Food Forest Forerunner

I want to do a bit more of a explanation on how we use tetonia. So we keep talking about how we use it to get on to the kaikuyu, kill kaikuyu off. So these guys here we planted at the beginning of winter and we planted them with long sticks. And this whole row came up nicely but we also noticed that in some places they just don't do it. So after years of planting just these sticks because they they did work good enough we got some feedback from a student, thanks Jared, who didn't have enough planting material and started using these guys, smaller ones, and had a lot of success with them or more success than by planting sticks. And the reason for that I feel is that the ratio of living material to dead material is higher. So there's these ones here there's only a thin layer of bark that's alive and if they get a bit dry or whatever happens to cold whatever or butts get taken off they quickly die. They don't have the reserve as these guys do. So these grow faster and they're more reliable but they also need moisture. They both need moisture initially. So for marking these ones are good. We try to get them about this much into the ground and all these little knobbles you see on them they make roots but they need a bit of moisture to get going. And don't keep them in a bucket this water. They die quickly if you put them in water to plant them in a few days later. They don't like that. They want to be planted as quick as possible. Same with these. So in the tall grass situation these are still good but then you might want to put some little ones in between. So you use these as markers and these as your insurance. And you get a lot more of these from a plant than the big ones. So keep that in mind. Now these ones here they have gone through winter. They will only just come really into growth. So at the moment they look really feeble. They don't look like they're going to take on kaikuyo. But by the end of summer you wouldn't recognize them again. They're going to be big bushes like that. And next year mid next year you probably will see no kaikuyo underneath anymore. They're pretty quick on that. And I show you what happens in a few years how they develop on another place. So this is a section that we planted in Tetonia about four years ago. It was really thick kaikuyo just like this roadside was all kaikuyo going down the hill. So we put in the big sticks and we cut it back probably 12 times by now. And last year we did a reset and we put in some more trees because there was a lack of trees in there. And there are also bananas in there from quite a while back that we planted also into the kaikuyo together with Tetonia. And recently someone asked if the Tetonia allelopathy also harms other plants apart from grasses. And I heard myself saying that I'm not sure about bananas. But when I look at the bananas in there we're gonna dig them out of the Tetonia right now. I don't actually see any problem at all. They seem to be very happy in there. And even some grasses seem to be okay with Tetonia. Like in winter we had blackouts in there as we chopped the Tetonia down and they did all right. Sugar cane seems to be okay. Elephant grass seems to be okay. But there are I'm sure some other grasses that will suffer from it. And I read that you shouldn't have Tetonia close to corn. Corn doesn't like Tetonia as a partner. So keep that in mind. It's not just kaikuyo. Make your own observations. Do your own experiments. But we're going to go in here now and dig those trees out that need a bit of a burst of sunshine here. Now trees that are longer living than Tetonia are by default able to handle that shade of Tetonia. Because Tetonia prepares for the forest. So these trees are able to grow under Tetonia. However they often go on standby. That means they just sit in there and wait until Tetonia has done its job. And then when Tetonia disappears then they come through. But we don't want to wait for that time. So what we want to do is we want to pulse the Tetonia. And each pulse the trees can make it jump until they are above the Tetonia. So we have the best of both worlds in here. So I take you down into the understory. So we have here one of our pineros. The South American cowrie that makes these beautiful nuts. Here's an albicia that definitely needs more light. It's an emergent. And yet even so it's underneath Tetonia. It is not suffering. It's just a bit straggly. It will recover. But we shouldn't leave it any longer. There we have a cabbage tree. Of course it handles shade all right. Then here we have sugar cane. It of course is an emergent. It shouldn't be in a situation like that. But it just got overrun by Tetonia. And we prefer Tetonia at the moment. But you can see it's still it's still healthy. But a bit of bonsai. And we will get that back into life. And then here we got a lucuma. See right bang next to a Tetonia. And again it's healthy. There's nothing wrong with it. But it's not going to be growing much. It's going to be very slow in that situation. Slower than it normally is already. But with the reset of Tetonia it will make another jump. Here's cocksfoot. I thought for a while that cocksfoot would suffer from Tetonia. But it is it is hanging in there. It's all right. It's not gonna gonna die from it. It looks pretty good to me. So we planted some of that in here as an erosion stopper. Here's a