Super Abundant Three year old sub-tropical Food-Forest -How to Restore Ecosystems by producing food

Greetings, my name is Ras and this is Ras. So welcome back to our regenerative food forest here in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains in Granada, southern Spain. It's been over a year since our first video which has been a great success so far. Please check it out if you haven't seen it already. I'll include the link down below. We have been very busy over the last year teaching courses, running internships, organizing music events and planting lots of trees. So in this episode I'd like to show you guys some of the food and the vegetables that we're currently growing in between the tree lines while we're waiting for the trees to become established. So this is one of my favorite perennial vegetables. I've only been growing it for a short amount of time but it's become one of my favorites very quickly and this is called pigeon pea otherwise known as gungo pea in the Caribbean. I think it's a really good plant for agroforestry systems, for food forest systems. These are only about just over a year and a half old and some of them are you know four or five meters tall already. I've planted these about 30 centimeters apart and some of the stems have almost become like trunks. It's really good for agroforestry systems because not only does it produce food but it's a nitrogen fixer and it also produces lots of biomass so you can use it as a chop and drop as well to get your whole system started to replenish the soil. So underneath this section of pigeon pea we've got some sorghum grass, we've got some dandelion, we've got some alfalfa and a few other things. We've also got this very interesting succulent ground cover, this is called coleus neotillus, very interesting herb, quite medicinal and over here we've got some malva or mallow as it's known, also a wild edible green. Okay so here we are in one of the vegetable beds that I'm responsible for here. Here we have some wonderful globe artichoke, another amazing perennial vegetable. Here in this part of the world if we're hungry and need some minerals we also eat the stems of the leaves which are very bitter, very good for you. So this is a good example of how we can organize a succession and companion planting, also consortiums as they're known in centropic agriculture. But basically these guys grow intensively from autumn until spring, but from spring until autumn they're quite dormant, they're quite small, they're almost sleeping. So in the summertime between these artichokes I plant, or for example last summer I planted okra, peppers and rainbow corn, something we're about to look for now to see if we can find some of the last cobs. I let the corn grow and and then dry on the plant itself, so what we should find today should be dry and ready to use. The type of corn I've been growing here is called rainbow glass gem corn and it's a variety that's a mix of different varieties from North America. It's all the different indigenous varieties of corn mixed together in one multicolored cob, it's beautiful stuff. So it's not sweet corn, it's maize, it's the corn that we use to make maize flour or masa as it's known. So come with me let's see if we can find a couple of the last cobs. So as you can see some beautiful combinations of colors. If we wanted we could separate out all these colors and grow them individually, but it's beautiful to see them working together. Eat more rainbows as we say. We are currently providing a five-month internship for 10 students. We have been very busy over the last months planting trees, planting vegetables, planting grasses, pruning trees, taking cuttings, growing mushrooms, saving seeds, all sorts of things. We will be running another internship in 2024 on April the 1st for three months, so please get in touch if you're interested in taking part. The details will be linked down below. So even though I'm wearing the same outfit this episode has been filmed over three or four months between November, December of 2023 and now January and the beginning of February. Here we are in 2024. So here we are in another part of the garden and I'd like to introduce this plant to you. This is another one of my favorite perennial vegetables and this is called melon pepino. Sometimes it's also called pera melon. Once again it's in the solanaceae family, it's in the tomato family, so don't eat these leaves because they're toxic. So we can see by the flowers here that they're very similar to potato flowers or other solanaceae flowers so it gives that good indicator that it's from that family. So the reason we grow this plant is for the fruit and this is a very young one because it's not quite the right time of year at the moment and basically the reason it's called melon pepino is because this is too small but when it gets a bit bigger if we eat it when it's green and hard it tastes like a cucumber but if we let it get about so big and it starts to develop purple stripes and becomes slightly yellow then it's ready to eat as a melon and it tastes beautiful and fruity and sweet. So it's not actually a melon but it's called melon pepino because it has that melon flavor. It's a really rampant plant, it grows very vigorously and produces a lot of fruit. It's one of the easiest plants to take cuttings from. I could literally just throw this on a piece of wet ground on the floor and it will probably root and turn into a new plant. If I actually make a hole in the ground and put it in there it's almost definitely going to turn into a new plant. So if you've never taken a cutting of a plant before this is a great one to start with just because it's so easy. I get probably two or three of these ripe fruit every day of the summer for at least six months. I normally turn them into juice. It's delicious stuff. I really recommend this plant and once you've got a patch it's hard to get rid of it. It just keeps on wanting to spread. You can grow it as a climber, you