How I Grow Unlimited Plants for My Food Forest

This entire food forest started with a handful of seeds, a couple of cuttings and a picnic table. And you know what's fun? Spending 50 euros on a single fruit tree and then realizing that you'll need a hundred more just to start that food forest dream. And that was me in the beginning, 10 years ago. I was standing in the nursery holding one sad looking fruit tree in my hand, doing the math in my head and then realizing that well there must be a better way. Since then I've planted food forests in three different climates and in the last couple of months we've planted over 500 different types of fruit trees, shrubs and support species for a total cost of about 200 euros. Welcome to my highly curated ultra professional propagation center. As you can see I've invested heavily into a somewhat wobbly picnic table that I built from local wood, recycled trays and whatever that thing is. But here's the funny part. This little table has already produced over a thousand different plants and in just a few months from high quality fruit trees to support species to shrubs and everything in between. So let's have a quick look in the nursery at what we've got growing right now. This is our basic nursery setup and as you can see we have a whole bunch of different kind of plants growing here, most of which will be planted in the upcoming weeks. So we've got well a whole bunch of different things. We've got some nitrogen fixes, we've got some duquinas, we've got some abyssias, here we have papaya, we've got some ginger, carob trees, loquats, like there's a whole bunch like lots of palm trees over there because who doesn't love palms. Here we've got some feijoas, we've got some bamboos, we've got tamarillo, avocados, like there's a whole bunch of different things that are getting started in such a simple basic setup that will then go into the food forest. Now is this the perfect setup? Not at all. Will I upgrade it? Probably. But that's the point. You don't need much to start a lot of plants. When we moved to this new location most of our time went into well getting the basics sorted and still with a couple of hours a week this setup was enough to kickstart our new food forest. And you can build something like this in an afternoon for well basically almost no cost. All we need to start is are a few supplies and mostly plants. And every plant that you grow create more of itself. In fact you can see every plant as a tiny factory and each one is built to multiply life in its own way. Some create diversity through seeds, others make perfect clones through cuttings. And I want to share the five simple methods that I use to grow a near endless supply of plants without using a greenhouse and with a very basic setup and without spending more than two hours a week. So let's start with the first one which is the mass production factory. Nothing and I mean nothing gives you more diversity, more resilience and sheer volume of plants for less money than a handful of seeds. Nature doesn't overthink it. She just floods the ground with seeds and the strongest ones will take root and survive. It's efficient and it's easily one of the fastest ways to fill your land with plants without emptying your wallet. Every seed is a tiny experiment and each one carries a slightly different genetics. Some handle the wind better, some fruit earlier, some taste amazing and some well compost happens. That's nature's version of quality control and if you grow a fruit tree from a seed and you don't love the results, well no problem. You can always graft onto that seedling later on and that's part of the fun. These days I start almost everything from seeds, from nitrogen fixers to fruit trees, from shrubs and herbs and even wild species I stumble upon. And half the time the seeds come from something that I just ate. You can literally plant the seed from like for example a mango or a local apple that we have here and you've got a whole new tree. The trick is you need to understand what kind of seed that you're dealing with because not all of them wake up the same way. Some of the seeds are well quite impatient and you just drop them in the soil and they're up in a week. Others are a little bit more cautious and they need a what's called a winter before they trust the world enough to sprout. The fancy term for that is called stratification. It just means like giving the seeds a little bit of a cold nap before spring. And you can very easily fake winter by sealing seeds in a damp paper towel inside a zip bag, stick it in the fridge for a few weeks and just wait. When they start sprouting you can then plant them in a pot and grow them on from there. We've done that with these apricot trees and even these comfrey plants. The method works perfectly for temperate climate species like apples, pears and chestnuts. Some other species are the exact opposite and they need more warmth and moisture to germinate. And that's called stratification. And I do that for a lot of the nitrogen fixing trees like leukinas or acacias. And I just soak the seeds in warm water for a couple of days until they swell up like little balloons. And after that you just plant them into trays or pots and they will turn into new trees. Here's the main rule to keep in mind. Don't overthink it. Seeds want to grow. That's their only job. Just give them breathable soil, some moisture and a little bit of protection and most of them will surprise you. Now sowing the seeds is actually really straightforward. Depending on the size of the seeds I either use very large pots like what I do for these avocados or I just use these simple seedling trays for smaller seeds. Which