2 years ago we planted an edible forest

Two years ago, before we planted our first trees, this used to be an old olive grove. After a devastating fire turned this place to ashes, the land was completely clear cut. When we decided to bring this place back, we knew it was going to be a big challenge. But after building these massive water harvesting swales and planting close to a thousand trees and over 100 different species, things have changed. The idea was simple, plant a wide variety of fruit and nut trees to create an ecosystem that functions as a forest, but feels more like a modern day version of the Garden of Eden. It is now April, the beginning of spring, and this place has really undergone a big transformation in the past two years. We are finally reaching a point where it starts to feel and look like the beginnings of a young forest. The whole swale is now covered in plant growth, we have all sorts of branches, organic matter starting to break down, mushrooms are popping up here and there, the trees are starting to wake up from the short winter siesta, and we even have already harvested our first fruits of the year. One of the trees we're really excited about is this flat peach tree. There are literally dozens and dozens of little fruits growing on this tree. Unfortunately, as you can see, it's got peach leaf curl, which is a disease caused by a fungus that creates these ugly, distorted leaves, that damages them and makes them fall prematurely. Now we could remove all the leaves and burn them to reduce the number of spores of this fungus, but in the winter and spring it can be really humid here and we've got so many different species, so many different edible trees, that we just try to focus on creating the most fertile and healthy growing conditions for them to grow in, that in the end of the day, if this fungus continues to bloom and persist, and it affects the trees too much, we will simply compost the tree down and we will grow something else instead. It's one of those things when working with nature. Sometimes you have a lot of success and sometimes nature has other plans, and that's all right. That's why with everything we plant in this food forest, we mostly use a strategy or a concept called STUN, which was developed by Mark Sheppard. STUN stands for shared total other neglect, and the idea is, as humans, we're good at killing things that want to live and we're trying to keep things alive that want to die. When we are planting trees with the STUN method, we first look at the larger biome and look for the types of woody perennials that are already proven to work within the region. From there, we can then select the types of trees that we want to grow and that are most likely to succeed, and we plant those trees in the native soil without much else input, and basically we'll see what works or not. The idea is to give us little maintenance or care and attention, and whatever dies, dies. But whatever works, we will plant more of and will form the foundation of the ecosystem. Some of the trees that work really well here are pomegranates, apricots, citrus, mulberries, and this tree, the almond tree. I mean, look at it. When we planted it, it was nothing more than a tiny whip, and in just two short years, it has grown into already a decent-sized, well, more than two meter tall beauty of a specimen. And in fact, every single almond we planted two years ago has grown as much or more as this one. Can't wait to start harvesting our first almonds. It won't be much yet, but it just keeps on getting better and better every year. Now, that is a good investment. If we walk a little bit further on the swale, we are greeted by this beautiful black mulberry tree, and this is another one of those trees that just seem to love the conditions here. As you can see, it is completely loaded with berries at the moment. We planted this one during our first fall, which is roughly a year and a half ago now, and since then, it has grown amazingly fast. This is actually one of the trees that has been used for more than 5,000 to 8,000 years in China in the production of silk, which is made by the silkworm, but that's not why we planted them here. We are after their berries, which are super sweet and juicy, and we are definitely not the only ones who love them. During this time of the year, we get a lot that can literally strip an entire tree before the berries are even ripe. They normally eat a lot of acorns, pine nuts, insects, and I guess they come here for dessert. So, since we shared a love for these berries so much with our fellow earthlings, we decided to plant another 10 of these with all sorts of different varieties, and eventually, there should be enough for everyone. In the worst case, we'll start maybe a little magpie sanctuary. Who knows? And that is what I really love about this system. Initially, you are planting this food forest for your own consumption and that it can provide you with all the fruits, nuts, and essentially all the food you and your family will ever need. But as the system is evolving, you start to notice that it goes far beyond that. We have tons of insects, birds, amphibians, and all sorts of life starting to create little habitats and calling this place their home. So, what started out as a dream