can grow it as a bush. Here I've got it as a ground cover but I need to chop it back. I need to control it. Here you can see it's trying to take over the pathway so occasionally I'll come back and chop it and feed it to the trees or feed it to some other vegetables as a mulch which obviously then turns into soil. So melon pepino, yeah I can really recommend this one. So here we have a patch of sugarcane that I established about three years ago when we started the first agroforestry system here. There's green sugarcane and there's also purple black sugarcane in here as well but we've got more of the green sugarcane. It grows so fast. We chopped all of this down at the end of last summer and turned it all into juice and already it's growing back like crazy. So even if you don't like sugar, even if you don't grow it for the sugar, just for the biomass, just for the chop and drop, it's absolutely incredible and obviously we can use the sugars as well to just replenish beneficial microorganisms. There are other reasons that we can use it apart from just the crystalline sugar that we're all used to. So yeah sugarcane and basically we can just take a cutting one small section where there's a line so that small chunk of sugarcane we can turn into a whole new plant. So this patch of sugarcane could be multiplied many many times over. Here's another great perennial fruit once again in the solanacea family, in the tomato family. So don't eat these greens, they're toxic. So these have lots of different names. Some people call these Chinese lanterns. The latin name is Physalis. I think in America they're called Cape Gooseberry but I think originally they're called Inca berries or Peruvian berries. So yeah once they ripen up and turn orange it's a delicious kind of sweet and sour fruit, great to have as a snack in the garden. And once again it grows so big, produces so much biomass it's good to chop it back and utilize that biomass in the garden. Physalis. I really appreciate everyone's kind feedback from the first video. But as was mentioned already I'm not actually the founder of this project. A local friend of mine called Laura came to study with me about three years ago and she was very inspired by regenerative agroforestry. So she decided that she would like to give it a go herself. So we tried to make sure that she knew enough that she could design and implement the system herself. Now after three years of implementation and experimentation I'm very proud of her and what she has managed to achieve here. So I live close by but I come here to work two days a week to help maintain the forest system and in exchange I get a small amount of land where I can grow my own food. So here we have some bananas. We grow two different varieties of bananas here in the food forest. This is a variety called Buro banana and these guys are just sitting here waiting to be split up and planted out. This variety gets to about three or four meters sometimes taller before it fruits and then once it's fruits, once it has fruited then it dies. And just in case you didn't know, bananas are actually herbs. It's actually a really big herb. I used to think it was a palm or a tree or something but now I start to realize it's actually one of the world's biggest herbs. So the bit that we eat, the banana, is kind of like an empty berry in a way, like an empty seed pod. So I'll show you the other variety of banana a little bit later on that we grow which is the canary banana which is much shorter and has much more bananas on each bunch, on each set. But there's another herb I'll show you in just a second which proves the point of how this is in the same family as another herb that we call plantain which is a very similar name to another type of banana that we eat which is the cooking banana otherwise known in Spanish. So this is called minutina and this is once again in the family of plantain. So here in the wild we've got I think at least two varieties of plantain that grow and all of them are edible. They're all very mineral rich, the leaves, but basically yeah this is the same family as the bananas behind me. It's just this is the kind of the small European version of the bananas that we have here and also the seeds of this are also very medicinal as well. So have a look into plantain as a herb if you haven't seen it already. But like I say it's very similar to the word that we use for the cooking banana which we also call plantain. So it's nice to put all these connections together and understand how these plants are related. So this is the other type of banana that we grow here in the agroforestry system and this is called canary banana because it comes from the canary islands. They're quite short, fat, very sweet and flavourful bananas. Unlike the bura banana, the bura banana I've seen up to like 50 fruit on a set and this one can produce up to one to 200 fruit and it can get so heavy that it can actually pull the banana down to the ground. Remember what I said earlier on as soon as it's produced bananas this actual stalk will die but it's always producing babies from the floor, from underneath. But if you want there to be good banana production it's important to separate the babies and plant them out somewhere else to become big plants and then it means that the mother in a way, this plant, can put all this energy into producing these bananas. Here we're in the winter time so it's not the best time for them to be forming but they seem to be doing quite well and I think I'm going to chop off the flower soon because it's not producing any more new bananas so it can put energy into all these little guys. So that's the canary banana, like I said it normally gets to you know once two meters before it fruits whereas the other one gets to three, four, five meters before it fruits. This is a much more compact banana, could be good for greenhouses for example. So this is another perennial green, this is called sorrel and it has a very lemony flavour. It's quite