is what I've done for these sesbania trees which are nitrogen fixing trees native to South America. And all you need to do is fill up a couple of trays or some pots with some nice loose seed starting compost which you can make yourself at home or you can just buy a couple of bags at the local agricultural store. And once you filled up the tray you can then plant the seeds about twice its size in depth which is a nice rule of thumb for how deep you should plant them. Then you water it. Make sure to label the tray with the date and the species that you've planted and you're done. A couple of weeks later you'll see green life start poking through and that's when you realize you can grow literally hundreds of plants for the price of one store-bought tree. These leucaena seedlings came from seed pods that I collected in a nearby park a couple of months ago. Literally a couple of minutes of work, a little bit of compost and now they are ready to be transplanted in the food forest. And I can start the next batch today if I want to. This is the beauty of the mass production factory. Once you start doing this the diversity keeps exploding and the whole system compounds year after year. And seeds keep things exciting because every new plant will be a surprise. But sometimes you don't want surprises you want results. That's when I switch to the next factory. Next up is a factory number two. It's the copy paste factory also known as propagating by cuttings. If factory one was like chaos and diversity this one's precision and control and this is where we clone success. Let's say you've got a rosemary that never dies or a fig tree that fruits like it's trying to prove something. Instead of buying 10 more you can just make them yourself. Cuttings let you duplicate plants that already thrive on your land and once you figure that out every thriving plant becomes a gold mine or a plant mine. Yeah that's terrible. Let's move on. Now to make cuttings work it all comes down to one thing. Timing. Cuttings change character through seasons. In spring you can take softwood cuttings which are those new green fresh shoots and they root fast but they dry out easily. Then by mid-summer you can take what is called semi hardwood cuttings. This wood is a bit tougher they root a little bit slower but they are more reliable. Then in winter when the plant goes dormant you can take what is called hardwood cuttings from woody branches and this is nearly foolproof. You can literally make a cutting of about 15 centimeters or like six inches stick them in the soil forget about them come a couple of months later and most of them will have rooted. Seriously it can be that simple. Generally the problem with cuttings well at least in like my case in the beginning where I killed most of my cuttings is by simply trying to babysit them all the time and looking every other day to see whether the cuttings have rooted yet. If you want to succeed with this method don't do that. A general rule of thumb is that when the leaves stay green it is rooting and when you gently pull and feel resistance that's when it's done and you can pot it up. But I have to warn you once you start doing this propagation can become addictive and you will stop asking like how do I afford all these plants and you start asking like where am I going to plant all of these. You can't say that I didn't warn you. Now let me quickly give you an example of a plant that I have growing here in the food forest. This plant right here goes by many names some people call it Mexican mint some others call it Cuban oregano, Indian borage, basically it's an identity crisis with leaves. But it thrives here it smells incredible it attracts a lot of bees and it gives endless biomass so let's clone it. All I have to do is take a few softwood cuttings of about 15 centimeters each and when doing this I want to make sure to cut the plant right below one of those leaf nodes which is the place where it will send out most of its new roots. So it can be just as rough as this and I just literally cut it under the leaf nodes and let's go and plant these right now to show you what I do from here. Welcome back to the propagation center. Right now on these cuttings there are way too many leaves and we want to strip most of them except for maybe like the top two. What this will do is this will prevent the cuttings from losing too much water through evaporation. This way the cutting will focus mostly on developing roots itself. So it can be just as rough as this and once I've taken off the leaves I can quite literally up maybe just two on the top look this is how it was before and this is how it is after and as you can see it's just below the last root node on the bottom here and all I have to do right now is plant it in a simple pot it can be a nursery tray can be anything can be directly in the ground sometimes and that's it. I've got a new cutting and in a couple of weeks couple of months it will look like this. This is the same exact species as the one that we just cut and this one's a couple of months old and as you can see it's got these lovely roots going all over. It's time to plant these ones as they start to become a little bit root bound well that's no problem whatsoever give it a quick prune but that's it. The first few times that I tried it I messed it up by watering too much too much poking and like too much checking and now I do the opposite. Once they are in I leave them alone and just make sure that the soil stays moist. Cuttings often fail more from love than from neglect and that's the copy paste factory. It's quick, it's easy, it's endlessly scalable and this is how you multiply what already works on your land