Syntropic Agroforestry: Transforming a Neglected Orchard into a Food Forest

foreign so I&#39;m going to use this video to explain how I&#39;m using syntropic agroforestry in my family&#39;s neglected old Citrus Orchard to turn it into a productive abundant diverse Food Forest it&#39;s also turning into a demonstration site a living Nursery to expand and produce more agroforestry systems here locally just a really cool way to learn and share about syntropica forestry so join me and let&#39;s dive into the details my experience with transitioning this Orchard into a food Forest began in 2019 when I was first learning about permaculture I didn&#39;t have any experience growing I didn&#39;t have any experience as a horticulturalist I didn&#39;t go to school for any of this I went to school for Ecology and environmental science which has actually proven to be a really valuable background not coming from Horticulture but coming out of this from an ecological point of view because centropic agroforestry is all about ecology applying it to Horticulture and so that works really well but when I first came here my vision was still turning this into a food Forest rather than just the Citrus and the grass it was really kind of a neglected situation when we moved here because the previous owners hadn&#39;t been here for a few years and so there were trees that were drowning in grass and there were a lot of holes and it was just not as productive as it could be and so I saw that in my first instinct was to just begin interplanting just plant fruit trees in between the existing ones and hope that that would eventually turn things into a food Forest the trees grew really slowly they were stunted because of the grass pressure and because it wasn&#39;t planted in one area it was really scattered and spread out and so that means my efforts were really scattered and I didn&#39;t always remember where things were to go water them and the grass pressure was taking over the trees and it was just really not it really wasn&#39;t working to develop that food forest and so after that first year of learning about permaculture I started applying companion planting and I would put certain species together I would plant berries with these fruit trees that I was into planting or I would put a ground cover like lemon balm and in some cases it worked really well but in other cases it didn&#39;t and I was noticing that when it worked really well it was because I was putting pioneer species in those nitrogen fixing tree Lucerne or Acacia for example and if I wasn&#39;t including those even the companion planting wasn&#39;t making a huge difference to the overall health and ease of management for the fruit trees that early succession ecology wasn&#39;t there to help move past that initial grass stage that&#39;s where I really began that syntropic Journey where I started learning about the importance of those early succession pioneer species like Mexican sunflower bonagrass eucalyptus Acacia and so that&#39;s when I really started applying that here and what that looked like the first iteration of that was a single row and that&#39;s actually this one right here behind me you can see I&#39;ll show you some drone footage of what that looked like but it was actually really funny because when it first got planted it looked like just a single row of vegetables right because there was Tomatoes there was pumpkins corn squash and beans and all these early succession vegetables just a whole row of them surrounded in grass and other isolated fruit trees fast forward to two and a half years later I&#39;ve began expanding and I&#39;ve intensified the expansion so now it all looks like that early succession forest with bananas we have the Mexican sunflower everywhere but it&#39;s been a really cool transition to watch it go from a single row of young centralic agroforestry into now what all of block one is pretty much covered and I&#39;m looking at block two next year which again block two looks like how block one looked two and a half years ago very empty very open and kind of lifeless when you&#39;re walking around it doesn&#39;t feel like it has that energy or has that life to it as compared to when you&#39;re walking around in this young forest ecosystem so obviously syntropic agroforestry can mean a few different things especially because it has so many different flavors depending on the context for me my understanding of centropic Agro forestry in all of its contexts is that it&#39;s a growing Paradigm where you&#39;re utilizing ecological succession as the process you&#39;re using the ecological succession to drive the process forward in a productive way whether that&#39;s mostly support species or early succession chop and drop in the beginning and then ultimately ending up with these high value crops or you&#39;re filling the whole succession up along the way with annuals perennial vegetables berries early succession short-lived perennials medium and long-lived perennials all sorts of contexts tour centropic agroforestry can apply that&#39;s where I found the most success is using the whole broad spectrum of succession which you can see in this little diagram here you can imagine each of these being a different species with a different life cycle right you have annual vegetables that turn over really quickly then you move into short-lived perennial vegetables maybe short-lived perennial trees and then long-lived perennial trees we&#39;ll give some examples but the annual vegetables like I said would include Tomatoes corn squash beans radishes lettuce cabbage that sort of thing your second stage your second succession of perennial vegetables might include rhubarb or Globe artichokes or raspberries these are all examples of the food forests that I&#39;ve been creating here your third level of succession might be those young quick producing fruit trees that don&#39;t last forever things like tamarillo bananas papaya passion fruit things of that nature right and then your lung lived succession those are the things that are growing in the understory the whole time right the micro climate the conditions are being created favor of these long-term species while these younger trees are being productive the avocado wants to germinate in those understory conditions where the tamarillo and the papaya and the banana are creating that shelter for it so eventually we end up with things like the avocado or the Macadamia chestnuts walnuts pecans those long-lived species that are going to ultimately be the productive trees of your long-lived ecosystem but the key part isn&#39;t just in those edible species the key is also having those support species and the layout and the organization of the organic material and how you&#39;re managing those support species most of those key support species I mentioned before Mexican sunflower monograss eucalyptus Acacia those are kind of the main ones along with tree Lucerne Queensland arrowroot there&#39;s a few others here and there but the key thing there is how you integrate them and incorporate them into your agroforestry system as you&#39;re transitioning that succession from your early succession Pioneers