May 2026 Main Food Forest Update

Hey guys, welcome back to the food forest. It's mid-May and we finally have that spring weather we've all been waiting for. Yesterday was a little warm, it was a high of 30 with the humidity, but today it's a little nicer. So we're going to do a bit of a walk around and show you what there is to see and what's waking up. Starting at the start of the food forest here, the apple tree is starting to get into blossom. Another couple days and this will just be absolutely beautiful. We'll have to come in and thin out a little bit of the flowering buds just so we can hope to get a little bit more size on the fruit. It always produces so much, but the apples are pretty small. Looking at the peach tree here, we had a little bit of winter damage in a storm right there. So we had to saw that off, it was just hanging. But other than that, the tree's doing okay. It's woken up and the leaves have broke bud. But we do have a little bit of a problem with the bark here. It almost looks like it was burnt. So I'm not too sure what is happening here, but I'll have to look into that. I just haven't had a lot of time. But if any of you have an idea of what you think is going on here or any remedies that we can try, let us know down in the comments. I'll try to do some research of my own here. So I looked into what could have been making the bark look that way on the peach tree. It's very common in colder climates, just because of the colder temperatures at night and the warmth of the sun in the day, where it expands and contracts. The bark will crack a little bit and the sap will come out, which gives it that darker colour. Sometimes it can be a little bit of a fungal growth as well, but most of the time that fungal growth isn't going to be a harmful fungus. So it will take away from the life of the tree a little bit, but it's not something to be too concerned about. It's just happening because of our climate here. So that's a little reassuring knowing that what looked like some really serious damage on the bark of the tree is really only just our climate taking its toll on the tree there. So we've got some other trees that we've planted around it, so once that one eventually passes, hopefully we'll still have the area be nice and full with other trees to take its place. But the peach is truly lagging behind everything else. The comfrey's coming right up. It's going to be time to start chopping it and dropping it already. Get a little bit of nutrients going back into the soil. We've got all of the black currants coming up. They're already got some nice fruit buds on them there. And then in the middle of the walkway here, I'm not sure how this happened, but we have a sea buckthorn. And if you can see there, it's got a thorn sticking right out into the walkway. And every time I walk through here, I know that it's there and it still gets me in the leg. So we're going to have to clear that out and just make it a little easier to traverse. The serviceberry has just done flowering. It lost its petals like a day or two ago, but it was absolutely stunning. Full of the white flowers and it's got its little fruit buds on it. So hopefully we get some before the birds take them this year. But at the end of the day, the birds, they'll come in and clear out some of the pesky insects that we don't like, that like to eat all the fruit on us. Continuing down the walkway a little bit, the rhubarb is coming right up and it's honestly ready that we could take a piece or more. Grab a piece right here. That'll be for my smoothie tomorrow morning. Great fresh fruit already. Not sure if rhubarb is really a fruit, but looking at the pear tree, I think this is the fullest that our pear tree has ever been with flowers. They're in like clusters of five. So we'll have to go in and thin them out, probably pick like one per cluster to be honest. It's just going to be way too much for the tree to support. So we'll come in and just pick some of them off. Once we see what gets pollinated and what doesn't, we'll have to thin them out. But it is doing extremely well. I think this is going to be our first big year of pears. We've gotten them in the past, but just they haven't really taken off yet. But I think this will be the year. We've got this tree here. I don't think that it made it through. I believe it was a peach back in the day, but now it's just wood. So we'll clear this out, cut it down, and we can use it for some fires and some of the smaller bits. We'll make some biochar. A lot of people were asking for what we use the chickens for other than eggs. And we're going to use it for biochar. All of their chicken manure, we're going to mix it in to ferment up some biochar and charge it up so that it can be a really nice fertilizer that'll last thousands of years in the soil. Raspberry patch is coming up really nicely. It was the first raspberry patch that we did, but it's actually the smallest one that we have now. The one over by the tomato trellises that we built two videos back, that patch is actually doing a lot better and we planted less plants in it. So it must just be they get a little more sun over there because here we've got the big cedars. They block a lot of the afternoon sun. So yeah, so with the raspberry patch on the east side of it, we've got the swale going through. Originally it was just this section over here, but we extended it right through to connect over so we could get the water that comes off of the house when it rains to fill the swale. Now the problem with that is this kind of made this area very hard to traverse. So what we're going to do is we're going to use some of the extra skids that we got building the trellises and we're going to make just like a little bridge that'll go over the swale here. So we can still have the swale function to store water and hydrate all the crop, but it'll just make it a little easier to traverse to get down here because we've got the blackberries over here. Yeah, so the blackberry bush, now that I look at it, it's not really a bush anymore. It's not looking too well. I'm not even sure if it's alive anymore. So we'll scrape back a little bit of the bark here. Oh, it feels brittle, but you know what? There's a little bit of green under that bark there, so hopefully it'll come back. Maybe it just hasn't woken up yet, but I'm hoping that it comes back because I just love putting a couple blackberries in with some Greek yogurt in the morning. It's truly one of the best breakfasts that you can have. On the west side of the swale here, just opposite to the blackberries, we've got a bunch of sumacs that are sticking up, which