackberries are coming but what is a fetch that's right what does that mean I mean a food hedge right we were noticing through observation in the first couple of years that people were not very productive with the the perimeters of their fenced pasture you know there was always that four five ten foot that just was unused and so we knew we were going to be fencing up my yard this is my personal yard that's the outdoors and we have a water feature we want to keep the kids in so we had a fence up but we wanted something aesthetically pleasing we want something that was productive and so we thought could we create an edible element along the interior fence that we could grace because animals like to graze neat and so to humans were part of that system here we have a variety of red raspberry it's already been harvested and so we've got some new growth coming on we transition to the black raspberry as you can see we're getting some fruit starting to turn black and be harvestable to transition down here we've got our aronia berries you can see we've got some fruit coming on there we have some forsythia we've got some mock orange in the back row that's competing from from that standpoint we have different varieties of our raspberries we have currents coming in more raspberry four big raspberry fans we have probably 450 linear feet of raspberries on this 1500 foot run got current you'll notice we've got some nitrogen fixers in here I didn't mention it earlier we've got Siberian pea shrub so if something that's going to grow up facilitate growth of the the fruit bearing got some nine bark we've got mock orange here you go and that to you these are Annie golden raspberries tell me what you never had a going raspberry Wow really sweet that's their best raspberry this is the one weakness to our deer fencing the deer come underneath there's no Mario Brothers fan that's right super Mario's Rose fan I apologize that I would generalize we never we have automatic gates on the farm and I can let people in and out by my cell phone so that someone coming in so here's the exterior here we have some rose hips coming up a essential of medicinal uses teas whatnot it's here but you'll notice they're very thorny and so the deer will browse but they don't get in too far because it's not comfortable silver wolf berry we've got going here you can start to see the mature hike that we want to get from our roses we've gone to a different variety here and apologize it's probably it's going to be the woodsy or the prickly not 100% sure we've got lilacs on the back row here we're going to have 10 12 foot lilacs in time they're going to dominate this space and what's interesting we're looking to nature to dictate who finds their niche and how they grow we're not going to manicure this one if the lilacs want to take over everything let the lilacs take over if it's the roses so be it we're going to be very hands-off with this with this system we've got some nine bark back there again pollinators lots of silver wolf very dominating a space why maybe the soil system is just the way it wants it and that's okay we planted on one foot spacing 1500 feet really tight we could have gone five foot spacing but at a dollar a tree we just decided let's go tight if we get some mortality through up predation through voles so be it this is going to take over and be real thick hedge and on and on and what we go so you know just another way that we're partnering with wildlife we want to see them but we don't want them to challenge our interior so we're giving this to them here mr. brown go and raspberry those are the gate we have sand you have sand you can stand on your hand let me just put it in your mouth [Music] is it good the question is do you want another one not that good huh I don't get it so you blackberries all day bitter but this is sweet you're gonna like [Music] just not what you're doing this morning you catching anything yes a Blanche I guess that count you can't eat a branch though yeah we've got trout in here up to 18 inches long these are expert fisherman gets just pitches branch thank you oh yeah thread it out real nice lady now we're not going to talk about the chickens again we've done that in the last two videos but what we don't want to miss buck he's calling them the Pied Pipers calling it babies here and here they come a-runnin but we don't want to miss it's right next door three bells so let's go get inside of them with Tim right now and see what's going on because I know it's just not for just kicks and giggles absolutely not you know in permaculture it's about observing and reacting and install we did a site analysis on this eight acres the first year and a half we were understanding where the prevailing winds were coming from south southwest we were looking at where the north winds were coming during the winter months we were understanding where the elk and the deer came up and migrated through the property and in doing that it allowed us to design not only fencing but planting that only embellished or increased the productivity of this this pasture and so we created these tree belts and now you can do a single one row tree belt or tree run we chose to do four rows and in doing that we wanted to wart the effects the negative effects of the wind so in the south in summer when it's coming out of the south we're getting a lot of evaporation from our pastures that means we're irrigating all the time if we developed a block to that wind or a great reducer to that wind could we potentially have to irrigate less less labor less electricity the same time if we're Bale grazing and