A LOT Has Happened at The Permaculture Farm!

What's going on, growers? It's James Pergione coming to you live from Jersey. Today, I'm going to take you along for an update of the progress at the farm. Things are really coming together. Let's go! Let's start things out with the kitchen garden area that has just been added to my right here and the first annuals that have been planted at the farm. I told you a few months ago that the center area of the terraces right here is where the kitchen garden will be. This area gets great sun exposure and over the last few weeks, I got the first section in and planted. One thing that I wanted to prep for was the moles and the voles. I wanted to prevent them from digging up underneath my beds. So to do that, I made sure to use some half inch hardware cloth. I laid down the hardware cloth and placed the beds on top making sure the hardware cloth extended at least one foot past the bed. Making sure the beds were level was important so they would lay flat on the hardware cloth and not leave any gaps. Next, I backfilled the area with some sand that I had earlier removed so the hardware cloth was not sticking up and the area was all even. Here are the beds placed and leveled with the hardware cloth underneath looking really good and all the beds have equidistant spacing between one another. Next, it was time to start getting the beds filled and prepped for planting. I decided to use wood chips at the base of the beds to fill space because I had so many on hand and didn't have enough rotted logs. Wood chips will break down quicker than logs would but the wood chips are an accessible, quick, convenient way to fill the bottom of the bed. Plus, having the tractor made filling the beds with wood chips super easy to do. I have done this before in my old food forest and had fantastic results. The bed is still kicking out loads of food and the soil hasn't sank as much as I thought it would over the last few years. I made sure to try and compress the wood chips down as much as I could by stomping around on them and I ended up with about 10 inches of wood chips as a base leaving 22 inches because these beds are 32 inches tall. Next, I decided to use cow manure compost I purchased earlier in the year to fill more space in the bed. This way, if the roots of my annual plants grow deeper than the quality soil that I will add, they still have this compost to grow into. After adding that and spreading it all around, I was left with 14 inches of space in the bed to fill with my own homemade soil mix. I let the wood chips and compost sit in the beds for almost three weeks before adding my homemade soil. This way, we could have some rains come and they could drop that compost down, fill in any gaps of the wood chips and that amount of time just allowed the whole area of wood chips and compost to just settle. I use my own soil recipe that I've shared with you many times. I get such good results from it that I didn't feel like it was worth switching anything up. Here is where the tractor was really helpful again. Instead of adding the homemade soil five gallon bucket by five gallon bucket like I had in the past, I was able to just fill the tractor bucket and dump it right in. Even though making homemade soil like this is more work compared to buying bagged soil or just using a topsoil and compost mix, I find it to be a hundred percent worth it, especially when you can get mushroom compost in bulk. It's not cheap but I know from experience that it will grow amazing plants and I will get the most out of the space, the most out of the seeds I buy and the highest return for the amount of time and effort spent. Here are all the beds filled, looking beautiful and almost ready to transplant into. Because I'm using mushroom compost, which can be low in nutrition, I made sure to go by and add some all-purpose fertilizer to the beds. I sprinkled some fertilizer on the surface of the soil trying to get as even of a spread as I could, then went by and mixed it into the top few inches of the soil. This will give the plants the nutrients they need to grow fast, produce heavily and remain healthy enough to keep growing late into winter. Before getting the beds planted, I wanted to get wood chips around all the beds to make sure that no weeds would be able to come up. To do this, I first laid down some contractor's paper to help block out any light, then covered that with a few inches of wood chips. Having wood chips in this area will make it much easier to manage. I won't have to mow around the beds or even weed whack around them. This will be a high traffic walking area and wood chips will provide the perfect free mulch ground cover to work on. Look how nice that looks with all the beds filled and the wood chips down. Next, it was finally time to get the plants in that I started and hardened off. I made a little homemade setup with a cover on it just to keep the groundhog from getting to my plants. Then, I went out and got all my starts transplanted into the beds. At this point, we were in late August, so I made sure to plant only cold hardy crops that will kick out food super late for me. Having quality soil prepped and fertilized makes this transplanting so simple to do. You can just pop the plants right in. And here is what the kitchen garden area looks like now. Overall, I'm really happy with how it came out and this is only one of the four sections for kitchen garden areas that we have. The plants are looking a bit sad right now because they recently just went in, but within a couple days they'll bounce back. And all these beds filled, it's exciting