What is the value of a tree?

Hey everyone, welcome back to the food forest. Uh want to do a video today on um what's the value of a tree. So going to show you this gorgeous tree and I'll tell you a story uh from a neighbor about why I'm even asking this question and then I also want to expand that to what's the value of a forest while showing you what the food forest looks like this year and what the benefits of planting in a polyulture permaculture food forest style planting is. So stick around. So story time. Uh this used to be just a grass lawn. Uh just basically like this except without the poly culture. It was just literally grass. The whole entire lawn was just grass. And over time I've added some trees. There were uh a couple of these maple trees here, but all the stuff around it. And just the theming of creating walking paths with food on each side uh is what I did when I started to get here. And when I bought this land, we had a neighbor on our street. I just cut down a massive at least 100-year-old oak tree. And when I went out there, I asked them what, you know, was the tree disease? Like, why on earth did you cut down that gorgeous tree? Their answer was the tree was worth a few thousand bucks in lumber and they needed the money. So, you know, that obviously drove me crazy. And it's their tree. it's their property. But it really um illustrated how little people understand the value of a tree. The value of a tree is not in its lumber. It's really funny to me how humanity has gotten so uh detached from the value of having an actual tree that benefits nature, a tree that creates habitat. Uh that oak tree was probably uh feeding at least 3 to 400 different insects and birds all around. And you just look at this seabbuckthorn and the grape and and all the grapes and food that is on this in the space of much smaller than a tree. And this is food for humans as well as birds and other animals as well. So what's the value of a 300-year-old oak? Well, from an engineer standpoint, you know, if I put my engineer hat on, if I had to design machinery in order to reproduce everything that a tree is actually doing from pulling the CO2 out of the air into the leaves down the roots, pushing out root exudates and feeding the soil food web of life underneath the ground. The tree is literally the connection to the external energy source which is the sun and it's converting that into sugars and food for the entire basis of the pyramid of the food web of life. So it is the connection from the solar system, the center of the solar system, that energy source and then it building the base layer that all life on Earth then chains up through. If you think of that snowball, that magnification effect that's going on from creating all that uh you know bacteria, prozzoa, nematodes, um and then all the things that are eating those all the way up all the arthropods into you know snails and frogs and snakes and birds and foxes and all the way up the food chain. The value of a tree is almost impossible to calculate. The value of a forest is even more so because we interconnect the trees with food in the brush layer, in the herbaceous layer, vines growing all of a puppet, habitat for birds. This one probably for chipmunks. Now it looks like they've gotten into there. But it's pretty crazy to think that this whole entire area was just a grass lawn maybe 8 years ago and now it's a walking winding path through a forest and there's shade and there's a canopy. All that all that shade is providing habitat for all of the herbaceous layer plants for all the animals uh you know in that base layer of the food forest system. We are literally living in an absolute jungle now and we've got food scattered in and all through it. So, um this year has kind of been a bit of of a um test of the whole entire stun, sheer total utter neglect. If anyone follows Mark Shepard, you know what I'm talking about. because I've been so busy with the dink den uh which is the pickle ball club that we're actually opening up. I haven't had a chance to do anything like at all. I haven't watered anything at all in the food forest and it's still producing tons of food for me. None of it's ready yet. Well, some of it's been ready. Uh but we're in a bit of a lull right now. Just waiting for the fruit uh for the later seasons to ripen up. But all of these trees and it's really hard to get the idea of just how big everything is. Not sure if you can see, but we've got trees 30 ft tall that are just absolutely jumping and thriving in this food forest system. We've got Rosie up in there above the swale. We're actually under the swale there here. So this is a bit of like a, you know, a tour and an example of just how powerful nature can be when we sew in seed in food everywhere. And then um you know even if we step back and we're not involved anymore. Oh wow, that is fresh. Then you know the whole system is still taking care of itself. Let's jump across the swim. the pears here putting on a ton of fruit that we'll have to collect later on. And this is kind of the front entrance to the food forest. Again, this used to just be an open field of grass and is now just so much food that we can barely even get to it all. And although some of the plants are struggling for sure, this has been a pretty dry uh summer, if I look at what the grass looks like, you know, it's this is what people's front lawn looks like and what it looks like if you don't water constantly. But the food forest is thriving. It's putting food on. It's putting fruit. And the shade that it's creating is actually keeping water and lushness abundant