to provide for our own needs is now turning and evolving into something much bigger than ourselves. Into a place that supports and provides for all sorts of life, which in my mind, it just can't get any better. When we arrived on this land, one of the first things that we did was build these massive water harvesting swales. This property used to be essentially an old olive grove, but since the last forest fire completely turned this place to ashes, the entire land was clear-cut of trees. As you can imagine, during the following heavy winter rains, most of the topsoil washed away into the valleys, leaving the ridge completely exposed to erosion. And one of our main goals is to reforest this ridge. So, when we started digging our first holes for the first trees, in some cases we hit bedrock 10 to 20 centimeters down. Not exactly an ideal place for trees to grow. And this is what I mean. As you can see here, this is where we dug the trench of the main swale. And you can clearly see the rock layer right here on the ridge, with only a little bit of topsoil on top of that. Now, it's not everywhere like this, but in most places it was either rocks like this, or a near impermeable compacted hardpan. So you might have been wondering from, wow, you know, like that's a big swale. And indeed, you're right. It's not very usual to see them this big. We dug the trench about one and a half meter wide, and in this particular swale, we went down 40 to 50 centimeters. The idea was to then create the berm with the excavated earth, and backfill the trench with organic matter like wood chips. But as you can see, the wood chips are still on the to-do list. Now, I definitely don't recommend using swales everywhere. And if you want to know whether or not swales might be a suitable water harvesting strategy for your land, I've written an entire article on that over on our blog. I'll make sure to put the link down in the description box below. Now, apart from being able to stop erosion, harvest rainwater, and let that water slowly sink into the soil to recharge the groundwater, we essentially built these swales simply to increase the topsoil for our tree systems. Essentially creating a large raised garden bed to provide enough soil for the tree roots to grow in. And so far, the swales have done their job quite well. Whenever we have a very or an extremely large rain event, where water would normally rush down the slope with all the potential consequences, now it is slowly infiltrating in the soil and watering our young food forest. But this is the only swale that we built so large, and others are much lower and shorter. So let's have a look at those. Especially on this swale, we didn't have to dig too much, as the soil was already amazing. Here there was a natural depression, and all organic matter had accumulated here over the years and created a sponge-like soil already. And you can see that back in the ground cover vegetation, which is one of the most abundant and lush on our entire property. Here we haven't nearly planted as many trees as we would like yet, but you can see the abundance of vegetation quite well. In between all of this dense vegetation we have all sorts of trees growing. Here we have the fig tree, just next to it we've got the citrus, just a little bit further we've got a pomegranate, and then you've got the almond over there, and over there there's right there is an avocado tree. So this avocado tree we planted last November, and it survived the winter. It is not in great shape anymore, because we had several really chilly nights that went down to minus three degrees Celsius, but it's still alive. It already started flowering and growing new leaves, so the goal is to remove these flowers or any fruit that might develop, so the tree can focus all of its energy on developing a strong root system. But for now I don't want to interfere too much with it yet, with removing anything, simply because I want to make sure that I don't accidentally remove too much and damage the tree. If we walk a little bit further on the swale, there are another couple of exciting trees that we planted, and one of them is this young carob tree. The carob tree is an amazing long-term nitrogen fixing tree, while the pods of this tree can be used as a much healthier substitute for cacao. It is something that we nearly consume daily, as we really love the taste of it. We planted quite a bunch of these trees all over the swales and the land, and the goal with this specific one is that once we cut down these huge eucalypt trees, the goal is to let this one take over and become the larger canopy tree of this area, and eventually provide shade for another tree that we're trialing out and we planted this last winter, and that is the pawpaw tree. I'm not sure if you can actually see it, because it's just a tiny little twig in the ground for now, but the pawpaw tree is native from North America. It's actually one of the only members of the normally tropical fruit trees like custard apples and cherry moja, but this one grows in the cold climate. Pretty fun evolution. I've never tasted the fruits before, but from what I've read and seen, this is something I'm really looking forward to trying out. Hopefully these little guys will make it and grow into abundant