to see to have the first annuals in. There's going to be so much food produced in this spot. I'll continue to bring you along for all the updates and everything, but it just feels so good to have our first beds in, our first annuals in, and just be one step closer to getting some massive harvests. And here is a shot of me in the kitchen garden area from a good vantage point, so you can see exactly where it is on the farm. I shot this video a little over two weeks ago. Here is the progress that the plants have made over that time. Check out all that healthy growth. The arugula is ready to grab some harvests from and the lettuces are doing extremely well. From here, let me bring you over to the blueberries because they flow right from the kitchen garden area. We can just move from here over to the blueberries and all the plants and the other kitchen garden areas are all going to flow like this. They match with the terraces to make it easy to be able to go by, monitor things, and even grab some harvests from the stuff. The blueberries have really hit their stride now having the wood chip mulched down and I couldn't be happier with how well they're performing. It makes me almost want to get more blueberry plants. Even though I already have 40, this is probably a good start. A few of them I lost early in the season, so we'll have to replace them, but the ones that did make it, they're just growing beautifully and I can't wait to start getting some harvests from these babies. Let me bring you over to show you the progress on the strawberries next and when this area right here of kitchen garden is all finished, it will flow right through to the strawberries, just like the blueberries. Here is where the strawberries are in relation to the terraces. Last time I showed you them in late July, they were doing well, but since then they have really taken off. I mean, look how much growth they've put on. It's actually incredible. Not to mention, since I last showed you, we had our first strawberry harvest from the day neutral ones. Check this out. It is July 27th today. It's an exciting day because I have my first ripe piece of fruit from the whole entire farm. We've got an Albion strawberry. I'm super excited about it. Coming here, the strawberries have taken off since we got the wood chips down. Look how beautiful this thing is. Oh yeah, gorgeous. First ever piece of fruit from the farm. I'm just super excited about it. The first of many, many, many more to come between the strawberries, the blueberries, the raspberries, the fruit trees, everything, and then the annuals will go in. So, an exciting time. I'll just take a bite first at the front. Incredibly sweet. Delicious. More and more strawberries were ready that I harvested, and it was such a treat to be able to get fresh, organic strawberries right from the farm. You'll notice that I let a lot of the runners grow. Look at them all in here. One of the reasons I did this is because if you move over here, you'll notice there's some gaps where the strawberry plants didn't do well. I'll be able to take those runners and transplant them to fill in any space here. But if you pan this way a little, you'll notice I probably let a few too many runners grow. That's okay. What I'll do is I'll take some, I'll transplant them into containers. There's nothing like getting free plants. As I step up to the next terrace here, we'll check out the peach trees. These things have put on so much growth, it's blowing me away. Here is where the peach trees are on the terrace. With this rate of growth, I'm thinking we might have our first peaches on about the third year, which is super encouraging to see. And with how much growth these things have put out in just one year, I do feel like we're gonna get some future, just massive harvests, and it's a really exciting. As you step back a little bit, notice that I kept a lot of space between these trees. This way in the future, they'll be easy to manage, easy to prune, and they'll get some good airflow moving through. The apple trees are doing well overall, but they are having a few more issues than the peach trees. Here is where my row of apples are on the terraces. This tree had a few issues. There was actually a caterpillar that came by and ate up almost all the leaves. I went away for a few days. I came back and the tree was almost like completely decimated, but it has bounced back nicely. One of the reasons is because, the variety I think. This is the Carmine de Saunaville. It's probably my least disease-resistant tree that I have out of all my apples, and it's pretty evident and showing. I'm confident it will bounce back though, but even the new leaves that bounce back have issues on them too. We'll see how this one grows next year, and hopefully we can just help protect it and get some nice fruit from this one in the future. Most of the other apple trees are doing well, except some of them have some spots where there's some cedar apple rust. You can see it in here. You can see the yellowing. I can remove a lot of these leaves and throw them out. What I'm going to do is dormant spray this tree in the winter to help prevent some of that cedar apple rust. Overall though, the trees are growing really nicely. They look healthy, and they've put a lot of growth on for this being their first year in the ground. The cherries are growing a bit slow at this point, but I still am happy with their progress. Here's where the location of the cherries are on the farm. It amazes me that all these fruit trees were just essentially sticks a few months ago. It definitely was a good idea to prune