high in oxalic acid like many of the greens can be. We need to be careful with oxalic acid in terms of how much we eat but once again I wouldn't eat a whole bowl of this salad green but I would mix it with other greens and it's absolutely delicious, beautiful colour that's for sure. So a really good perennial plant for food forest it will it will stick with you for many years to come once you've planted it. Here you can see this is the growth from last year which is now dying off so now as we're into winter I'm going to take these old shoots off and let these new shoots come through. This green growth is what we want and these old dead shoots from last year I'm going to take off and give them to the trees. And I can show you some other asparagus which are growing really well which we're very tempted to eat but we're going to let them continue to grow until they've become well established. So here are some new shoots coming for this spring and it's very tempting to harvest them and eat them but they're still quite thin. This one's getting a bit thicker but we want to let them get established and let them get thick so these ones we will let them grow into a fern into a plant and we'll let them become more established. We'll probably start picking them next year maybe even the year after but I think by next year they should be fat enough that we can start harvesting. Okay so the next vegetable I'd like to introduce to you is taro. Once again this is about to go to sleep for the winter it's looking a bit sad it's got to you know just over a meter tall and some of the old leaves are now starting to die off and just to show you where I am in the garden I'm next to a tree line here this is just under two years old this tree line this olive tree behind me is one of the literally is the only pre-existing tree in this whole agroforestry system so all the other trees that we planted are new apart from this olive so that's a good example of how you can include a pre-existing tree into a new tree line. We'll talk about that in more detail in a future video. So on the other side of these taro if you pan across very slowly you can see there's a line of pigeon pea they've now got almost four or five meters some of them and we planted these last spring so they've been going for about almost a year and a half now producing lots of peas and as you can see in between these two lines we've got this line of taro and underneath the taro there is a sweet potato as the ground cover so we might find sweet potato as we're harvesting the taro here in this part of the world we can grow taro but we need to protect the shoots through the winter before we plant them again in the springtime so I'm going to give you an example of that right now I'm going to harvest one or two and show you which bit that we eat and which bit we save to plant for next year. So I'm just peeling off the outside leaves here you can see they're very juicy here's another one you can see the actual leaf itself has died so we'll peel that one off as well but we want to make sure we don't snap that central stem so I'm going to hold it a bit further down now okay so now I'm just going to peel back all of this here yeah I'm going to do another leaf this is the final big one so we'll leave this small one and we'll take this big one off as well so I'm going to be careful not to break that small one as I'm taking off this big guy I'll be easy to use the knife that's coming off we don't want any remnants of this leaf because it can rot and it can make the hooli go bad so the hooli as far as I know is the traditional term for the cutting that we're about to take off the top of this root this is one of the reasons why it's called a coconut yam because it's got hairs on the outside a bit like a coconut so we're going to reveal some of those so that you guys can see the difference between the pink flesh to the orange flesh I'm just going to peel it back around here because when we take the cutting we actually want to use a little bit of that orange flesh and then we can eat everything that's underneath so I'm just going to clean up this a little bit more just to get these bits extra bits off and if you look up here before I chop this off we're going to come up here and we can see there's this line just here and this is where the new leaf is going to appear from and I'm actually going to chop it just above this line like so yeah um and then I'm going to chop it here so basically where we where it goes from pinky flesh to almost orange flesh we basically want to chop just below the pink line to include a little bit of orange so there's a good example of the orange flesh yeah I'm actually going to get my machete for this one just so that we have a bit of a better chop so once again we're trying to include some of that orange line if we include too much then that bottom bit is at risk of rotting off and also killing or affecting the hooli yeah if we don't include any of that orange line it won't root so it's quite a fine balance you see this little white spot that's a new little pup like these guys that we've taken off so we're going to try and include a certain amount of that orange line and perfect so once again I need to clean this one up because we've this one's still got three leaves on it and we just want one yeah so I'm going to take this off around the edge okay so once again and follow up the stem and look for this line here that's where the new leaf is going to come out and I will chop it just above okay and there we go there's my hooli they contain oxalic acid just like rhubarb here's the root this is the bit that we eat as you can see it's quite a white starchy flesh as I was saying very similar to a potato but nice and creamy people call it a yam but it's not technically a yam and then this is the cutting that came from the top this is what is called the hooli the cutting so like I said you can plant roots in the ground but best is to plant hoolies in the ground we can bury it just