From Desert to Food Forest - A Transformation through Soil Regeneration!

I'm here with Ron McCord in San Diego, California, and he's going to show us how he turned his neglected patch of desert into a thriving food forest. So six years ago the land was bare, scraped with a bulldozer, very little life in the soil, no worms, and almost no food being produced on site. After six years of working the earth, we have an abundance of food, we're sharing with our community, and we're creating habitat for local wildlife. So in front of us is tree collards, and this is actually a perennial collard, and I'm curious, how old is this patch, how old is this plant we're in? It's about four years old, and it's probably created 10 times this amount of food that we see here. So this is a four-year-old collard plant. That's pretty cool. So I lived in San Diego for about five years, and I know that San Diego is a desert, and I see bananas growing here. So do these actually produce bananas? Yeah, we get about three to five racks of bananas a year just off of this stand of bananas here. Bananas in the desert. Five years ago we planted this mulberry. It was in a one-gallon pot, maybe two feet tall, and now it's over 20 feet. And mulberry is one of my favorites because both the mulberries and the leaves are edible, so it's a super productive tree. So this is the African walnut. It's also called weeping lower bean, and one of its benefits is that it provides canopy for the food forest. This was one of the original trees on the property when we got here. And in a food forest and in permaculture, every plant has multiple purposes, and this one has a pretty unique one. Ron's gonna help me out. So this produces an incredible amount of nectar, which is enjoyable for us, but it's great for the bees as well. So I'm all sticky from the last plant still, the African walnut, and there's over a hundred species of plants that are edible, medicinal, and beneficial to the other species that we share the earth with. And what do we have here? Here we have popcorn cassia, which is a nitrogen fixer. It's chopped, we use for chop and drop for bringing fertility to the soil, and it's the host plant for the cloudlit sulfur butterfly. Plus it gets the name popcorn cassia because it smells like buttered popcorn. Here we have bouillon bush. It gets its name because it literally smells and tastes like bouillon cubes. That's a first for me. This here is Mexican honeysuckle, and the leaves can be boiled down to make an indigo blue dye, and you can suckle on the flowers. Here we have the macadamia nut tree. It was one of the only trees on the property when we moved here. It produces about 600 pounds of macadamia a year, and it always has fruit or flowers year-round. So here we have a forte avocado. When we moved onto the property, it wasn't producing at all. It took about three years, but now we're getting up to 200 pounds of avocados a year from this tree. So all of this abundance that you see that's been created over the last six years, all of the food, all of the medicine, all of the plants that are beneficial to other insects and animals, all of the plants here are made possible through food waste, mulch, and harvesting rainwater. We've used no additional fertilizer for any of the plants on the property. It's all made using Bokashi food waste and local arborist waste. 100% of the food waste produced on site goes back into our soil. We also get food waste from the local community that goes back into the site here. So that's keeping all of this food waste out of the landfill, emitting methane, and instead turning it into soil. Which turns into food for us to eat. And the other ingredient is mulch. Tell us a little bit about that. So there's multiple sources of mulch that we get here in the city. One is the local arborist. They produce all of the waste from the tree systems and that would otherwise go to methane digesters or local compost producers. But we try and get it fresh here on site so it can go straight back into the soil. Today most houses are designed to actually flow the water away from the land but here on Ron's property his job is to keep all of the water on the property. Yeah so first we use the the roof and the downspouts to draw water into the grow zones. We also use terraces and swells to direct water into the key planting areas. So virtually every drop of water that falls on this property stays on this property right? Yes. But you've also come up with a really creative way to get more water onto this land right? Yes our house is strategically placed where the run-on from the street can be directed onto the property so we get almost double the water that we would normally get in some areas where we grow our plants. So that's how Ron worked with this neglected plot of land and turned it into the abundant food forest that you see today. So Ron when you got started with this did you know that you could do this? Not at all. I had a little garden we moved here and watching videos like this inspired me to try some things and learn as I went and now look where I am today. So Ron is proof that with some hard work and dedication that the power is in our hands to regenerate our soil and our earth. Thanks Ron. Thank you.