back all the trees heavy, and then allow them to focus first on their roots, then they could grow their leaves up top. This variety right here, the Regina, is doing the best out of all the cherries. Look at that growth. So this is just from this year. From here, they put on all that growth going up, which is really awesome. You will notice the Japanese beetles have gotten to some spots. We're going to have to work on preventing them in the future. It's a healthy tree, it's a good tree, and these cherries are going to get massive. Like these are going to be some of the biggest trees on the farm. I can't wait to be getting fresh harvests from them. All the way at the top, we have the persimmon tree. Here is where it's at on the top terrace. The raspberries right in front of me here, they flow through from the blueberries, keeping that theme that I showed you earlier. You can see they're in the back corner of the food forest here. I really need to get a trellis in for these raspberries, especially these black cap ones. You can see how long some of these are getting and they're dragging along the ground. I need to get them up and tied, but that'll probably be one of my next projects. What I don't really want to use is pressure treated wood if I don't have to. So if you guys have some alternative ideas, something that I could use besides pressure treated wood to make these trellises, just let me know down in the comments. Now let's move over to the tomatoes that I'm growing in containers. They're at the front of the terrace here. They have done really well and produced so many tomatoes. A number of these are also some experiments that I'm running and that video will be coming out soon, well at least one of them. It's really really interesting stuff, so hit the subscribe button if you want to see that one. It's going to be some stuff you've never seen or heard of before. One thing you'll notice is I did all my plantings on the front side of the terraces. This is the front side of the lowest terrace and then this is the front side of the next terrace. That's where all the plantings are. This way I'll have this section here that I can drive the tractor through on each terrace. That will make maintenance much easier and I decided to just have grass or weeds grow in this area instead of using wood chips. If I put wood chips on these whole areas, it would be just a lot to maintain and the tractor seems to do better going on grass as opposed to driving over wood chips. Another thing is where I'm at right now, if I stand and I go this way, this is east over here, so the south is over in this direction. Because I put my plantings on the front side of the terraces, what's going to happen is they're going to shade essentially this back side of the terrace. So as long as I put all my plantings on the front of each side of the terrace, in the future as these cherry trees get much larger, they're only going to shade the back side where I only have like grass and it's more my maintenance area. They're not going to shade any of my other plantings that are on the front side of the terraces. Overall, I'm very happy with the progress. Check out what it looked like in spring when it was all sand and barren and lifeless compared to what it looks like now. Green and lush and even just seeing the growth on all the perennials like the fruit trees has made me super hopeful for the future. And the terraces have truly made all the difference. Now every time it rains, the rain just stops and sinks into the ground. That's how we're getting all this beautiful growth. Compared to what it used to be like when it was all hill and it would rain and all the rain would just wash down the hill. Between the terraces going in, the perennials being put in, the irrigation in, the first raids beds are in, and the first annuals planted, I'm just really feeling good about things. Moving ahead, we can add more sections for the kitchen garden and just let me know down in the comments if you have any ideas on what we should do with the kitchen garden area. I'm still working on the design of that. And I'm having a lot of fun doing it. We'll also add the steps going up the center of the terraces too. Then as we move forward in the future, we can just really start, you know, painting this canvas with some beautiful productive plants. That's today's video growers. Thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you got something out of it. It feels, I'm just very grateful to be able to bring you guys along for the progress at the farm. And, you know, month to month, it might not seem like there was that much progress, but when I look back months ago and even like, you know, a year ago from where it was to where it is now, it's super inspiring for me. And that's one of the reasons I love making these videos to just kind of track the progress because day to day, it doesn't seem like much. But then when you can see from where you started, where I started here to where we are now, it's, uh, it's encouraging and it motivates me. I hope it motivates some of you guys and I can't wait to really start beautifying this place. It's gonna be awesome. I wanted to send a thank you to one of our new channel members, Joanne. Thanks for being a part of Team Grow. Thanks for having your hand in everything we're doing out here. I'll continue to update you guys on the progress and I also have some really, really cool experiment videos coming out. So make sure you hit that subscribe button. Make sure you like this and share with your friends if you found value in it. We'll catch you guys on another one real soon. We out.