but sometimes instead of cloning success you just want instant expansion and turn one plant into 10 today and that's where the next factory comes in. Now this next one feels great the first time you do it because you don't need trays you don't need cuttings and you don't even need seeds you just take a shovel split a plant in half and suddenly you've got two. That's the slice and multiply factory or better known as propagation by division. It's a really easy way of turning one plant into sometimes more than 10 plants. There's no waiting weeks for roots to appear no wondering if it's going to take it's basically instant results and I use this method all the time for plants that naturally grow in clumps like this lemongrass or chives but also plants that produce offsets rhizome and bulbs like ginger or comfrey. Basically anything that forms like a big root ball or keeps sending up new shoots from the base can be divided and the beauty of division is that it helps you multiply plants fast because one healthy mother plant can quickly become 10. Those 10 become a hundred next season and before you know it you've got well enough species to fill every empty space in your food forest and the process is quite straightforward. You want to use a plant that is well established something that's already outgrown its space or started forming multiple clumps like this lemongrass here. This was a small division when we planted it out some six months ago and it's already grown enough to multiply it across the food forest. It's obviously a great use for cooking it provides a ton of biomass and it's reducing the weed pressure around it quite significantly. So let's propagate some more of this plant but first let's give it a quick haircut and take about two thirds from the plant off which will help it establish faster once we start transplanting it. All right that's what's left. Now I can come in with a shovel and I can go around the base of the plant just to like loosen it a bit. If the soil is really compact you can give it a deep watering before it'll make everything a little bit softer and easier to handle and you can do this in two ways. You can either dig out the entire plant or you can loosen the soil around the plant to kind of see where like the natural divisions are. Generally I find it easier just to take out the entire plant and make some divisions, amend the hole a little bit and then replant a division back into it. So let's do it. That's it. Now it's ready to be propagated. So now that I have the entire clump out I can clearly see where the natural divisions are and all I have to do now is either make a cut or just separate them from each other and you can be pretty rough while doing this. So already got this one's already fell out of each other. As long as you ensure that each of the divisions has some roots or at least a healthy shoot on it with some roots that'll work. So basically it can be very rough and voila we've got a new lemongrass plant and all I do is I can just rip them off some roots and another one and like this what started as one plant turns very quickly into a whole bunch of new plants. All right so as you can see I've now divided the plant and we had one main plant which was this one with the largest root set and right now we've got one, two, three, fifteen, sixteen plants. So one plant just became sixteen plants and I just have to transplant these now out into the food forest and then in a couple of months time I will have sixteen plants like the one you just saw before and I can redo it again. So all I need to do right now is I need to dig a little hole while this one was already here. I amend it with a tiny bit of compost, dig it in there, put it in there, some of the native soil, give it a good water and that's about it. I can use some of these leaves as mulch, ferment a little bit and that's really all there is to it. Within a few days you'll see new shoots popping up, within a few weeks it will look like it was never disturbed and within a few months you will probably be dividing it again and that's how fast this method compounds. One plant becomes 10, 10 becomes 50 and suddenly you will start considering actually turning this into a side business and start selling plants and that is how we propagate plants through divisions. But sometimes some plants do the work for you and you just have to know when to step in and claim them. Now this next one you don't even have to do much, you just let nature do what she already is doing and you take the credit. This is the sucker factory and it's one of the lazy gardener's best friends. Some plants, well many plants, naturally send up new shoots from their base. Even a lot of fruiting trees and plants like figs, olives, mulberries, cherries and these bananas. Basically they send up little clones of themselves nearby and once they're strong enough you can dig them up and give them their own home. Free bonus plants growing around the originals. It's nature's way of saying like hey I'm already multiplying whether you help me or not and that's the beauty of it because you don't need any trays, you don't need any pots or any setup, you just need to keep an eye out on when you're walking like through your garden because once you start noticing suckers you'll see them basically everywhere. But the key with propagating suckers is timing. You want to wait until the sucker has grown its own little root system. Usually once it's about 20 to 40 centimeters tall and it looks like it can handle life on its own. If it's too small and you try to remove it, it will die. If it's too big the roots can be tangled too much with the mother plant and that can cause more harm than good. But