Trellises - out with the old in with the new

Hey guys, welcome back to the food forest. Today we're going to be building some tomato trellises. What we've noticed in the last year or so is that when we let everything go wild, it's really hard for us to get in and access all of the plants for harvest season. And as much as the wild is nice and we love the way that everything grows for the biodiversity, we really want to make sure that we're getting in and harvesting everything and getting the most out of our harvest. So when we have any problems on the food forest, on our homestead, what we try to do is ask ourselves three questions. The first question, what's the problem and what solution can we apply to it? So for us, the problem is everything's so wild, we can't get in and harvest everything. So our solution is going to be organizing it through trellises and clearing walkways so we can get in. Today we're going to be building the trellises, which will be the first start to the problem. The second question we want to ask ourselves is what level of priority is it? For us, it's a pretty high priority because we don't really have any other issues. Everything's flourishing, we have all of our perennials planted, but we do have an issue when it comes to harvest. So it's at the top of our priority. The third question, what kind of resources do you have available that you can put towards fixing the problem? So for us, we went around and looked where can we get free lumber and we found a company down in town that manufactures wood pallets and all of their defects, they throw them to waste. So we're going to go and get some of those pallets and put together these trellises to start fixing our problem that we hit every year at harvest. So let's get into it. As we're editing this in after, we found something really cool while we were building the hugelkultur beds, and it's in the way that the soils broke down over time. So stay tuned for that because that was really cool. What was really funny is when we went to get the skids, there was actually another gentleman there grabbing skids as well. Now he was using these to build a fence, but it's really nice to see that people know about this and that all of these skids just aren't going to a landfill. It's really nice to see people reusing things in the community. What we've done in the past is we've just stuck sticks into the ground to try to hold up the plants and as much as that kind of worked, it kind of ended up being just a mountain of tomato plants. So reaching into the center was not possible at all. So what we're going to do is we're going to clear out all of these beds and make rooms that we can put in the proper trellis. While we put on the time lapse of us cleaning out the beds, I just want to talk about the comments from the last video. The comments were so incredible. You guys are so supportive and you guys truly are a very loyal fan base and I want to thank you for that. You guys are incredible. A lot of you were like, oh it's that time Canadian Permaculture Legacy videos are coming out and I thought that that was so cool. Another thing is we've looked at what you want to see. You guys want to see, and if there's anything missing put it down in this video, but recipes, tours, pest control, how we deal with pests and birds and insects, overall maintenance, an overview of the nut trees and what we grow here for nuts, how we cure them, preserve them, and there were a couple other things in there as well. Just wanted to let you know that we're going to take all of that into consideration and you guys will all see what you want to see this summer. So stay tuned and we'll get back to the video. So now that we've got each of these raised beds cleared out, we took some measurements and they're about eight by four feet and the pallets that we're going to be using are about 32 inches. So we're going to be putting two in on each raised bed, one about here and one about here and we're going to see how that works for us. Something cool that we found is that we have some green onions poking up here which is really nice and we have some more green onions poking up over here in this raised bed and there's another cool thing just over here is we have some some raspberries poking up here so I thought that would be a cool thing to share. And what's really cool about these raspberries is they're not just poking up anywhere they're poking up through a raised bed. A couple of years ago when we started this garden here we planted just a couple of plants over here and they spread through how aggressive they are to the point where they've spread all the way over here and are now shooting up through the raised bed which is really cool. So what we've done is we've gone and prepped all of our pallets and what we realized was they didn't have enough vertical height for us but being beggars we can't be choosers we got these for so we made it work. We secured some screws into all of them stacking them double high and that should give us the vertical height that we need. Now installing these what we're going to do is we're probably going to bury them to about here and that's going to give us the stability that we need so that they're not going to knock over with the weight of the plants but we also get some pretty crazy storms here so the big worry is that they're going to blow over in the wind and it's going to damage our crop so we're going to make sure that we bury them deep enough but the reason that we're burying them and not screwing them