into that long-lived ecosystem where you&#39;re building that natural fertility you&#39;ve created the microclimate or the conditions where those long-lived species are going to thrive so we&#39;ll take a look at more detailed of what those support species are we&#39;ll also take a look at the more edible species that are growing around us at the moment so I&#39;ve got a list of the edible species that I&#39;m using obviously I&#39;m using a huge variety of them but these are some of the ones that I&#39;m really kind of focusing on as potential crops and that&#39;s the way I&#39;m doing this is I&#39;m going really high diversity to see what works well here because I&#39;m still in the first few years I&#39;m still in the early stages and I&#39;m still in that process of figuring out what works well for the conditions the management and how I want to move forward I don&#39;t want to put all my eggs into one basket so rather going really high diversity at the start and then kind of narrowing down as I go through and learn more make better observations and see what works well for me here so this is just a list of all the species that I&#39;m kind of at this stage focusing on still and seeing again what works well and what doesn&#39;t we&#39;ve got a lot of different banana varieties multiple different raspberry varieties as many Fig varieties as I can find a bunch of different papayas we&#39;ve got the mountain papaya the babaco the Rainbow Valley cross the oak leaf papaya I&#39;ve got the red papaya all kinds of papaya we&#39;ve got multiple tamarillo varieties we&#39;ve got multiple Mulberry varieties the black the plum red white all sorts love mulberries we&#39;ve got multiple guavas the Cherry guava tropical guava again as many varieties as I can find and that&#39;s the key thing here is I&#39;m collecting as many different varieties as I&#39;m able to source and I&#39;ll make sure to share how I&#39;m sourcing a lot of this plant material because that&#39;s a huge part of reducing the cost in your agroforestry systems also planting a lot of different potatoes in the early succession stages lots of different avocados from seeds some grafted ones a lot of Japanese raisins that have been growing from seed ricotta chilies elephant garlic adamoya mioga ginger and we&#39;ve got a lot of ice cream beans grown from seed from multiple different trees around here different passion fruit varieties Taro loquats lots of different loquats from seed varieties from all around the country French Sorrel rhubarb Globe artichokes Egyptian walking onions sugar cane Lemon Verbena Yacon Jerusalem artichokes alpine strawberries blueberries Japanese wine berries gooseberries American pawpaw rosemary sage lukuma pomegranates so those are just the main edible crops that I&#39;m focusing on obviously there&#39;s a few other ones but those are the ones that I&#39;m really trying to hone in on and focus and see what works best in these situations now you might have noticed that some of those are subtropical species and some of those are more temperate or Mediterranean species we&#39;ve got a whole mix here because we&#39;re in this really nice Goldilocks zone where we can grow things in all sorts of different zones we can grow the subtropicals that need a lot of shelter from the frost we can also grow those things that need that dormancy in winter so we&#39;re in a really nice Goldilocks zone to have huge diversity and experiment a lot with creating the different microclimates and just seeing what works well here so if you look at that list you&#39;ll see that there&#39;s a lot of things across the spectrum of those early succession mid succession and late succession species and the beautiful thing is that because there&#39;s so much diversity because there&#39;s so many different kinds of growing habits of different life cycles different canopy layers that&#39;s all factored in when you&#39;re looking at the stratification over time right because this syntropic agroforestry can be really boiled down into two different characteristics you&#39;ve got time and then you have strata it&#39;s a time and space equations Tropic agroforestry where the life cycle of the plant and what strata it fits into what canopy layer does it fit into whether it&#39;s a low light condition a medium or a high canopy or is it an emergent canopy layer so it&#39;s a space and time equation and the key here is really diversity is if you can get a really diverse assortment of plants you&#39;ll be pretty much guaranteed to find a combination that works well filling out that space and time so diversity High diversity is really key especially if you&#39;re just getting started and then you can figure out what works well specifically at your site so that&#39;s my biggest recommendation is high diversity when you&#39;re starting see what works well and then as you go tailor it more and more to that the reason that things are done in rows in straight lines is because of ease of management planting a tree is only five percent of the work but managing these systems over time is most of the work and so you want to put a lot of emphasis in how you&#39;re designing these systems and how your layout is to make management really simple and easy because if you make the system where the management is really difficult and cumbersome and challenging then you&#39;re not going to want to do it it&#39;s going to get neglected and you&#39;re going to feel really bad about it and then you&#39;re going to ignore your system it&#39;s going to become this tension and then you&#39;re going to blow the whole thing off and wish you had never dried growing a food for us in the first place so designer systems well up front the management the layout hopefully this will help and then you&#39;ll have a really smooth sailing agroforestry system Food Forest into the future because my context is a little bit unique I&#39;m retrofitting an existing Orchard the layout of the Rose was already predetermined going east to west that&#39;s how the roads are laid out ideally it would have been north south now that&#39;s allowing for better sunlight penetration right because if the Sun is really low in the sky in Winter we still want to get that sunlight all the way to the back of the system whereas when your rows are east to west the further back your rows are the less and less sunlight they&#39;re getting especially those Evergreen subtropical rows so you have to take that into consideration if your rows are east to west the further back your rows are the less Sun they&#39;re going to get in Winter whereas if the north south they&#39;re going to be a lot more sun throughout the whole year so if these were north south Rose and these are our East West rows you can see our sun is rising in the East setting in the west the further back your roads are these rows are going to shade these back rows whereas if your rows are oriented north south the sun rises stays low in the sky because it&#39;s winter you&#39;re still getting that sunlight all the way back into all the roads they&#39;re getting more equal sunlight exposure versus when your rose or east west so that&#39;s why the big recommendation