once you get the timing right this method is awesome because not only are you getting free plants that are identical to the mother plant but if it's a really healthy plant they've already adapted to your soil and they've proven that they can thrive where they are. So the odds of them thriving somewhere else on your land are really high and the process to separate suckers without damaging the mother plant and give them kind of like the best shot at survival once you move them is quite straightforward. So let me show you how I do this because this is the kind of lazy gardening that I think that we all kind of deserve. First you will need to spot a sucker and you can usually find them popping up right next to the base of the parent plant or sometimes even a few meters away if it spreads through roots. Once you've found a winner you can basically just grab a sharp shovel or a spade or a knife and dig like a small circle around the sucker to loosen the soil and then slice down between it and the main plant. The goal is to cut like the umbilical cord cleanly but without ripping everything apart. So let's get this sucker out of the ground. There we go, there we go. Up some roots fall off and there we have a brand new banana plant with roots still intact. And this one I can transplant it and it becomes a new plant. So let's go and let's do that. Once you have the sucker and the hole is ready it's just a matter of planting it and watering them deeply and that's all they need to settle in. And that's all they need to settle in. But don't forget about the one who did all the work. After removing the sucker I always backfill the hole, give the mother plant a deep watering and maybe a little bit of light mulch. It helps recover and she'll often reward you by sending up even more suckers next season. It's really one of the easiest ways to propagate a ton of new plants in your food forest. But there's a one more type of plant factory that's just as sneaky and it doesn't pop up next to the plant but it literally grows from the branches themselves. You just have to bend it, bury it and let nature handle the rest. So let's have a look into that one. Now this last one might just be one of the forgiving ones because it's the most set and set it and forget it method that there is. And it's called layering. But I like to call it the bend and bury factory. You literally bend a branch down into the soil, cover most of it and just wait. That's it. Nature handles the rest. And when you come back a few months later that buried section will have grown its own roots completely independent from the parent plant. Then you just cut it free and boom you've got a new plant. Same genetics, same resilience and already pre-adapted to your soil and microclimate. And you can use this method with vines like kiwis, passion fruit, grapes and also blackberries. But you can do this with many more species. Pretty much with anything that has flexible stems and likes to grow low or ramble. That can be layered. And the best part is that you can do it while the plant is still producing. You're not cutting it up, you're just borrowing like one of its arms for a few months. And you can see this method in action often like what we have here with brambles. So this right here is a bramble that I don't want to have that I send out a long primocane. Which is the name for the arching shoot that the plants generally send out to expand their territory. It's a very vigorous shoot from the mother plant, sent from the rootstock. And when this shoot eventually touches the soil like it just did here, it will form new roots on the tip and it establishes a new plant. This primocane then becomes a floricane from which new side shoots grow and produce a fruit. This is a classical example of tip layering where the tip of a shoot forms new roots and becomes a new plant. And there are tons of different layering methods that you can use from tip layering like this one. But also air layering and trench layering and mound layering. All methods are quite straightforward and allow you to propagate a ton of new plants that you can use elsewhere in the food forest with not much effort. Now I'm not much of a big fan of propagating a bramble like this. And I have several thornless varieties in the pots in the nursery that are ready to be transplanted. But they don't have these long canes yet. So I can't really demonstrate of how to use this method with those plants. But all in all this is a very straightforward method. You just literally take a cane. It can be the shoot of a vine, of a grape or anything. You just dig a hole, you put it in there, you put some soil on top of it, you put some weight on it. It could be a peg, it could be a piece of a rock or whatever. And you just let it there. And that's all there is to it. And then in a matter of time they will just pump out all these new roots. Which for this one I don't like too much. And I will definitely remove it and replace it with something that I do like. These are the five simple methods that I use to get a near unlimited supply of plants for my food forest. And once you get the hang of it, you will never look at a plant the same way. For every plant that you really enjoy and want more of, there is a method to multiply it. And in no time you will have more plants than you know what to do with. But then once you start to stock up on some of your favorite plants and you get a whole bunch of them, how do you turn all of these plants into a thriving food forest one patch of land at a time? And that is what I will show you in this next video. Thank you so much for watching. I hope you've enjoyed it and keep on propagating. See you next time!