How we Started - Syntropic Agroforestry - SOUTH OF FRANCE

Hello everybody! Welcome to our garden tour. Here we have our syntropic agroforestry experiment. For the first year we wanted really to just focus our energies on a small experiment where we can try everything. So we have three meters by 15 meters, two tree lines and two vegetable gardens in the middle. We are in the south of France, zone 8, and we've done a previous experiment in Romania and now we moved to France to be a bit closer to Jimmy's family. So we changed climate and we had to adapt to the species here, but the basis stays the same, the methods. So we really wanted to make it clear that we are not following the dogmatic, the theory of syntropy. We are adapting the methods and the practices to our own needs, to our own climate. We don't want to stop ourselves and put limits and labels on it. We're just really experimenting and try things out for ourselves. So we really encourage you as well to not be stopped by the complication and by how complicated it is sometimes to follow these theories and these practices and philosophies and how important it is to really experiment and observe on your own experience. So yes. So I just wanted to quickly tell you what situation we're in so that you understand maybe if you would adapt to yours too. We have pretty deep soil because we're next to the river, the river is behind us. This land can sometimes inundate so probably the soil is quite crumbly and quite soft and there's a bit of compaction but it's not so bad. Then we're in zone 8, it's a mediterranean climate so we have rains a bit in the winter and in the summer a bit more dry periods that can get quite hot. We also have a bit of lead freezes and strong winds that can really come and push through this like valley quite strong. And when it comes to our vision, what we were visioning for this place is to grow figs, pomegranates on a first term and then more on longer term to have like khakis and almonds and stuff like that. So when it comes to soil prep, we've experimented a little bit with different techniques. On the first line of trees, we have a double dig where we would manually weed kind of like the top layer to then put the top layer soil back on the top. So that was very physical. Then we did on this tree line, we chose to do a double dig but a bit faster by throwing the top layer under in the hole and then cover it with the second layer so you wouldn't have the weeds on top. And so we didn't weed it manually, we just threw the top layer with the weeds and everything at the bottom. Then for the garden beds that we have in between, what we did was two different things. First one, we just weeded it manually and then covered it with compost. And the second one here, we put just cardboard straight onto the weeds and then a thick layer of compost like this on top. We did only one layer of cardboard but some weeds seemed to really come through. Then we had access to compost that we would buy and we managed to put like on the tree lines a thinner layer of like a couple centimeters and then we cover with amazing wood chips that we can get for free that are basically like one year old so already composted a bit and they had some thinner brown parts to it but also some woody parts to it. So these are the resources we had. We also had for example for other parks, you can see them here, we have access to quite like nice wood that when it inundates it stops and blocks here behind us in between the trees. So we kind of go and pick up that wood, we put it all on the path and covered it with chips and we got a lot of mushrooms already coming out now because they're already moist and already decomposing. So that was pretty cool and yeah these wood chips we also get them for free. So within Centropy, often they say there's no input and stuff so this is what we want to say that like sometimes you just have resources available and yeah we feel like it would be a shame not to use them. In terms of sourcing of plants, we experimented a bit with everything and what we had. So we didn't have so many plants so we bought a few in the store but that was expensive so we didn't do too many. For example rosemary, little pots of that and stuff. We also bought some bare root trees like pomegranate trees that we wanted the varieties of and we went to to buy them and we also went to take some little plants from the hills, from the forest around us and we would just grab them out on a rainy day and put them in which was a lot cheaper but not amazing for various reasons. And a lot of seeds, we collected a lot of seeds that we could just collect in that time and that we tried to stratify real quick and but we had a lot that we didn't need to stratify and therefore we could use them straight away that was great. And a lot of cuttings when it comes to like poplars, figs, stuff like that we would get cuttings and put that straight in. We had a little late freeze situation. The poplar started going, the pomegranate started going and even like plants and everything. Seedlings. Seedlings, yeah very true. And that late freeze came it was probably like minus one something like that and everything took a big hit. All the poplars, the willows, the pomegranates they just completely fried and luckily they are growing again now from like the lower parts and they just start again. They're slower but they seem to be able to to still start again. So for this late freeze situation it's very important it seems to have already things growing that can kind of cover a bit the little trees and the little seedlings and the little cuttings that are very low on the ground. For example if you have fava beans on top it would have been great and if you can if we would have maybe have a little bit of woodchips in a in like this kind of structure so that the trees were in the center and they had woodchips on each side potentially they would have been also covered more snug and the temperature would have been higher. And worst come to worst really like if you know it's gonna freeze I think what we'll do next time maybe is maybe put some woodchips or something on top of the cuttings just the night that it would have frozen. That was it for this introduction and I hope you liked it and next video is gonna be about a tour of this garden. So it's a three months old at this moment and in the tour you go through a bit like how the plants are doing how they look how big they are and stuff like that. See you next time! See ya! Now we're getting better