3.5 Year Food Forest (Syntropic Agroforestry)

This is going to be the last food forest update that you'll see until spring. I know I said that same thing last year. I'm going to show you the newest food forests, the oldest food forest, the best performing area, and then what's coming next. Let's go check it out. Things have grown like crazy this year. Let's go. These are the backyard systems. You can see we've already got these massive trees after just two and a half years old. Crazy. It's amazing how fast trees grow here when you're using the principles of agroforestry. This transformation has been crazy. It's been all grass. This whole area, everything you see here was just grass just a few years ago. Now it's this series of diverse food forests, but we're going to go to the most recently planted area. It was planted about five and a half months ago. It's the end of a long weekend course. We've just done an epic agroforestry installation. We've got a bunch of the Brazil seeds all going into these really diverse and dense tree lines. So this is the most recently planted food forest. The most recently planted agroforestry is actually integrated into what was previously kind of a patchy orchard. There were some established mandarins and citrus and things are growing beautifully. Young support trees around the established mandarins and in between the mandarins. So from the drip line over to the next mandarin has been filled with a huge diversity of species. Centropic agroforestry. We've got early succession pioneers, tons of herbaceous chop and drop support trees, nitrogen fixers, eucalyptus, bananas, papayas, and all sorts of longterm trees in the understory. Huge diversity of seeds and seedlings put in the ground. What that does is the huge diversity gives us the opportunity to be picky and selective with which plants we choose. We've actually already started getting edible mushrooms out of these systems. They were inoculated about a month and a half ago, already gained King's safari on top of having already harvested corn and tomatoes out of these systems. It's incredible. When you work with natural processes, how low maintenance this has been. That's the crazy thing is this has been so low maintenance. People don't believe me when I say that I'm actually not out here all the time. It really is a lot less work than you would imagine given the size of the space. These tree lines are about 60 meters long and there's three of them. It's 180 meters of tree line that I don't actually have to manage that intensively. My aim here is to quickly develop it into an agroforestry system where we're producing higher succession species. Cherimoya, bananas, Japanese raisin trees, papayas, avocados, tons of guavas, citrus, parana nut, mulberries, loquats, olives, peaches, lots of peaches from seed, tons of sugarcane, pecans. I brought huge bags of Brazil seeds with me when I came back from last year's trip. All of those seeds are in the ground as trials here. Not expecting them all to do well, but the ones that do going to nurture those. And a few different eucalyptus varieties. You can see right here, we've got the ovata, the swamp gum, and then my personal favorite the nitins or the shining gum. These are my favorite because they have a really straight growth habit, really oily foliage, but also just more foliage in general than the ovata. More canopy, more material to prune, better frost protection. Ooh, check this out. You can see we've got some new mushrooms popping up that we'll go ahead and harvest right now. It's mushrooms for dinner tonight. Should've brought a basket out here. So this is block two. It's really diverse. It's humongously dense. It's the biggest system I've ever installed here. A lot of the propagation material came from the living nursery, which is the first block. Most of that propagation material that's been used for this area was sourced from the previous installations. And so start your agroforestry. It turns into a living nursery very, very quickly. And then suddenly you'll have massive systems of food that you don't know what to do with. That's block two. It's crazy. Seeing the before and after footage here, the transformation has been wild and I can't wait to see how it continues to evolve. You can be sure that in the next few years, you'll keep coming back and seeing this forest just develop looking more and more like the year three and a half forest, which we're going to go to next. It makes my heart really happy to see this. I've known for a couple of years that block two wanted to get planted and to now see it in the ground, six months old. It just gets me really excited seeing this baby young system, knowing that it's destined for great things. This is the oldest food forest that I've ever planted here. It's three and a half years old and feels like a jungle takes me back to Brazil. The biggest change that's happened this year is in the understory. This all used to be grass. All the previous videos that you've seen up until the spring intervention from a few months ago. And now look, it's just like a big giant ground cover of all these different edible perennial vegetables, coffee. There's Vietnamese mint, Okinawa spinach, taro, myoga ginger, all these really incredible understory species that love the shade. They're not trying to get the intense sunlight. They love these understory conditions that the forest is now providing because these tree lines are now three and a half years old. These bananas, there's fruiting Tamarillo's behind us. It actually feels like a forest now and no doubt it'll continue feeling that way over time. And right here where I'm scraping is actually these wooden log pathways that were laid down in spring. When we did the big heavy pruning of the surrounding trees, we laid these wooden log pathways to reduce the compaction. When I have tour groups through here, I only walk them on this track because I know that if I just keep having compaction in the same areas over time, no good. So I walked tours through this wooden pathway, reduce the compaction slowly as being digested by the microbiology, turning into a happy forest. I've been eating highland papaya for months straight since I got back from Brazil. Basically these avocados that I pruned heavily have been doing beautifully. The bananas are thriving. The citrus is happy. The macadamia is in the understory, the cherimoya are hip and belly button high now after just a few years from seed. One of the biggest lessons that I got from Brazil was incorporating alley crops in between your tree lines. Now in Brazil, the standard is five meters between tree lines here. There are about three to four as time goes on. I'll probably just continue planting more trees into this alley crop. So it becomes more of an organic flow rather than just straight lines as the system develops being excited for the future, but also just so happy with where things are at now in the food forest. Because I remember when three and a half years ago, I was here with a group of people and we were planting this food forest, but it just was this tiny little line of trees in this ocean of grass. And now there's no grass to be seen. There's just beautiful young trees. There's fast growing trees. There's fruit dripping everywhere. It's the most magical thing in the world. Grow food forest. If this doesn't convince you, I don't know what will because this is such a special feeling to know that this forest is this forest is just life should be called a life forest, not a food