is north south versus East West again I&#39;m kind of stuck with the East-West orientation because of the inherited context of retrofitting an existing Orchard but if you can do it from scratch on flat land that&#39;s how it would go if you&#39;re not on Flatland if you&#39;re on a slope the biggest recommendation would probably be on Contour or just barely off Contour to help move water out to The Ridges away from just shooting water into The Valleys you want to retain as much of that water in the ground as much of the moisture because that&#39;s going to really help accumulate the minerals and working on Contour is really the best for Access for accumulating organic material water nutrients really great for maximizing how much you can retain into your landscape so you&#39;re either on Contour or you&#39;re ideally trying to go north south orientation let&#39;s dive into the details of what each row layout actually looks like now I&#39;ve gone through a few different iterations of how I&#39;m setting my rows up but there are some things that have remained consistent the whole way along is the first one is that all my rows are very strict tree lines what I mean by that is all my tree species are straight in line and I&#39;m not staggering things right because the key here is you want ease of management and what that means on a really practical level is organizing your organic material when you come through on those regular chopping and dropping interventions you don&#39;t really want to take a lot of time to be putting organic material and being having to be really careful you want to just be able to really know exactly where you put your organic material and put it there move to the next one because that&#39;s how you expand it&#39;s really easy to manage a really small space that&#39;s really complex but as soon as that complex area triples or quadruples or 10xes in size you&#39;re gonna have a really hard time managing if it&#39;s not really streamlined and straightforward so part of the reason for straight tree lines and you can see that here is then you can lay your organic material right along the edges just like that and you know you&#39;re not going to accidentally lay your organic material on top of seedlings you&#39;re not going to crush any seedlings you&#39;re not going to accidentally prune a high value tree and so that&#39;s part of why I&#39;m not incorporating the herbaceous biomass species into the tree line right what I am including into the tree line is all the edible species all the high value trees as well as all the chop and drop trees so the eucalyptus the popular acacia willow all of those trees that are trapping drop are still going into that main Tree Line because the management is more up in the canopy I&#39;m not chopping and dropping with a rice knife with my herbaceous things in that tree line I&#39;d rather have a dedicated Row for those trap and drop species I started out incorporating them into the tree line and I very quickly realized that was a huge mistake because I was accidentally chopping trees whether I was planting comfrey in the tree line Mexican sunflower whatever herbaceous biomass species I&#39;m using now I&#39;m always putting it on a dedicated support Edge right again whether it&#39;s bone grass Mexican sunflower whatever it is and something that I&#39;m doing now more of is leaving a dedicated space to drop that organic material so rather than putting it just right on the edge of that tree line that&#39;s not leaving enough space for me to put that organic materials it depends on what species you&#39;re choosing if you&#39;re choosing Mexican sunflower versus if you&#39;re choosing bone grass or comfrey they all have different growth habits they all have different management requirements and so that&#39;s going to kind of dictate the proximity of your support line to your tree line but the idea is you&#39;re creating that offset support species Edge so you can just come through really efficiently chop it drop it move to the next area and that&#39;s going to really help you scale your food Forest up so when I&#39;m planting my tree line originally I&#39;m putting as many tree seeds in as possible and I&#39;m putting more tree seeds in than I&#39;m gonna want ultimately there to be existing in 10 15 years like if I have good access to Macadamia seeds or pecan seeds or cherimoya seeds for example I&#39;ll put as many of them as I can into a single row to allow for as many to come up and I can be really picky and selective with which ones I choose to keep and which ones I choose not to keep and I&#39;m really selecting for those vigorous high quality trees with good genetics if some fruit early that&#39;s fantastic but I&#39;m playing that genetic Lottery I&#39;m rolling as many dice as possible rather than just putting two seeds in and hoping that those are going to be the winners so for example if I have a selection of trees maybe we&#39;ll start with our macadamias I&#39;m putting a Macadamia in every two meters and I also have guava seeds or seedlings I&#39;ll put a guava in every two meters and I have an ice cream bean seed cool I&#39;ll put an ice cream bean seed in every few meters and maybe I have some loquat seeds so we&#39;ll put a loquast seed in every few meters and you can see how this pattern plays out over time is that your tree lines just become absolutely packed now you include that with all your species your whole succession annual vegetables perennial vegetables berries short-lived perennial trees all the way up to lungs of trees your tree line becomes really really packed and really dense and you can include a combination of seeds cuttings seedlings whatever it&#39;s going to take but the more you can put in there the more you&#39;ll be able to be selective and choose for high quality genetics good growing habits and just the right density rather than just putting all your hopes and dreams into two seeds and just crossing your fingers and praying those are the two winners get as many seeds as you can to put into your agroforestry system and then what you&#39;re doing is then I&#39;ll plant an entire line of say Bona grass and I&#39;ll plant those on both sides of the tree line at say 50 centimeter intervals right and that&#39;s going to provide a good amount of shelter that&#39;s going to provide a fantastic amount of biomass in the first few months while the woodier tree species and the tree line are still kind of establishing and allowing themselves to produce that organic material that&#39;s going to create a really nice high density productive Food Forest system the key thing here is emphasis on the early production of organic material that&#39;s one of the things that I messed up on in my early Food Forest is it just did not include enough organic material and so the whole system suffered as a result I would rather focus on having a really fantastic amount of organic material production and then I can fill in with the edible species later rather than spending a bunch of money on some nice edible species a really diverse Consortium but not having enough organic material so prioritize your early succession biomass your