Welcome back, it's the 2025 season, let's get started

Hey, welcome back to the food forest. It's almost April here. It's just another day in April. I'll come around and show you the ice storm that we had yesterday. And just walk around and get reacquainted and everything. We're kind of coming out of winter time and we're getting back into gardening season. So always an exciting time of year. So it is pretty cool here right now. We had a ton of freezing rain come last night. We just had our big snow melt so we're finally out of snow. I know a lot of you are probably well into your gardening seasons. Look at that cedar tree. So there could be a lot of tree damage around. Especially with all the ice hanging off of trees just coming out of dormancy. So we'll go around and take a look. Look at the apple tree here. It's like something out of a Disney movie or something. So another thing to check also when you have coming out of different seasons is just make sure that all of your infrastructure is in place. We've got essentially two areas to send water off of the roof. This one here sends it down underground into a long swale that cuts right down the whole property. It's a way that I can, in a rain storm, kind of get a little extra water into some of those swales if they're not filling up yet. And the other way that this water channels is down here underneath all these rocks and then down into the pond. So this is a way that we can kind of fill the pond with fresh rain water. You'd really want to do that. Something like that. If you have a metal roofing, you don't necessarily want to just send a big flush of water off of shingles into a nice, clean, healthy ecosystem pond. You might want to get a flush diverter, that sort of stuff. But off a solar panel roof, it's perfectly safe. As for general ice on your food forest trees, the ice is actually fairly protective against the cold. I know that seems super, super strange, but one thing that orchardists actually do when they're expecting a cold snap is they go out and they spray a mist of water on their trees essentially to do exactly what this ice has done, create a little set of armor around the branches and that actually keeps the buds on the inside, it actually keeps them isolated from the cold weather. So I'm not concerned at all about the ice on the trees outside of just the physical weight and snapping of actual tree branches, but the actual cold, it's not going to be cold enough and it'll actually protect against really cold nighttime temperatures and protect the actual things that I care about, which isn't the wood, it's actually the fruiting buds. One thing that's nice when the season starts up and all the trees start getting their leaves is this area closes in. In the wintertime, in the fall, it looks just open, it looks like I don't have that much planted, but you can see when you actually get an ice storm how dense the actual planting is in and around the food forest and in the summertime when everything's leafing out you can also see that. You can actually see that the slightly warmer temperatures have started to send the daylilies, so the daylilies are starting to pop up. I probably have some asparagus popping up now, maybe not quite yet, maybe in about a week or so, maybe a couple weeks, and hopefully we didn't have too many of our fruiting trees starting to break bud. It's when the buds just crack open a little bit to start to flower. It's that breaking of the bud and then the cold weather that really is the one-two punch that kills fruit tree production. It's actually slippery walking around here, stepping on the ice. Look at this, it's pretty crazy. Really cool. Rosie's super, super interested in what the heck is going on out here. Here's something super interesting, and you'd only know it if you really know your trees well, but this branch here is actually a vertical branch. This branch is normally straight up and down and it is totally pulled over with the ice, so I'm not sure if I should try to shake it off or anything, but you can see that this is normally way up and it's actually falling right over. I don't necessarily want the whole branch to crack or anything, so maybe that's something that I can do, is just kind of come in and take off some of this weight because it's a lot of weight. Ice is pretty heavy, and if I do a little damage to the tree, it's not the end of the world. It's better than cracking the whole entire branch. This is a ton of weight. Anytime you're dealing with weight on the end of branches, just general physics, science, is you get the most bang for your buck dealing with the weight that's furthest away from the point of flexing and bending. So even though maybe this isn't the most amount of ice at the tips, this is actually where the most amount of torque comes from actually bending the branches. So if I can get that weight off of the tips, it might kind of straighten back up a little bit. Anyways, I can come back out and do that. I don't have to do that now, but you can see it's really flexing over all the branches. Sometimes, depending on the age of the branches, that can actually cause a permanent deformation of the branches. So it's kind of neat. It might add a little bit of interest to some of the plants as long as it doesn't crack the branches. You can maybe let it go and see if the branches will stiffen up as the younger wood turns into harder wood. You can hear all the ice falling all around me as it melts. Hey, Lucy. So here's just a section of some of our annual gardens. We've got some persimmon trees that have been heavily scratched by rabbits, but not straight around, so those should just survive fine. If we did have a lot of damage, there's a lot of different branches here that I could just prune off the ones that did get more damaged. Here's another persimmon tree, and we had deer come in and take it right back. So these branches here were actually just as tall as these ones. I was going to kind of clean up, kind of selectively favor some of the main branches. This is a tree that I just kind of pulled out of the wild, so it didn't have a great form. I didn't want to mess with it too much in its first couple years. Now we'll prune it because the deer kind of did part of that job for us. We'll just kind of let them be the teacher, and we'll let the other branches be the main scaffolds. Here's a cherry tree, and this is the Jerusalem artichoke patch. These Jerusalem artichokes, you know, this is essentially what it's going to look like if you do plant Jerusalem artichokes. I planted these maybe five years ago. I've got a video on pulling that food out. This is probably my favorite crop in terms of a resiliency, self-sufficiency standpoint. We've got enough food in this little swale to deal with a family's worth of food. If there was no food in the stores at all, this would feed my family in terms of calories for the whole entire year. So it's a very minimal investment. This is what it'll look like. So it'll get a little messy. You can pull all this out, make biochar with it. It burns super, super easily. It's good kindling for starting fires. So you just kind of come in. It's like a one-day job going there with a machete, clear it all out and then kind of reset it. And you've got food in the ground that you can pull up whenever you want to. And it's very, very calorie-dense. You know, I think in the world that we're going into... Whoa! So definitely some tree damage going to be happening. It's a lot of weight. Like look, we've got branches coming down here kind of all over the place. But that was like a full tree coming down. Crazy. But yeah, into the world that we're kind of moving ourselves into here, having a little bit of food resiliency is a good thing. We're talking about tariffs and global trade wars and that sort of thing. You know, having a little section of your property with Jerusalem artichokes like this could be really beneficial. People are a little afraid that they'll spread a lot. But this is roughly the same size as it was when I planted it. Really hasn't moved that much. It's not like it's going to take over your whole lawn. You know, I had Jerusalem artichokes planted here. They haven't moved very much in at least five years. Alright, so I'm going to just come check in the chickens. Make sure we're getting their eggs, top up their water and hopefully I can get in there when it's not frozen. So we've got some eggs in there. Haven't checked in on the chickens actually in about three days, so they're loaded up with eggs. We'll go grab those and give them fresh bedding. And I think I'll leave it at that for now. We've got some chores we've got to get done so we'll go get those done. Make sure that the chickens are taken care of. It's been a couple days since I've been in there. I've got a big project that's kind of not permaculture related that I've been working on and I'm going to probably continue working on that for a little while but now that we're into gardening season I'll definitely get into the permaculture. Start pumping out some more videos once we've thawed out here. It's definitely not that I've stopped doing permaculture stuff. It's just when your land is frozen there's really not much to film. So anyways, I'll leave you here. I hope everyone is having a wonderful planting season for their gardens and it's going to be a great gardening season. If you haven't started a garden, working on resiliency, getting chickens, that sort of thing, I think it's a really, really good idea. Check out some of my older videos on how to get started. It is just, you know, there's never been a better time to start growing some of your own food with the uncertainty of the world that we live in today. Thanks for watching everyone. Take it easy.