keeping our cattle in this pasture at the winter time and they're getting blasted by the north winds could we potentially shelter them from that and if that's the case they don't need so much fuel they're not using they're not losing as much energy so are potentially are how much hay we need to put up or acquire from a different farm is less so it's by reducing operating costs that we can see better profits in how we design these tree bells and if you want why don't we pop inside and we'll talk a little bit more about it while we're in in and about all right so we find ourselves in tree belt four we have six tree belts in the eight acre past year behind me is approximately due west due east so we're running them in an east-west pattern because of the prevailing southerly winds and the winter North wind's but it's not a straight linear run we've actually created like a Charlie Brown angular run and there's reasons for that one we get summer storms with a lot of wind and lightning that push in from the West so by creating these niches the cattle in time will be able to get into some of these little alcoves that will protect them from the wind at the same time during the winter months excuse me during the fall months you've got leaf drop which can allow for slowdown of winds in those particular areas to drop and collect biomass some organic matter to just build the fertility in the soil so there was a reason for that that being said why don't we just go venture here to the north side of the tree belt and we'll look at row number one and what we've got going on we have a black locust nitrogen fixer followed by a maple tree we follow this pattern the whole way through Row one locust maple locust maple four different kinds of varieties of maple we have Norway red silver and sugar the plan is we've got a dead locust there okay no worries the plan is in about 15 to 20 years we will take out the silvers and the red they're not great syrup reduce producers we're going to go ahead and sell those for timber straight linear maple runs we think we'll have some revenue off of that at the same time we will keep these sugars and the Norway's they will grow tall they will become a syrup production so we've got a future revenue generator here at the same time why did we choose the large canopy tree at the north side of our East waves West run well imagine large canopy trees here of maple it's going to shed shade onto our pasture too so as we're rotating the cattle daily in time they're going to get a lot of comfort in shade at the same time we're going to get shade on the pasture may have to irrigate it less so that's what's going on here I think it's also important to note before we head off that we have nitrogen fixers planted in all the holls of our predominant trees are maples here we have autumn olive but we also have bayberry and we have silver wolf area will point that out as we go along transitioning to the row number three which is in front of us we went an evergreen deciduous pattern for the entire run we have Austrian pines every 24 feet planted intermingled with Oaks honey locust a pin cherry and so what we've got here is in the future we're going to have the large Austrian pilings are going to be creating the real the wind barrier what should we want then we're going to have these large canopies of acorns and beech nuts and pin cherries and locust pods to feed only the none of the wildlife but our livestock that we rotate through here moving up to row two as we move southward in our east-west felt we again do the locust deciduous tree pattern black locust chestnut with a silver berry nitrogen fixed in the same hole comfrey Lupin alfalfa is nitrogen fixers again we come back to the black locust then over to the chestnut with an autumn with a silver wolf berry planted in it so we'll chop and drop this two or three times during the year releasing the nitrogen into the soil structure we'll do the same with the comfrey which is the dynamic accumulator calcium phosphorus magnesium it's mining from the ground will chop and drop that to feed our parent tree imagine if you will here's another chestnut small little chestnut they're paying top dollar in parts of Europe Italy for hogs pork that are finished under chestnuts so in the future we plan to remove the fences in time seven years from now ten years who knows we'll monitor that and get the pigs moving through here quickly to digest of the nuts on the ground and move them off before they create too much damage moving to the front row we have more of our berry bushes there's a reason for this one we wanted something harvested but what we also we partner with wildlife I don't know if you notice but on the big poles every 40 feet you have nest boxes we have over 200 nest boxes built on this farm what we do is the berries feed the birds as well as the humans and they do our pest management for us there are they're a pest team because we don't use herbicides and pesticides so here we have a beautiful aronia berry it's its fruiting right now the berries are going to be ready to pick here in the next week we'll make jams and jellies with these we have apricots we have nectarine we have service very elderberry we have a country with kind of petered out there we have Hardy Ukrainian almonds here we have a sea buckthorn weight for weight it's 10 times the vitamin C as an orange and so we're have these growing throughout the property the idea we did this was not only for the birds but we'll get 120 ahead of elk in here anywhere between September and February and so we thought that if we plant it on the south side in