chop and drop species and then focus on adding your tree seeds your high value trees in once you have enough organic material production happening it&#39;s always better to start with the early succession building your soil building the nice conditions rather than starting with expensive fruit trees and then realizing oh I don&#39;t have enough organic material to support this system let&#39;s look at how you&#39;re collecting all these different trees because the big thing is with centropic agroforestry this can be a lot more of an investment than planting a regular Orchard because you need so many different species you need so many different plants so let&#39;s look at how you&#39;re acquiring enough plants to make this work without breaking the bank so there&#39;s a few different ways of reducing the cost in your food Forest one of the best ways is propagation but you can only go so far with propagating your own material if you don&#39;t have access to certain seeds how can you propagate so one of them is propagation learning good propagation especially of your accumulator species the biomass species that you&#39;re going to be using lots and lots of or just early succession high value species like papaya for example you can do from cuttings that&#39;s why I have about 30 papaya growing now because I&#39;ve just been able to multiply them by cutting them growing them in a greenhouse planting them out and then you multiply your plants quickly like that the other easy way is growing things from seed whether that&#39;s fruit that you&#39;re buying at the grocery store and then growing all the seeds from or better yet contact Growers because usually they&#39;re really happy to just let you scrounge around the base of their trees for seeds or you can buy their fruit and you can grow the seeds from the fruit building a network of other growers in your area who are going to have the fruits who are going to have the trees that you&#39;re looking for in your agroforestry system contact them ask if you can get some seeds ask if you can trade them for things for their cuttings do whatever it takes to get that propagation material another option obviously is buying grafted trees now in certain cases I have done this in order to allow myself to have the early production of certain things that I can then begin planting the seeds of a really great example here is almonds I don&#39;t know anybody who has a lot of productive almond trees and so I&#39;ve bought a handful of grafted almonds that now two and a half three years later have begun producing and now I can take those almond seeds and begin planting those in my agroforestry systems again using those grafted trees those Investments which are a lot costlier I&#39;d rather buy just a few almonds rather than a whole Orchard I&#39;ll buy a few grafted almond trees and then begin planting the seeds once they start producing after a couple years and now I have almonds planted everywhere that&#39;s the third key so propagation get your skills up build your network of other Growers and buy some grafted trees by certain trees that you can&#39;t grow and then figure out how to quickly replicate multiply and divide them whether again it&#39;s root root divisions for some things cuttings air layering from seed whatever it takes but learn your propagation skills that&#39;s one of the best way to reduce the cost in your food Forest is just figure out how to propagate things that&#39;s really the key for expanding your food Forest at a lower budget rather than just spending outrageous amounts of money I can&#39;t even I would I&#39;d be scared to think of how much money this whole food Forest would cost if I had to buy every single species every single individual plant from a nursery that would be ridiculous and Way Out Of Reach so that&#39;s part of it is making these food forests accessible the best way is just contacting other Growers knowing where certain fruit trees are collecting seeds and designing your systems to plant the seeds into them because remember if you have that straight Tree Line you can always plant seeds into your tree line and you&#39;re going to know where they come up and you&#39;re going to know that because they&#39;re coming up there don&#39;t shop it whereas if you have these higgledy-piggly all over the place Food Forest systems where you just have things coming up randomly you might accidentally step on a young seedling if you just try and push them in you might accidentally chop it down when you&#39;re doing some chopping and dropping so the value having a straight tree line is that you can always reliably know where to put your seeds and know that they&#39;re going to come up that&#39;s the other benefit and really important point on strict tree lines so hopefully that was valuable we&#39;ll take a little bit of a look around just see kind of where things are at two and a half years into this food Forest Evolution from grassland and some struggling deserted trees to now what is you know a series of some areas are two and a half years old like this area I&#39;m in right here this area is two and a half years old then we&#39;ve got areas that are one year old and then areas that are just five months old so and each year because I&#39;m becoming more competent because I&#39;m becoming more aware and I have a better understanding of the Dynamics of these certain species and what their management looks like and the timing of everything and how to best and most efficiently install and manage them I&#39;m able to expand more and more every single year which is really exciting so that&#39;s one of my biggest pieces of advice is take bite size steps start small figure things out and then the next year you can maybe double that size and the year after that maybe you can double it again and So eventually you get to this point where things feel really manageable doing them at a bigger scale but when you start out man you just want to make small mistakes as quickly as possible so that you can figure out what to do next you can figure out how to iterate on that and there&#39;s endless iterations of ways you can kind of continuously improve on your system so even these systems that I&#39;ve put in five months ago now going into next year where I have plans to expand into block two because remember block one is pretty much almost full now so now block two is what I&#39;m looking at next in terms of continuing to expand these agroforestry systems I&#39;m now going to be changing even from five months ago I have different design considerations and different approaches and different ideas for installing there so go bite size start slow and continually graduate up and the best thing about that too is that you don&#39;t have to make crazy Investments on the plant material side of things because that allows you to propagate that allows you to slowly build that critical mass of planetary material that&#39;s going to allow you it&#39;s going to facilitate your expansion rather than just having to buy tons and tons and tons of material for these massive installs you&#39;ve just sunk a ton of money in you&#39;ve made big mistakes at a big scale versus going slow starting off doing your own propagation learning iterating and then you look back three years later and you&#39;ve converted a whole block into epic food for us so get out there we&#39;ll go check some stuff out and hopefully that was interesting and valuable otherwise check in soon let me know what you thought leave a comment leave a like subscribe and see you real soon [Applause]