everywhere. Here's my compost bins. And we've got a a row of apple trees back in there as well. And we've got a ton of apples growing all in this tree. So, you know, it's kind of frustrating when you see um people cutting down 300ear oaks because they don't understand the value of what plants do for an ecosystem. That area is now just going to be a grass lawn. The person will take great pride in their grass lawn, but it is still at the end of the day just nothing. Nothing for anybody. You know, grass lawns were essentially how the rich showed that they were rich in the old days because they could actually convert some of their land to not produce food and that was how they showed their status. They didn't they had so much money they didn't even need to use their land productively. Whereas nowadays, you know, why on earth do we have so much of our land committed to just lawns everywhere instead of food? This is seabbuckthorn here. It's one of the healthiest berries on the planet. And this tree is just absolutely loaded with seabbuckthorn berries. Just think about how much nutrition, you know, if you're not even thinking about pounds of food and calories, but nutrition, how much nutrition is stored on this one plant right here. We've got peaches everywhere. We've got our apple trees everywhere. Asparagus that we've been harvesting from earlier that we're letting to grow. and just tons of apples growing. And yeah, this the tree itself might be a little struggling because of the the lack of water. But we just come by and we stomp over. We kind of do our best large ruminant impression and we just stomp over and create walking paths and mulch with the plants that we don't want. We create the walkways that we want and then we foster uh the trees that we do want. This here is a paper birch and they don't last too long but they are very valuable insect trees. So we're not just planting you know pears for humans. We also allow some stagghorn sumac. Uh that's not tree of heaven. That's stagghorn sumac. It's a great nature tree we plant for nature. So anyways, I hope you enjoy this video and showing what it looks like when you actually connect in to creating a food forest and not just gardens. If I just had gardens and didn't water them, everything would be dead. But sheer total utter neglect in the forest system and everything's doing great. And I've got all this beautiful walking, winding paths to enjoy on my on my property and forage for food like a caveman. And I can appreciate the value of all these trees because it's not just providing uh food for me. It's providing habitat and shelter and and shade on the soil uh to grow things like Jerusalem artichokes. So, I've got it's zombie apocalypse happens. I've got, you know, at least a month of food under the ground here that I can tap into. I've got another big chunk uh spread out elsewhere. I've got tons of medicinal plants. We've got a ton of cherries growing out on the side here. And then we've got this beautiful forest to enjoy and shade to sit under. So, not only would the trees be providing all of this function for nature and think of the cost in designing machinery in order to reproduce that. But if you put a couple trees in and around, you know, the south side of your house if you're northern hemisphere and you can collect all this shade and and save that on air conditioning or whatever cost that you have, make your house more comfortable. There's so much value in that as well. So, replace your lawns with food and gardening. Plant trees everywhere. Plant tomatoes at the base of your apple trees. Just let them climb right up. Plant kale in as your ground covers. When you see weeds, look up what they are. They might be food. Like this beautiful lamb's quarter. We had this beautiful box elder. Not a great tree, but we decided to use it as a trellis to grow grapes up. So, it's now turned into food. Cuz I mean, lawns are boring. Lawns are boring. This is much more fun to go around and pull raspberries off of what used to be just useless lawn. And in the back there, we've got kiwi. So, we got some cold hearty kiwi growing all up. There's the rest of it. Just tons of it. Look at this. Loaded. So excited to eat that. It's a great guild actually. Raspberries, kiwi, and this is all growing up a walnut tree, believe it or not. There's a walnut in there. There's the walnut tree here, and it's supporting hundreds of pounds of kiwi. So much so that we're actually probably gonna have to cut some of this off. Guess it's just weighing this branch down. It's going to crack it. And make sure you're integrating animals in where it makes sense and where you can. There's so much fertility in this area because this is right next to our girls. So, we open this up and they can run all in here and they can eat and peck at whatever they can reach. Raspberries. They've got shelter. When I stepped in here, it's literally 10° cooler in here. And all these kiwi will drop and fall and they'll collect them all and turn it into eggs at no extra effort and cost to us. And if we get some, we get some. If we don't, we get their eggs and they are happy as can be living in this little mini forest that I created for them. So, thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed this video. You probably saw a lot of wildlife and insects jumping around as I was walking around. I know I saw them, too. Just uh spread the word that the value of a tree is not just in its lumber. It's in all the all what we would have to create and engineer machinery to reproduce all of its functions in an ecosystem and trees priceless. Thanks for watching.