花園農業 種植可食用的樹葉代替生菜和菠菜！

Hello and a very warm welcome back to the garden Now I bet you didn't wake up this morning thinking Hmm, if only I could replace lettuce with tree leaves And it sounds wild but Some tree leaves are in fact edible and very delicious And not only that, they're easy to grow And highly highly nutritious Now before you think, oh you know what My garden is too small to grow trees Many of them can be coppiced or pollarded To be kept small and compact And many of them also shrubs Which you could train up against a wall or something This is a little extract from a chat that I had With Joshua Sparks who I visited in Devon He's a natural farming pioneer And he absolutely blew my mind When it came to this little part of this podcast segment One of the things I was quite excited to hear is How you're actually planting Like how much you're doing with perennial salads But you're growing things like limes And white mulberries and chardonnay Great, can you chat a little bit more about that and why Yeah, so you know with how our climate's going You know it's getting more difficult to grow Especially in those early seasons Like March, April, May Start of May are bonkers now And what we've noticed is The things that do really well are the trees Don't get touched by slugs Don't get hit by anything Grow in the wind, grow everywhere And we've taken the decision now to basically To focus more on perennial foods in general But especially perennial salads So we developed two beautiful perennial salads this year That have been really successful And it's kind of given us the confidence to be like Actually this does work You know you can actually produce a salad Without having to use lettuce and rocket Delicious salads as well may I add And it's important Yeah, yeah, yeah If you want people to change you have to enjoy it Yeah, and I think perennials fit into that Ever so slight foraging remit sometimes You know my uncle He probably eats up the sugar Yeah, my uncle says it perfectly He thinks that foragers are like wine connoisseurs And they'll give you something to try And it tastes absolutely disgusting But they'll tell you it's the best tasting thing in the world And I think perennials can sit within that sphere slightly You know there are a lot of horribly tasting perennials Just like there's a lot of delicious tasting perennials And so we've spent a long time developing salads With things that taste good That are efficient to pick That have a business point of view And they're not finicky and hard And so for us what came out on top was lime leaf You know just tilia leaf and white mulberry leaf Which are beautiful delicious lettuce alternatives You know I think me and Jack were joking We wanted to create a I don't know if hashtags are still a thing But we wanted to create a hashtag that was Limes over lettuce Because they were delicious And you know I think I put it into context When I was pricing it out So I can buy a lime whip for £1.80 A seed packet A lettuce packet is what £2.25 for a small packet Give it two years That lime tree will produce more leaves Than that salad packet Give it four years And that one lime tree Will produce more lettuce than one salad bed And from a cost point of view as well It just makes more sense But they are delicious Lime leaves, white mulberry And we can go beyond that So once we let the white mulberry shoot a little bit We can actually use white mulberry shoots As a vegetable substitute And there's another substitute A sub canopy tree Which we call Staphylae pinnata Which usually gets celebrated For its pistachio tasting nut or seed But actually you can use the young shoot As a vegetable as well So you can just cut the young shoots And sauté them a little bit And then you've got another vegetable alternative So we can actually use trees as vegetables What's that one you just mentioned A Staphylae pinnata bladder nut Bladder nuts And so we can use those crops Saltbush you know a very classic perennial Beautiful in salads It's lovely salty You know texture is quite We have to recreate the texture of a salad And we do that by adding things like The Buxhorn plantain The Hylothelithiums The Sedums and the saltbushes And they'll add the texture to the lime trees And the white mulberries That people are looking for that crunch But you've got five species As opposed to one You know doing the same thing And we know that I can't remember the fifth one But we know that there's The five most nutritional crops That we can grow in the north You know kind of our temperate climate Is vine leaf Mulberry leaf Lime leaf And goji berry leaf I can't remember the fifth one And those four crops Are the most nutritionally And mineral dense foods That we can grow in our northern hemisphere Are you serious about goji berry leaf Yeah goji berry leaf And we use goji berry leaf as well Because the thing is I've been trying to grow goji berries For a few years And it leaves up great Yeah But I've never had a berry salad Goji berry leaf is delicious in a salad Just a few trickled in It has this lovely kind of like Tangy bitterness And remember we grow for chefs So they want I don't know I can't remember What the five pillars of food are But one of them is bitter They want bitter, sweet, zest You know the stuff And so what I've learned is actually We're so scared of bitter We're so terrified of it It's so good for you It's like one of the best things You can eat for your gut Is bitter foods And so just adding a few Of those goji berry leaves Just to add a little hint of bitterness That has this kind of zesty heat twist to it Is really good