foreign so I&amp;#39;m going to use this video to explain how I&amp;#39;m using syntropic agroforestry in my family&amp;#39;s neglected old Citrus Orchard to turn it into a productive abundant diverse Food Forest it&amp;#39;s also turning into a demonstration site a living Nursery to expand and produce more agroforestry systems here locally just a really cool way to learn and share about syntropica forestry so join me and let&amp;#39;s dive into the details my experience with transitioning this Orchard into a food Forest began in 2019 when I was first learning about permaculture I didn&amp;#39;t have any experience growing I didn&amp;#39;t have any experience as a horticulturalist I didn&amp;#39;t go to school for any of this I went to school for Ecology and environmental science which has actually proven to be a really valuable background not coming from Horticulture but coming out of this from an ecological point of view because centropic agroforestry is all about ecology applying it to Horticulture and so that works really well but when I first came here my vision was still turning this into a food Forest rather than just the Citrus and the grass it was really kind of a neglected situation when we moved here because the previous owners hadn&amp;#39;t been here for a few years and so there were trees that were drowning in grass and there were a lot of holes and it was just not as productive as it could be and so I saw that in my first instinct was to just begin interplanting just plant fruit trees in between the existing ones and hope that that would eventually turn things into a food Forest the trees grew really slowly they were stunted because of the grass pressure and because it wasn&amp;#39;t planted in one area it was really scattered and spread out and so that means my efforts were really scattered and I didn&amp;#39;t always remember where things were to go water them and the grass pressure was taking over the trees and it was just really not it really wasn&amp;#39;t working to develop that food forest and so after that first year of learning about permaculture I started applying companion planting and I would put certain species together I would plant berries with these fruit trees that I was into planting or I would put a ground cover like lemon balm and in some cases it worked really well but in other cases it didn&amp;#39;t and I was noticing that when it worked really well it was because I was putting pioneer species in those nitrogen fixing tree Lucerne or Acacia for example and if I wasn&amp;#39;t including those even the companion planting wasn&amp;#39;t making a huge difference to the overall health and ease of management for the fruit trees that early succession ecology wasn&amp;#39;t there to help move past that initial grass stage that&amp;#39;s where I really began that syntropic Journey where I started learning about the importance of those early succession pioneer species like Mexican sunflower bonagrass eucalyptus Acacia and so that&amp;#39;s when I really started applying that here and what that looked like the first iteration of that was a single row and that&amp;#39;s actually this one right here behind me you can see I&amp;#39;ll show you some drone footage of what that looked like but it was actually really funny because when it first got planted it looked like just a single row of vegetables right because there was Tomatoes there was pumpkins corn squash and beans and all these early succession vegetables just a whole row of them surrounded in grass and other isolated fruit trees fast forward to two and a half years later I&amp;#39;ve began expanding and I&amp;#39;ve intensified the expansion so now it all looks like that early succession forest with bananas we have the Mexican sunflower everywhere but it&amp;#39;s been a really cool transition to watch it go from a single row of young centralic agroforestry into now what all of block one is pretty much covered and I&amp;#39;m looking at block two next year which again block two looks like how block one looked two and a half years ago very empty very open and kind of lifeless when you&amp;#39;re walking around it doesn&amp;#39;t feel like it has that energy or has that life to it as compared to when you&amp;#39;re walking around in this young forest ecosystem so obviously syntropic agroforestry can mean a few different things especially because it has so many different flavors depending on the context for me my understanding of centropic Agro forestry in all of its contexts is that it&amp;#39;s a growing Paradigm where you&amp;#39;re utilizing ecological succession as the process you&amp;#39;re using the ecological succession to drive the process forward in a productive way whether that&amp;#39;s mostly support species or early succession chop and drop in the beginning and then ultimately ending up with these high value crops or you&amp;#39;re filling the whole succession up along the way with annuals perennial vegetables berries early succession short-lived perennials medium and long-lived perennials all sorts of contexts tour centropic agroforestry can apply that&amp;#39;s where I found the most success is using the whole broad spectrum of succession which you can see in this little diagram here you can imagine each of these being a different species with a different life cycle right you have annual vegetables that turn over really quickly then you move into short-lived perennial vegetables maybe short-lived perennial trees and then long-lived perennial trees we&amp;#39;ll give some examples but the annual vegetables like I said would include Tomatoes corn squash beans radishes lettuce cabbage that sort of thing your second stage your second succession of perennial vegetables might include rhubarb or Globe artichokes or raspberries these are all examples of the food forests that I&amp;#39;ve been creating here your third level of succession might be those young quick producing fruit trees that don&amp;#39;t last forever things like tamarillo bananas papaya passion fruit things of that nature right and then your lung lived succession those are the things that are growing in the understory the whole time right the micro climate the conditions are being created favor of these long-term species while these younger trees are being productive the avocado wants to germinate in those understory conditions where the tamarillo and the papaya and the banana are creating that shelter for it so eventually we end up with things like the avocado or the Macadamia chestnuts walnuts pecans those long-lived species that are going to ultimately be the productive trees of your long-lived ecosystem but the key part isn&amp;#39;t just in those edible species the key is also having those support species and the layout and the organization of the