14 types of nitrogen fixing trees you can plant to improve your soil

In this video I'm going to take you around our agroforestry plantations and show you all the different nitrogen-fixing trees and shrubs that we have planted here in Portugal. This one is called Silverberry, it's really good for wildlife habitat, it's a good windbreak here in our food forest and also we can eat the berries by making jam with it. There are various ways for us to be able to identify nitrogen-fixing trees and one is by the leaves. They tend to have these leaves that look rather like this one so when you pull a leaf off you can see that there are leaves on alternate sides and you can take any one of these off and then there are smaller leaves on alternate sides again and these can be very similar on all the nitrogen-fixing trees they just be different sizes and colours. This one is Honey Locust, I grew this by seed about five years ago and it's a really good fodder for the animals, we can even eat the pods as well and the flowers, there's just a few coming up now, are really good for attracting bees and beneficial insects. This one is a thorn variety so it has these very sharp thorns making it quite dangerous so I keep it away from the main paths although I also have a thornless variety. This one is growing in quite a wet area and it's doing much better than the other ones I have on the farm. Most of the nitrogen-fixing trees are from the legume family which is like the bean family so you can recognise them two ways one by the flower and another way is when they go to seed and you can see this river Tamarind has these seed pods which are flapping around in the wind and these look like bean pods so all the nitrogen-fixing trees have bean pods but some are long and big and some are small and we can identify them that way. Another way to identify which are the bean trees or which are the nitrogen-fixing trees is from the flowers. The flowers have a similar shape on all of the bean plants and bean trees so this Brazilian Glory Pea Tree is a great nitrogen fixer it's quite a small tree and it sort of weeps down like a weeping willow and in the summer it's completely full of these beautiful red flowers and actually the sheep don't seem to bother it too much they eat the leaves a little bit but they're not going for it as much as some of the other trees so it's quite nice to have it in the pasture to fix nitrogen here. In the winter when these when the beans dry they have these really cool bean pods which you can get the seeds from just in there and use those to plant more trees. So this one here is Tagarçaste this is a really good one because it grows very fast here in Portugal it's evergreen so it can be used as a windbreak one of its best uses is that it's really good for fodder for the sheep it tends to grow quite bushy and big and can have quite weak roots and blow over in the wind so what we have to do is pollard it now and again so it doesn't get too tall and big and we can feed all the leaves from it to the sheep it's a really good fodder tree so I have it in my pasture and my silvopasture and also in spring around March it's full of which attract loads of bees so it's a really good one for keeping the bees fed in the area it grows really well from seed and then after about one year it gets about that big in the pot and after about two years it's about two meters high and this one behind me is four years old this one is Carob tree I absolutely love this evergreen native tree to Portugal as it's a very slow growing tree and grows huge and creates these lovely bean pods which can be used to make a flour for bread cakes or even a fake chocolate it's the most sustainable way to use flour it's from a tree and not from grains but this one's also a nitrogen fixer so it improves the soil for a very very very long time there's a saying plant an olive tree for your children and a carob tree for your grandchildren here in central Portugal it's a little bit cold for these in the winter but I think as the world seems to be warming up these will be good here in the future so I've currently propagated over a hundred of these to put around my farm to future-proof this place and have these beautiful bean pods for chocolate and flour this one is the Catalpa tree this is a very big tree that you often find on roadsides here in Portugal and has these big leaves and they have these very long dry bean pods which can be used for starting fires and the wood is quite rot resistant so it's good for fence posts it's not the most beautiful tree but it's quite good for attracting wildlife so this one is wisteria this is a great one to have in your systems because it's a climber so here it's growing up our fence for our chicken run and it has these beautiful drooping flowers so this one is scotch broom in this lovely flower bed this one is a little bit invasive here in our land and we're trying to actually get rid of it because it's a fire hazard but when we cut it back it drops lots of nitrogen and it grows back so it's really good for improving soil as it's a very fast growing pioneer shrub which you can keep cutting back and it grows back again this hasn't got a lot of uses we use it for starting fires it's very flammable and also you can use it to make a thatched roof this deciduous nitrogen fixer is called older i planted this when it was this big about 60 years ago and it grows pretty fast and this is a great one because it grows in really wet areas and it can stabilize the soils on riverbanks it's a good summer windbreak but in the winter it drops its leaves it can be used for making furniture musical instruments or even firewood this one is called himalayan indigo and it's more like a shrub and it has the same type of leaf pattern small leaves the same type of bean flower however what's cool about this one is this indigo colored flower is used as a dye so this one here is flowering sienna this is a nice big butch a low nitrogen fixer it has the most beautiful yellow flowers for the whole summer and it's quite good for attracting bees and pollinators and also can be used for medicine but it's getting hidden here because there's this climbing plant which is a vetch it's a weed which is also a nitrogen fixer and you can actually see it's little bean pods here showing that it's a nitrogen fixer we'll have another video on nitrogen fixing weeds and cover crops this one is called bladder sienna it's just like flowering sienna but with smaller leaves and smaller flowers not as pretty as the flowering sienna but a better nitrogen fixer and the seeds become these pods that are squishy and quite strong and hard and actually just like a bladder from a sheep or something like that that's not too full and when these dry they don't really break they're quite strong so you could shake them around and use them as a musical instrument so behind me here we've got mimosa this is an invasive nitrogen fixer from the acacia family it's something we're actually trying to get rid of from this land so we can keep cutting it back and making wood chips and using that whilst it's green to spread the nitrogen in the garden but it still is beneficial for us as a nitrogen fixer but one day we want to eliminate this tree from our farm thank you very much for watching this video i hope you enjoyed it if you have any questions or comments please do leave them below