So goji berry leaf Is a fantastic salad crop as well And in a world where we're living Where our food is so nutritionally poor To grow those foods that are Climate resilient Build biodiversity Require minimal input Nothing almost basically And you're growing something Which is dense and fills you up quicker You know is a win on all parts really I think particularly after this growing season And the slug onslaught One of the exciting things about tree leaves Is that slugs just aren't interested in them And another part of the discussion I had with Joshua Was about how he uses beetles As one of his key ways Of dealing with slugs You would look at his farm And think it's just slug habitat everywhere But ground beetles Are a very exciting part And I think we can all learn something from it So here's that little clip One of the things that kind of struck me Is what he said about you Actually being a beetle farmer Yeah I've never heard of that Yeah yeah no I don't Why is that So beetles are really the kind of I mean if you exclude like the soil microbes And the fungi and that From a ecosystem point of view I think the beetles are the foundation to build on Interesting Beetles start for me anyway You know how I see it is Beetles are the start of that kind of like Ecosystem equilibrium That we're always trying to find And because of that Slug is our biggest predator You know it Like everyone's experience this year especially Slug just decimate everything And I think they're always seen as the villain And they're always seen as the kind of like The I would say How people see natural farming not working Is because of slugs So what we have to do is focus on beetle populations And so really a lot of the decisions we make Whether it's from our agroforestry Or field layout Or kind of habitat controls Really to build beetles You know that's what we focus on as a farmers You know and that's why I joke that we're beetle farmers Because we're doing everything to maintain Those beetle populations And then really from building Those beetle populations up It's almost like you know Kind of flicking the dominoes You know building them up Build something else up And then very quickly start to rebuild that ecosystem And then you find your slugs are kept in balance And then beetles also keep other pests Like sawfly in balance Or carrot root fly in balance Or cabbage root fly in balance Because they eat everything in the soil as well And then from that You can just build a system That doesn't require so much Netting or digging or anything like that really And so we leave grass in the field We create slug habitat Because beetles like the same habitat as slugs They live side by side And so we almost want slugs Because the more slugs I have The more beetles I get And you never want to eradicate the slug You eradicate the slug The beetle will go somewhere else to find them And it's that classic like hero paradox You know you need the villain in order to be a hero You know and the beetles very much are You know kind of Batman's And the slug is the joker And so you know Kind of almost reluctantly say That we almost encourage slugs in the system Because we want the beetles to have the food as well I have to say I think that's the first time I've heard a grower say Yeah slugs you need more slugs Yeah and you know I'm not going to sugarcoat it The first couple of years When we took the farm from a pasture You know we turned it into what it is today It was tough Because we just didn't have the beetle populations You know it had been a cultivated field It had been sprayed It had been lay It had been everything That beetles don't want to be in And it's taken a good three to four years Now for those beetles to come back In such a population That they make a massive impact on the ecosystem And like I said Like it is honestly like flicking dominoes Now they've come back Everything's just kind of slotting into place Really nicely And you know we can put things out You know and like we can put trays and trays Of lettuces and onions and brassicas out And we know that we're going to have Probably a 90-95% survival rate From what we put out as well You know and it's And you know you lift up a plank of wood Or you move a piece of grass And there'll always be a beetle Or a centipede Kind of just scurrying around as well I definitely saw the biggest centipede I've ever seen in my life here Yeah yeah yeah A lot of centipedes But we also have to recognize Like mice and voles are big slug predators Grass snakes are big slug predators When they're young You know there's a lot of things That eat slugs out there It's just the fact that Because we keep so much of that ecosystem Out of our food growing The slugs just have free reign Because there's nothing there to eat them You know we're talking in the field that You know we have an ecologist Who helps us to make sure that Everything we do is to the best that we can And we know that beetles Have an active hunting range Of between 12 to 20 meters at night And so what we've done Is put our agroforestry at 12 meter distances So at least the beetle can get from One tree row to another at night And not have to panic about Getting back in the daytime When a bird could grab it Or something else could grab it So it's decisions like that Which are predominantly for the beetles If you want to get your mind blown By the type of work that Joshua Sparks is doing I've got a video coming up soon about it But we do have an hour and a half long chat That you can watch right here All about his methods his approach And I learned so much from it So give that a watch