mulberry. Here's a camarillo. Also looks looks really healthy. Look at that. Looks really healthy. A bit spindly. So that's that's the problem I pointed out. So this pruning job of Tetonia should have been done about a month or two ago. So that shows you how important timing is. But it looks healthy and it will recover I'm sure. There are avocados in there. There's a beautiful beautiful sapote in here. And there's a cherimoya here. And then the banana. I already started taking the Tetonia down on on the other side over there. So here's a banana which is doing doing nice. So I don't see any problem with Tetonia and bananas. And you can see all this organic matter underneath here. It is a it is a fantastically beautiful soil. Look at all the mycelium in there. Tetonia is just such a wonderful soil builder. There's just nothing nothing like it. Look at that. So that's why we have it. And of course the kaikouya is totally gone. There's just nothing of it left here. And that was knee-high knee-high kaikouya in here. And we didn't pull it out. We didn't cover it with plastic or cardboard. We didn't even mow it when we started here. It was just going straight into the kaikouya and and we forgot about it. And that's that's what it turned into. So it's it's really amazing again and again how you see that. And it creates this really dense shade and moisture. So you have a high fungal growth in here. And fungi do really love the the cuttings of of Tetonia. It's a really good fungal substrate. So yeah it's such a beneficial plant. And if you don't live in the right climate for Tetonia just think of other sunflowers that work for your climate. That can be burdock, cardoon, even yacon and so on. But of all of them Tetonia is certainly the most productive in terms of biomass and the most effective against grasses. So if you can grow it if you're not too frosty it's a must-have definitely. Now there's sometimes people point out that it could be invasive. Now our Tetonias don't make seeds but it can grow from branches that you drop like this one here. However they have a hard time to come up in the shade of adult Tetonias already. And in the end it's just more of what you want anyway. But it can get messy if you have your trees in between it. So that's why we recommend planting everything in rows including Tetonia because it makes management so much easier. And then you know which is the plant that you wanted to have in that place and which is stuff that comes up from from cuttings like that. In this case scenario it was a patchwork so we didn't stick to rows and now we paid the price for it. It is harder to manage but if you have a good botanical eye you can recognize where your little trees are from three meters away already you have no trouble. But for beginners definitely everything in rows and if you're on the slope then consider contour rows which are not straight rows but they fit into the pattern of the landscape. So take that advice stick to rows makes management a lot easier especially when things get messy anyway as in the case with bananas and Tetonia and so on. We're gonna chop that now. Frieda and me are gonna rip into that and we show you how that looks like just in Tetonia is it's quite a straight long growth which makes it quite easy to settle down. You really have to just cut the whips off put them down you don't have to take side branches off as with other trees. So that's handy. Now you see how steep that slope is and how barren the soil originally was. You can still see it sticking out but in these areas where we can put it down where things collect it is a lot better already. We didn't have any casualties. We found all the trees all right but what we see again and again is it's not dense enough with other trees that come and take the place of the canopy of the Tetonia. That's why we are still stuck in the Tetonia cycle and you can see it's quite a messy job. It is not that easy as pruning a more mature food forest without Tetonia. So we don't want to stay too long in that phase even so it it does increase fertility and builds up soil. We want to grow out of that within three years. So here we are still in four or five years. What was the mistake? Not enough other trees. We should have had more power trees here. More brush bottles. Maybe some more cabbage trees as well. A lot of things we could have put in initially in a high number and that was the mistake. Initially I just focused on bananas and Tetonias because the Kaikuyu was so dense that I doubted anything else would function in here. So we want to get out of that phase. So we should have had either more bananas in here or more Tamarillos. Something that takes us quicker to another layer of vegetation that is more productive in terms of food. We miss that potential. We are still wallowing after five years in Tetonia. That is not necessary. So it's always something to learn. There's always another potential that's untapped and it's a learning process. There's nothing wrong with what we did here. It's just we could have done something more beneficial for our human economy here. So we keep learning and that's how we do it. I hope you do your own learning in that. Feel encouraged by that and do your own experiments. We have the questions and answers every month. Take advantage of that. It's such a great way for all of us to learn. All the best and see you next!