small trees. They're not exactly known to like excessive heat or harsh direct sunlight, so we planted them in the shade of the eucalypt trees, and eventually hopefully they will be shaded by the carob tree. We'll see how that is going to work out. Now, what you see here is not only planted by us, and there are many herbaceous plants and weeds that start to come into this system, and one of these weeds is pistils. Now, pistils are great indicators of compacted heavy and acidic soil, which is pretty much the case for us, and probably one of the reasons why all the blueberries that we've planted here are doing so great. But I'm not the biggest fan of having these thorny little plants in the food forest, so since they're proven to work here without our input, we decided to copy this and instead grow a pistil that we do love, and that is native to the Mediterranean and grows an abundant amount of food. So this right here is an artichoke. Charlene has planted this one as a little seed in the greenhouse, and we've planted well over 50 so far, a little bit all over the place. This artichoke is a beautiful and delicious perennial plant that provides abundant flower heads, which are exceptionally nice when steamed for a bit and even raw. And since pistils seem to love it here so much, we thought why not replace most of them with this one instead. Now, normally from seed it won't flower in its first year, but in the years to come I hope they will produce abundantly. Unfortunately, we do have some that have already been eaten by slugs, which we have surprisingly a lot of this year, so we'll see how many will survive. Honestly, it is easy to go on and on about the beauty of this system. I mean, things are still small and young, but I think that now that we've reached this stage, we really start to have a small and emerging young food forest that will only get better from here on. Right now our job is simply to maintain what is already in place and try to keep filling any gaps as time goes by. It's still not at the density and diversity that we ultimately want to have in this forest, but hey, there's only so much that you can do with the time and resources that you have. But one of the plants that we did plant this winter and we are quite excited about is the alder tree. Now, we've already planted quite some support species and biomass trees and we started a lot more in the greenhouse, but we haven't had this one yet. This is the Alnus cordata, also known as the Italian alder, and this tree doesn't produce any fruits or nuts, well, at least not for us, but the great thing about this tree is that it's a deciduous nitrogen fixing tree. They are fast growing, super helpful and provide a ton of shade and biomass and all sorts of goodness to the soil. And as you can see, I planted it right next to this massive eucalypt tree that just doesn't seem to stop growing. I mean, just look at it! They really love it here. But my goal is to cut down all the eucalypt trees in the coming seasons and then slowly let the alder trees and other beneficial species take over and become the more long-term support and biomass trees of this system. Now, I'm not entirely sure how the eucalypt will respond to such a hard cut, but I'm guessing that it's going to take several seasons before the alder and the other trees have completely replaced them. A couple of months ago, we had a visitor on the and she accidentally drove on this eucalypt tree and broke it. And as you can see, it already starts growing a lot of new sprouts from the bottom of the stem, but that is essentially what I'm going to try and imitate. I'll just keep cutting it down until it doesn't have enough energy left in its root system and the other species are large enough to start taking over the space. I'm pretty curious how that is going to evolve over the coming seasons. One thing is for sure, we will continue to keep adding more diversity, more layers, more trees and shrubs and then eventually keep expanding this ecosystem outward towards the edges of our property. We've noticed that now that we have a bit of a foundation in place and the system has had a little bit of time to mature, it becomes much easier to keep on adding different plants and different species that can grow together in the same space. Over the years, we will see more wildlife making themselves at home. It will provide an abundance of diverse fruits, berries and nuts and many other things and hopefully things will keep getting better and keep on thriving for generations to come. Throughout this process, we start to realize that we're merely short-term passengers or stewards of the land and we're just trying our best to give nature a little bit of a helping hand wherever we can and in the process create abundant ecosystems that will continue to expand long after we are gone. We often overestimate what we can do in a year but it's really about the day-to-day over many years that counts. This is going to be our journey for as long as we can because why not? I could go on about all the different plants and species that we've got growing here for maybe hours and if that is something that you would like me to dive deeper into, just let me know in the comments. For now, thank you for watching and I will see you next time!