forest because there's more than just food in here. There's there's all sorts of life underground medicines in here. There's resources like wood. It's just such a cool place. There is no frost that gets in here anymore. Whereas just outside of the food forest, you can see the photos from year two outside of the food forest areas. Frost will absolutely be here. If we get to negative two in the food forest, it doesn't really happen anymore. The microclimate is established these evergreen support trees. I'm not going to prune them until early spring. They're going to keep our frost away, keep things nice and warm and protected. That's the dynamic that you're looking for. It's crazy to think that this was all grass. A few years ago, three years ago, I had friends who were having kids and having babies. I was having my own baby and it's this food forest. Now this is way cooler than any, any three year old. Just kidding. But it's amazing what happens in three years. Now there's just a beautiful layer of organic material and really dark, rich soil. It's been super productive and we've got a forest of food. Now let's go to my best area because this isn't my best. This isn't my favorite. This isn't the best performing area. It's the oldest, but I'm going to explain why the best is the best and how you can skip my mistakes. So walking through here, you can see there's another alley crop of Yakon Peruvian ground apple. That's head high. I'll tell you why it's the best performing the density of tree species and not just any trees, the density of support trees. This was when I really fixed that mistake that I made in the first year. So I want to pass that mistake on so you don't have to make it. I didn't plant enough support trees in the first year. So when I planted this area, I over corrected and planted way more than I knew I would need. The benefit is that allowed me the opportunity to prune trees out early. What I originally planted was a support tree every half meter. I would plant a tree lucerne and a eucalyptus, a tree lucerne, a eucalyptus, the tree lucerne nitrogen fixing the eucalyptus are a bit longer lived. Both of those produce organic material cycle nutrients and build our soil. And so the first mistakes that I made were not planting enough of those species. I included some here and there, but I didn't plant the volume of them. The second year I was worried about frost and I wanted a frost protection. And so I over planted them knowing that I'd have to prune them out early. And so I've started doing that. And as a result, the soil has improved. The trees have grown better. The trees that were planted a year later than the earlier year, I've grown faster. The soil is better. It's turning more fungal because of the extra organic material. When you plant things higher density than you know, you should be that gives you the opportunity to prune them and cycle that organic material very quickly into the soil. Cause that's the point. The point of planting all these support trees is to build organic material into soil. And so the way you do that is over plant your support trees. I was learning a lot from Felipe and Genaro in the Agroforestry Academy when I did this. And I thought this feels crazy. Planting a eucalyptus every meter, and then a tree lucerne every meter in between there. But trust me, it's working beautifully. At this stage, I've pruned about half of the tree lucerne out. Every other tree has been cycled into the ground as organic material. So you can see in here, there's tons of sticks and logs, and that's all building our organic material in the soil. It's increasing our life and helping our trees have access to nutrients. Biological activity is the key behind all of it. Unlocking the nutrients and the minerals in your soil. And so feeding the biology is the key. How do you feed biology? With organic material, especially that you grow in situ on the site itself. And so that's why we've over planted our support trees here. And that's why it's working so well. That's why this is the best area. I've had one recommendation that would be it is over plant your support trees. So you have to prune them earlier. You have to start building your soil conditions. This is what it looks like. On to the next area. This is an update on the temperate system, which was installed beginning last winter. When we put a cover crop down in between each of the tree lines in spring came through as a part of a course and installed a series of diverse alley crops where those cover crops had been existing. And so now we have a diversity of herbs, berries and some long to medium term trees planted in these alley crops. The target crop here in the temperate alley crops are American pawpaw. So every half meter I've planted American pawpaw seedlings. And so ultimately this will have a thicket of berries, herbs and American pawpaw in the understory between the tree lines of whatever grafted climax fruit trees, nut trees, support trees. We'll see where things go, but so far very happy with the temperate centropic agroforestry in this area. There's plums, apples, pears, nectarines, peaches, Japanese raisin trees, apricots, walnuts, pecans, support trees include different kinds of willows, eucalyptus, Acacia and poplar. I like the Kawa poplar the best. There's tons of rosemary, sage, lots of berries, huge diversity of raspberries, blueberries, pomegranate, figs, mulberries, a bunch of other stuff that I can't quite think of off the top of my head, but that's most of it. This is the final area that I'm going to show you and it's what's happening next. These mandarins, these citrus are really old and stagnant. There's lots of disease and they're just not the healthiest. And so knowing what I know now about how agroforestry can improve the health and productivity of these trees, this is going to be an area where next season there's some really heavy agroforestry happening here. You can see in this small little patch just here, this was about two years ago. We've planted some eucalyptus and a few things from seed, but really low density and very little management, but it's an occupation system. It's an occupation system because that's better than having nothing here. It's better than having just grass. When we come and do our intervention next season, we have a lot of organic material to work with and the conditions have already began improving even with very little management. It's just an occupation system. The mandarins are still productive here. They taste great. However, there is still a fair amount of disease pressure, wasted space, underutilized potential with how disease riddled these trees are. What we know now about how agroforestry can just improve everything about a space. This area is next on the chopping block. Tune in in about six months and you'll see the radical transformation that this undergoes. But it's so great to see the comparison because I'm going to be able to pull this footage up in another two years when this whole area is just a giant productive forest. We'll be able to see how these trees have become more healthy. These leaves are so unhealthy and small. That's all going to change very quickly. I mean, that same thing happened out here in here. We plant the agroforestry, the trees get healthier. And so that's kind of the last block where things are yellow and unhealthy and sick. Life is good in the agroforestry. Check in soon. Costa Rica, Florida, Brazil, it's going to be crazy. Hope you got something out of this and see you very soon.