organic material and how you&amp;#39;re managing those support species most of those key support species I mentioned before Mexican sunflower monograss eucalyptus Acacia those are kind of the main ones along with tree Lucerne Queensland arrowroot there&amp;#39;s a few others here and there but the key thing there is how you integrate them and incorporate them into your agroforestry system as you&amp;#39;re transitioning that succession from your early succession Pioneers into that long-lived ecosystem where you&amp;#39;re building that natural fertility you&amp;#39;ve created the microclimate or the conditions where those long-lived species are going to thrive so we&amp;#39;ll take a look at more detailed of what those support species are we&amp;#39;ll also take a look at the more edible species that are growing around us at the moment so I&amp;#39;ve got a list of the edible species that I&amp;#39;m using obviously I&amp;#39;m using a huge variety of them but these are some of the ones that I&amp;#39;m really kind of focusing on as potential crops and that&amp;#39;s the way I&amp;#39;m doing this is I&amp;#39;m going really high diversity to see what works well here because I&amp;#39;m still in the first few years I&amp;#39;m still in the early stages and I&amp;#39;m still in that process of figuring out what works well for the conditions the management and how I want to move forward I don&amp;#39;t want to put all my eggs into one basket so rather going really high diversity at the start and then kind of narrowing down as I go through and learn more make better observations and see what works well for me here so this is just a list of all the species that I&amp;#39;m kind of at this stage focusing on still and seeing again what works well and what doesn&amp;#39;t we&amp;#39;ve got a lot of different banana varieties multiple different raspberry varieties as many Fig varieties as I can find a bunch of different papayas we&amp;#39;ve got the mountain papaya the babaco the Rainbow Valley cross the oak leaf papaya I&amp;#39;ve got the red papaya all kinds of papaya we&amp;#39;ve got multiple tamarillo varieties we&amp;#39;ve got multiple Mulberry varieties the black the plum red white all sorts love mulberries we&amp;#39;ve got multiple guavas the Cherry guava tropical guava again as many varieties as I can find and that&amp;#39;s the key thing here is I&amp;#39;m collecting as many different varieties as I&amp;#39;m able to source and I&amp;#39;ll make sure to share how I&amp;#39;m sourcing a lot of this plant material because that&amp;#39;s a huge part of reducing the cost in your agroforestry systems also planting a lot of different potatoes in the early succession stages lots of different avocados from seeds some grafted ones a lot of Japanese raisins that have been growing from seed ricotta chilies elephant garlic adamoya mioga ginger and we&amp;#39;ve got a lot of ice cream beans grown from seed from multiple different trees around here different passion fruit varieties Taro loquats lots of different loquats from seed varieties from all around the country French Sorrel rhubarb Globe artichokes Egyptian walking onions sugar cane Lemon Verbena Yacon Jerusalem artichokes alpine strawberries blueberries Japanese wine berries gooseberries American pawpaw rosemary sage lukuma pomegranates so those are just the main edible crops that I&amp;#39;m focusing on obviously there&amp;#39;s a few other ones but those are the ones that I&amp;#39;m really trying to hone in on and focus and see what works best in these situations now you might have noticed that some of those are subtropical species and some of those are more temperate or Mediterranean species we&amp;#39;ve got a whole mix here because we&amp;#39;re in this really nice Goldilocks zone where we can grow things in all sorts of different zones we can grow the subtropicals that need a lot of shelter from the frost we can also grow those things that need that dormancy in winter so we&amp;#39;re in a really nice Goldilocks zone to have huge diversity and experiment a lot with creating the different microclimates and just seeing what works well here so if you look at that list you&amp;#39;ll see that there&amp;#39;s a lot of things across the spectrum of those early succession mid succession and late succession species and the beautiful thing is that because there&amp;#39;s so much diversity because there&amp;#39;s so many different kinds of growing habits of different life cycles different canopy layers that&amp;#39;s all factored in when you&amp;#39;re looking at the stratification over time right because this syntropic agroforestry can be really boiled down into two different characteristics you&amp;#39;ve got time and then you have strata it&amp;#39;s a time and space equations Tropic agroforestry where the life cycle of the plant and what strata it fits into what canopy layer does it fit into whether it&amp;#39;s a low light condition a medium or a high canopy or is it an emergent canopy layer so it&amp;#39;s a space and time equation and the key here is really diversity is if you can get a really diverse assortment of plants you&amp;#39;ll be pretty much guaranteed to find a combination that works well filling out that space and time so diversity High diversity is really key especially if you&amp;#39;re just getting started and then you can figure out what works well specifically at your site so that&amp;#39;s my biggest recommendation is high diversity when you&amp;#39;re starting see what works well and then as you go tailor it more and more to that the reason that things are done in rows in straight lines is because of ease of management planting a tree is only five percent of the work but managing these systems over time is most of the work and so you want to put a lot of emphasis in how you&amp;#39;re designing these systems and how your layout is to make management really simple and easy because if you make the system where the management is really difficult and cumbersome and challenging then you&amp;#39;re not going to want to do it it&amp;#39;s going to get neglected and you&amp;#39;re going to feel really bad about it and then you&amp;#39;re going to ignore your system it&amp;#39;s going to become this tension and then you&amp;#39;re going to blow the whole thing off and wish you had never dried growing a food for us in the first place so designer systems well up front the management the layout hopefully this will help and then you&amp;#39;ll have a really smooth sailing agroforestry system Food Forest into the future because my context is a little bit unique I&amp;#39;m retrofitting an existing Orchard the layout of the Rose was already predetermined going east to west that&amp;#39;s how the roads are laid out ideally it would have been north south now that&amp;#39;s allowing for better sunlight penetration right because if the Sun is really low in the sky in Winter we still want to get that sunlight all the way to the back of the system whereas when your rows are east to west the further back your rows are the less and less sunlight they&amp;#39;re getting especially those Evergreen subtropical rows so you have to take that into