in is if we ever want to remove these all we got to do is pull them out. So we'll get digging here and we'll show you the process and we'll set up our skids. We're really trying to disturb the soil as little as possible. For those of you that have been watching for a long time you'll know that the microorganisms in the soil they set up their colonies we'll call them and we really don't want to disturb that. A lot of people will rototill their land and till all of the soil in which helps with compaction but at the same time it kills your soil. So a big part of permaculture and really trying to have a nice rich soil so we can grow some nice plants is really all about not disturbing the soil. It comes down to that. If you rototill your soil you might have a good crop but you would have had a better crop if you didn't. So this one here we had to pull a couple onions so we're going to transplant those and we'll give them a nice new home where the trellis won't be bothering them. So all that we're doing is once we dig this hole we're really trying to push it into the ground as much as we can just enough that it'll stay and then we're just going to go layer by layer because when we pulled this out we made sure to keep it as much as we can layered and that way we're not disturbing the soil. Obviously we're disturbing it but not as much as we would if we were just being reckless with this. But at the end of the day these trellises are going to help us with our harvest so one year of disturbing the soil a little bit just around the trellis isn't going to hurt us. Ran into a little bit of a problem but the problem's kind of cool. We did the north two garden beds first and we didn't have a problem at all. We dug the trenches, put the skids in, packed it in, trellises were done quick and easy. Well when we went to do the two beds on the south side, mind you they get a little bit less sun, there was a bunch of wood in the way and it struck me oh my god these are hugelkultur beds. So for those of you that don't know a hugelkultur bed it's built by layering building layers that will decompose and compost into a rich soil. So the way you do it is you layer thick pieces of wood and then slowly slowly the pieces of wood get smaller and then you'll lay your your nitrogen strong like your manures, your composts and then your mulch on top. Now what's cool is the sun shines a little differently on the north and south beds. The north beds get a little more and the south ones get more shade. So this extra heat would have increased the metabolic rate at which the microorganisms were decomposing the biomaterial in the hugelkultur beds. So it's a little bit of an inconvenience but it's really cool because it shows you how just very slight differences in your beds are going to have drastic changes because these beds were built almost identically. But just that little bit of extra sun increased the metabolic rate of the bacteria and the fungi and there you go you have two beds without the wood in the bottom and two beds that still have it. So I thought that that was really cool. We're running out of sunlight here so we're going to have to get to the other south side beds there. We're going to have to screw them in but we're running out of sunlight so we'll have to do that hopefully tomorrow. I'm really hoping it's supposed to rain a little bit but I'm hoping that we can get out. It's been really crappy weather here. It's been raining the last couple days. We've had frost the last three nights and today we actually had some snow and hail. But we'll get this video out to you guys because it's Saturday night now but we'll get another one. We'll finish those trellises another time. We have quite a bit of time until planting season but yeah I just thought that that was really cool that just the difference in the sun changed how the beds broke down. Thank you guys for watching. I really hope that you enjoyed the video and how simple it is to build some trellises. I'm sure that you guys have companies in your areas that give away skids as well so give that a look because those trellises were really easy to install. It was 30 minutes to go get the pallets, 20 minutes to clear out the beds from last year's stuff from the old sticks that my dad called trellises but now we've got trellises. It took us like 40 minutes to install them and now we're good. We're going to have a nice organized raised garden bed for the summer and it was really cool finding the difference in the beds just based on the sun that shined on them. A quick note before we go what we're going to try to do this summer is at the end of every video while we're saying goodbye I want to feature your guys properties so if you guys want to email them I'll leave the email down in the description and I'll put it on the screen right here. Email us a 20-30 second clip of your property and just give us a little description of what we're looking at and I really want to see the highlights of your guys properties and I hope that this is going to be a way that can inspire the viewers that haven't started to start and I really want to show them how easy it is this summer to get started because if everybody can get started you know the best time to plant a fruit tree was seven years ago the next best time is now. So I hope that you guys like that idea if you email down below we're going to do a random draw each video and we'll put them in at the end. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time on season 2026 of Canadian Permaculture Legacy.