up to this line where you can see here is the leaf is coming out so we don't want to bury where the leaf is coming out we need to make sure that it can grow and basically from here to here is where the root will then grow so that's why you want to bury your hoolies nice and deep in the ground so if you if you just plant roots close to the surface they're not going to get that big because the roots grow upwards so I'd like to tell you about this perennial vegetable as well this is called chayote sometimes called chayote squash because it's in the squash family in the pumpkin family in Brazil in Portuguese I think they call it chuchu and it normally lives for about three to five years if you're lucky and it will sleep in the winter here whereas in the tropics it will grow all year round which is the case with a lot of the perennials that we grow here they uh they take a pause for the winter when it gets cold so the chayote interesting plant first of all you can eat the first 30 centimeters of the actual vine if you get enough of those vine shoots get a handful you can put them in a stir fry excuse my very dirty hands you know that's the life of a gardener but if you have a closer look here you can see it's flowering and if you look at the bottom of that flower you can see there's a fruit set already waiting to be pollinated yeah and if we go a bit further down the vine we will see our first fruit starting to form so here's a chayote and unlike other pumpkins it's only got one seed inside it and if we try to take that seed out the seed will die so in order to plant a new plant you have to plant a whole new so just wait there i'll see if i can find you a full size one that's ready to eat and we can talk about what the vegetable is actually like itself so there you go chayote see here i am amongst the canopy of pigeon pea they've taken over and yeah on the ground just here i've got a chayote on a vine so i'm going to actually take this off now because this is actually ready to ready to eat you can see it's slightly spiky but they're not actually uh you know spiky like a cucumber it's not painful so i'm just going to pull this off now from the vine itself the vine will now go to sleep for the winter it will come it will regrow again next spring and yeah this is the vegetable so it's a bit like a potato some people say it's similar to air potato um you've got to put flavors into it to make it interesting um but one plant can produce up to 200 of these per season so as i said you actually plant this in the ground on its side and the whole thing starts to grow out of here out of the the rear end and basically you get a vine that grows from here and roots that grow from here and so one vegetable can turn into another vine that could grow for another four to five years so yeah if you get them established and get them productive that can be a really good so after our first video many people have been asking what types of trees are we including here within our regenerative agroforestry system so i'd like to list some of the trees that we're working with today but as i said in the next video we'll look into greater detail how we've arranged these trees into cooperation and not into competition so in terms of the support species in terms of the biomass accumulators in terms of what we call the chop and drop trees the trees that we prune and feed to the ground to create future topsoil and nutrition for the trees that are growing in that area so to list some of those chop and drop trees some of those biomass accumulators we have for example aliagnos which is the russian olive we have rubinia we have gravilia we have false pepper we have poplar we have eucalyptus and paulownia those last two i would say are incredible if you want the the fastest production of shade and biomass and the most production of the growth hormone of the gibberellic acid it seems that paulownia and eucalyptus are hard to beat so there's a list of some of the biomass accumulators that we're using in the system to get the whole thing started so on the other hand some of the productive trees that were growing some of the food crops some of the nut crops some of the leaf crops the trees that were growing we call them target trees because they're the trees that we're trying to produce that we're trying to turn into nice big healthy productive trees so the first group of trees we talked about we almost feed to the second group of trees which i'm about to list out for you so let me give you an idea of what we've got here in terms of productive trees or some of our target trees so we've got ginkgo biloba we've got hazelnut we've got bay leaf we've got avocado we've got pistachios we've got apricots we have got peaches we've got flat peaches otherwise known as paraguayos we've got pecans we've got walnuts we've got nectarines we've got plums we've got pears we've got apples we've got khakis which is a type of persimmon we've got almonds we've got um i'm starting to forget but they'll all come out we've got macadamia uh we've got um pomegranate we've obviously then got all the interesting tropical ones like the star fruit the carambola we've got lychee we've got guava uh we just put in the first mango recently as well um we've got moringa oh so many things i haven't mentioned them all but gives you some idea so a very large selection of fruits and nuts and some of the trees where we can also eat the leaves such as the moringa or even the white mulberry as well you can also eat the leaves while you're waiting for the fruit so as i said that's just to give you an introduction and the next video will really help you to understand yourselves which trees you can use and how you can arrange them together to create a food forest of cooperation so thank you very much for coming along with us today on this tour throughout the garden once again don't forget we have an internship coming up in april so please get in touch if you're interested and keep your eyes open for the next videos