consideration if your rows are east to west the further back your rows are the less Sun they&amp;#39;re going to get in Winter whereas if the north south they&amp;#39;re going to be a lot more sun throughout the whole year so if these were north south Rose and these are our East West rows you can see our sun is rising in the East setting in the west the further back your roads are these rows are going to shade these back rows whereas if your rows are oriented north south the sun rises stays low in the sky because it&amp;#39;s winter you&amp;#39;re still getting that sunlight all the way back into all the roads they&amp;#39;re getting more equal sunlight exposure versus when your rose or east west so that&amp;#39;s why the big recommendation is north south versus East West again I&amp;#39;m kind of stuck with the East-West orientation because of the inherited context of retrofitting an existing Orchard but if you can do it from scratch on flat land that&amp;#39;s how it would go if you&amp;#39;re not on Flatland if you&amp;#39;re on a slope the biggest recommendation would probably be on Contour or just barely off Contour to help move water out to The Ridges away from just shooting water into The Valleys you want to retain as much of that water in the ground as much of the moisture because that&amp;#39;s going to really help accumulate the minerals and working on Contour is really the best for Access for accumulating organic material water nutrients really great for maximizing how much you can retain into your landscape so you&amp;#39;re either on Contour or you&amp;#39;re ideally trying to go north south orientation let&amp;#39;s dive into the details of what each row layout actually looks like now I&amp;#39;ve gone through a few different iterations of how I&amp;#39;m setting my rows up but there are some things that have remained consistent the whole way along is the first one is that all my rows are very strict tree lines what I mean by that is all my tree species are straight in line and I&amp;#39;m not staggering things right because the key here is you want ease of management and what that means on a really practical level is organizing your organic material when you come through on those regular chopping and dropping interventions you don&amp;#39;t really want to take a lot of time to be putting organic material and being having to be really careful you want to just be able to really know exactly where you put your organic material and put it there move to the next one because that&amp;#39;s how you expand it&amp;#39;s really easy to manage a really small space that&amp;#39;s really complex but as soon as that complex area triples or quadruples or 10xes in size you&amp;#39;re gonna have a really hard time managing if it&amp;#39;s not really streamlined and straightforward so part of the reason for straight tree lines and you can see that here is then you can lay your organic material right along the edges just like that and you know you&amp;#39;re not going to accidentally lay your organic material on top of seedlings you&amp;#39;re not going to crush any seedlings you&amp;#39;re not going to accidentally prune a high value tree and so that&amp;#39;s part of why I&amp;#39;m not incorporating the herbaceous biomass species into the tree line right what I am including into the tree line is all the edible species all the high value trees as well as all the chop and drop trees so the eucalyptus the popular acacia willow all of those trees that are trapping drop are still going into that main Tree Line because the management is more up in the canopy I&amp;#39;m not chopping and dropping with a rice knife with my herbaceous things in that tree line I&amp;#39;d rather have a dedicated Row for those trap and drop species I started out incorporating them into the tree line and I very quickly realized that was a huge mistake because I was accidentally chopping trees whether I was planting comfrey in the tree line Mexican sunflower whatever herbaceous biomass species I&amp;#39;m using now I&amp;#39;m always putting it on a dedicated support Edge right again whether it&amp;#39;s bone grass Mexican sunflower whatever it is and something that I&amp;#39;m doing now more of is leaving a dedicated space to drop that organic material so rather than putting it just right on the edge of that tree line that&amp;#39;s not leaving enough space for me to put that organic materials it depends on what species you&amp;#39;re choosing if you&amp;#39;re choosing Mexican sunflower versus if you&amp;#39;re choosing bone grass or comfrey they all have different growth habits they all have different management requirements and so that&amp;#39;s going to kind of dictate the proximity of your support line to your tree line but the idea is you&amp;#39;re creating that offset support species Edge so you can just come through really efficiently chop it drop it move to the next area and that&amp;#39;s going to really help you scale your food Forest up so when I&amp;#39;m planting my tree line originally I&amp;#39;m putting as many tree seeds in as possible and I&amp;#39;m putting more tree seeds in than I&amp;#39;m gonna want ultimately there to be existing in 10 15 years like if I have good access to Macadamia seeds or pecan seeds or cherimoya seeds for example I&amp;#39;ll put as many of them as I can into a single row to allow for as many to come up and I can be really picky and selective with which ones I choose to keep and which ones I choose not to keep and I&amp;#39;m really selecting for those vigorous high quality trees with good genetics if some fruit early that&amp;#39;s fantastic but I&amp;#39;m playing that genetic Lottery I&amp;#39;m rolling as many dice as possible rather than just putting two seeds in and hoping that those are going to be the winners so for example if I have a selection of trees maybe we&amp;#39;ll start with our macadamias I&amp;#39;m putting a Macadamia in every two meters and I also have guava seeds or seedlings I&amp;#39;ll put a guava in every two meters and I have an ice cream bean seed cool I&amp;#39;ll put an ice cream bean seed in every few meters and maybe I have some loquat seeds so we&amp;#39;ll put a loquast seed in every few meters and you can see how this pattern plays out over time is that your tree lines just become absolutely packed now you include that with all your species your whole succession annual vegetables perennial vegetables berries short-lived perennial trees all the way up to lungs of trees your tree line becomes really really packed and really dense and you can include a combination of seeds cuttings seedlings whatever it&amp;#39;s going to take but the more you can put in there the more you&amp;#39;ll be able to be selective and choose for high quality genetics good growing habits and just the right density rather than just putting all your hopes and dreams into two seeds and just crossing your fingers and praying those are the two winners get as many seeds as you can to put into your agroforestry system and then what you&amp;#39;re doing is then I&amp;#39;ll plant an entire line of say Bona grass and I&amp;#39;ll plant those on both sides of the tree line