time these will start to droop through the fencing and that during the elk can graze it and be satiated rather than having to challenge the system now when we remove the fence posts again observation will determine that these will be strong enough and healthy enough to maintain the pressures of those wildlife moving in and out and so we're just going to monitor this from time to time and see how it plays out and adjust accordingly [Music] [Music] Oh [Music] you [Music] you can find the golf fish they usually travel in about a school of 30 or 40 at a time 10 this looks like a crater and a garden it does look like a crater in a garden hence our crater garden yeah you know lack of a better term it realistically it's a sub surface sub grade garden feature and that resembles potentially a crater hole if you will and so this is something totally unique to ABC acres and we're trying to do some really inventive agricultural work through taking hints taking clues from Mother Nature and putting them all into one spot to try to create a microclimate for upper zone plant productivity and so here in Montana where zone four we're going to see negative 22 negative 30 even negative 30 - but we believe that harnessing keys from Mother Nature we might be able to produce Gro zone 6 zone 7 plantings by protecting them from those harsh winters through various design strategies if we pan over here behind us I just want to give people of scale of what's going on here at the top of this Terrace right here at my eye level shoulder level this is the original height of the pasture from this southern point all the way across to the terraces over there on the north point you can see that over the course of the last three and a half four years we have excavated approximately 10,000 yards of rock out of this particular spot now we just didn't willy nilly let's go ahead and spend money and just dig the hole know we needed the rock for our farm roads we were noticing we were running up where the trucks were going in different directions so that was a nuisance so we thought hey let's go ahead and excavate for new roads we'll take the topsoil and we'll use that for garden bed in the future plantings and let's start excavating the aggregate out of this area and borrow it and put it in and build our roads so we built rows but instead of having just this hole in the ground we thought you know what let's aesthetically make it nice if you come baby see acres you know we are about aesthetics as well so we wanted something really nice to so we started to Terrace it we have four terraces there on the north side the water feature actually the water feature level ends and flows throughout the season but what we're trying to do is where you have built in a lot of different design features here to try to have productive zone six zone 7 productivity if you imagine on the North Slope there the terrace that has a south southwest facing so that is getting the most heat of the day during the spring summer and fall months so that's where we want to put our zone seven plants now imagine if you will during both the summer and winter months you're getting direct sunlight from the south on to the lope of that those plantings that's one source of heat with the water feature we're getting a reflective light a reflective heat source so there's two forms of heat now compared to your traditional one we have the thermal mass of the water feature that holds what halls temperature so we can extend or we can make our growing season longer by having an early start and extending it further into the fall so there's three things going on there we put the rocks around not only for extending aesthetically pleasing the frogs utilize them we've seen different cranes on them as well but they harness the heat of the Sun they transfer it to the water so they're actually bolstering the heat of the thermal mass of the water so there's four things going on there in the winter months we get these dry cold killing winds and they shoot from the north but if we put our trees sub the upper terrace those north winds shoot over so the trees are protected from that so there's really five things going on right now so a sixth heat element is reducing the effects of frost here in Montana we have a roughly 110 frost-free days our last frost date is June 6 and so what we try to do is by putting the zone 6 zone 7 plantings about midway in that Terrace frost likes to drop and settle and so if these six 7s have nice buds that are forming and the frost settles on it it can kill those so by putting a mid weighing in the terrace the frost drops down past towards the water feature which is warmer creating some convectional currents in the wind and moves the frost away so we have six things that are happening there to basically bolster the survival rate of these zone 6-7 plantings imagine if you will I'm going to reminisce a little bit here but step back four or five years ago this was just pasture just irrigated not much life the first year we built this in and had this terrorist we had and I'm not joking over 10,000 little tiny frogs that were in here and I mean just the life wants to happen if you create the ability for it to happen and we we welcome it and so we've got frogs and we've got sandhill cranes coming in feeding off of them [Music] Oh [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Justin Rhodes

Views: 351,033

Keywords: permaculture, permaculture systems, crater garden, permaculture design, tree belt, trees for wind block

Id: TxASYYqRHak

Length: 21min 45sec (1305 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 23 2017