is expected. We have a couple sumacs over there and over there, so the roots for sumacs, they send them under the ground and then they'll poke up and that's how they spread. Well, through seed as well, but that's one of the main ways that they'll spread if you have sumacs poking up with sumacs nearby. So what we'll do, because I don't really want the sumacs here, I'd like to put something edible. And I know the sumacs, you guys are going to tell me you can make tea, but we have so many sumacs and we'd be better putting this to dry it out and make a little bit of biochar. I really want to do a biochar this summer, just make a new bed and start a guild. On that topic, one of our neighbors actually, he got inspired by the food forest. I was talking to him at the garden center, I ran into him and he wants to start his own little food forest. So I'm going to talk to him about maybe making a video on that just to show people how to start it again and get back to the basics a little bit. But yeah, we'll clear out these sumacs here. We've got another beautiful pear going up, not quite as many flowers on this one yet, but we still got a little bit of time. This one gets a little bit less sun. So we'll see maybe another couple days or a week and it might be just as full as the other one, which would be incredible. We used to, there was a couple pear trees on the way home from my dad's work and it was abandoned. The owner, I guess, moved south and they just had all the pears there and they would just ball the waste. So he got in contact with the owner and he would come home with tubs of pears and we'd dehydrate them. Oh my God, the best snack in the world. So sweet and it lasts practically forever because it's just dehydrated, right? But moving along the west side of the swale here, the autumn olive has just taken off and there's a buckthorn here too. It's huge. I remember digging these things out of the ground to transplant them over here and they've taken right off. I don't think I'd be able to carry that and put that in the ground. But yeah, and that brings us over to the inside here. So we'll wrap back around and we'll go back to where the old strawberry patch was. So for those of you that remember, just in here was where our old raspberry patch is. For reference, we're at the dead peach here and behind here we had the raspberry patch. So what we did was we planted a couple seabuckthorns in hopes of getting some nitrogen into the ground to help the strawberries out. But we snuffed the strawberries right out. I looked into it a little bit after and we have creeping charlie going through where that strawberry patch used to be. So creeping charlie is another like semi-broad leaf ground cover. So it would have been competing with the strawberries for dominance in the area. Now something else about the creeping charlie is I believe it's pronounced allelopathy or similar to that. But essentially it releases like a sort of toxins into the surrounding areas so that it can get a biological advantage over the other plants. So this would have set it just that extra step above the strawberries to help it take dominance and clear out the strawberries. So we probably won't try strawberries in that area again, but we'll sow some strawberries into some other places where the creeping charlie won't fight them out. There's not too much that we can do about the creeping charlie. Like you can rip it out, but we really don't want to be spraying anything to kill it because that's not our goal here. So if the creeping charlie wants to be there it'll be there and we'll have to move the strawberries somewhere else. So it's actually so hard to walk in through here. The seabuckthorn comes right out and then that one's there. So we're really gonna have to be able to get in. So I'm thinking if we move either that one or that one just so we can have a bit of a walkway in. I just I don't want to go too far in this way because we have the asparagus here. We didn't really harvest our asparagus this year just because we haven't really had time and we haven't really needed it. We've yeah but uh just to be able to get through here just a little easier without getting stabbed in the leg. So I had to come in the other side. I wasn't able to make it through all of the buckthorn. But um yeah this is where the old strawberry patch was and I don't really see much strawberry. I'm trying to look for just one but I'm actually not seeing any. So I really think that we snuffed them out. Like there's just so much growing back here. There's just not enough space for them. What is nice though is that all of the hascaps are doing really well. They're coming up all over. We've got this little peach tree here and he's doing okay. But uh we don't really need these on them. Not sure what these were doing. I think that they were initial supporters but the tree kind of grew into them a little bit. But yeah so this guy will have to replace the one just over there that uh passed away. But he'll be put to good use. He'll be feeding the other peach trees so he'll still be making us peaches. But this buckthorn something needs to be done about this. We've got one here a couple on my left here and then a bunch in behind. There's just so much seabuckthorn and like it's impossible to traverse this area. So we're gonna have to do a video on cleaning this up and just making it a little more accessible. But uh yeah because I can't even I can't even get in there because we we had other plants over there too. But like I might be able to yeah I know I'm gonna be squeezing through thorns over there. Yeah the top food forest is doing good. All the perennials are coming back to life but we're gonna have to start the strawberry patch again. Yeah so that's the top food forest. It's doing pretty well. It woke up nicely from its winter sleep. But it's almost time to plant. This is about a week maybe a week and a half since we recorded that. Just haven't had a lot of time to do any editing. But we'll close this one out here and we'll end off with a clip from Claudia. She sent us in a video that she put up of her place waking up from the spring. So we'll show you guys a little sneak peek at her video and I'll put the link down in the description as well for any of you that want to go see that. But yeah we'll see you next time on season 2026 of Canadian Permaculture Legacy. Freezes um this yard is like late May not not early April and let me tell you in March it looked like early May and not March. So um we did have a really hard freeze a while back and that did in the the apricots that were setting fruit. I think it's done in the peaches.