at say 50 centimeter intervals right and that&amp;#39;s going to provide a good amount of shelter that&amp;#39;s going to provide a fantastic amount of biomass in the first few months while the woodier tree species and the tree line are still kind of establishing and allowing themselves to produce that organic material that&amp;#39;s going to create a really nice high density productive Food Forest system the key thing here is emphasis on the early production of organic material that&amp;#39;s one of the things that I messed up on in my early Food Forest is it just did not include enough organic material and so the whole system suffered as a result I would rather focus on having a really fantastic amount of organic material production and then I can fill in with the edible species later rather than spending a bunch of money on some nice edible species a really diverse Consortium but not having enough organic material so prioritize your early succession biomass your chop and drop species and then focus on adding your tree seeds your high value trees in once you have enough organic material production happening it&amp;#39;s always better to start with the early succession building your soil building the nice conditions rather than starting with expensive fruit trees and then realizing oh I don&amp;#39;t have enough organic material to support this system let&amp;#39;s look at how you&amp;#39;re collecting all these different trees because the big thing is with centropic agroforestry this can be a lot more of an investment than planting a regular Orchard because you need so many different species you need so many different plants so let&amp;#39;s look at how you&amp;#39;re acquiring enough plants to make this work without breaking the bank so there&amp;#39;s a few different ways of reducing the cost in your food Forest one of the best ways is propagation but you can only go so far with propagating your own material if you don&amp;#39;t have access to certain seeds how can you propagate so one of them is propagation learning good propagation especially of your accumulator species the biomass species that you&amp;#39;re going to be using lots and lots of or just early succession high value species like papaya for example you can do from cuttings that&amp;#39;s why I have about 30 papaya growing now because I&amp;#39;ve just been able to multiply them by cutting them growing them in a greenhouse planting them out and then you multiply your plants quickly like that the other easy way is growing things from seed whether that&amp;#39;s fruit that you&amp;#39;re buying at the grocery store and then growing all the seeds from or better yet contact Growers because usually they&amp;#39;re really happy to just let you scrounge around the base of their trees for seeds or you can buy their fruit and you can grow the seeds from the fruit building a network of other growers in your area who are going to have the fruits who are going to have the trees that you&amp;#39;re looking for in your agroforestry system contact them ask if you can get some seeds ask if you can trade them for things for their cuttings do whatever it takes to get that propagation material another option obviously is buying grafted trees now in certain cases I have done this in order to allow myself to have the early production of certain things that I can then begin planting the seeds of a really great example here is almonds I don&amp;#39;t know anybody who has a lot of productive almond trees and so I&amp;#39;ve bought a handful of grafted almonds that now two and a half three years later have begun producing and now I can take those almond seeds and begin planting those in my agroforestry systems again using those grafted trees those Investments which are a lot costlier I&amp;#39;d rather buy just a few almonds rather than a whole Orchard I&amp;#39;ll buy a few grafted almond trees and then begin planting the seeds once they start producing after a couple years and now I have almonds planted everywhere that&amp;#39;s the third key so propagation get your skills up build your network of other Growers and buy some grafted trees by certain trees that you can&amp;#39;t grow and then figure out how to quickly replicate multiply and divide them whether again it&amp;#39;s root root divisions for some things cuttings air layering from seed whatever it takes but learn your propagation skills that&amp;#39;s one of the best way to reduce the cost in your food Forest is just figure out how to propagate things that&amp;#39;s really the key for expanding your food Forest at a lower budget rather than just spending outrageous amounts of money I can&amp;#39;t even I would I&amp;#39;d be scared to think of how much money this whole food Forest would cost if I had to buy every single species every single individual plant from a nursery that would be ridiculous and Way Out Of Reach so that&amp;#39;s part of it is making these food forests accessible the best way is just contacting other Growers knowing where certain fruit trees are collecting seeds and designing your systems to plant the seeds into them because remember if you have that straight Tree Line you can always plant seeds into your tree line and you&amp;#39;re going to know where they come up and you&amp;#39;re going to know that because they&amp;#39;re coming up there don&amp;#39;t shop it whereas if you have these higgledy-piggly all over the place Food Forest systems where you just have things coming up randomly you might accidentally step on a young seedling if you just try and push them in you might accidentally chop it down when you&amp;#39;re doing some chopping and dropping so the value having a straight tree line is that you can always reliably know where to put your seeds and know that they&amp;#39;re going to come up that&amp;#39;s the other benefit and really important point on strict tree lines so hopefully that was valuable we&amp;#39;ll take a little bit of a look around just see kind of where things are at two and a half years into this food Forest Evolution from grassland and some struggling deserted trees to now what is you know a series of some areas are two and a half years old like this area I&amp;#39;m in right here this area is two and a half years old then we&amp;#39;ve got areas that are one year old and then areas that are just five months old so and each year because I&amp;#39;m becoming more competent because I&amp;#39;m becoming more aware and I have a better understanding of the Dynamics of these certain species and what their management looks like and the timing of everything and how to best and most efficiently install and manage them I&amp;#39;m able to expand more and more every single year which is really exciting so that&amp;#39;s one of my biggest pieces of advice is take bite size steps start small figure things out and then the next year you can maybe double that size and the year after that maybe you can double it again and So eventually you get to this point where things feel really manageable doing them at a bigger scale but when you start out man you just want to make small mistakes as quickly as possible so that you can figure out what to do next you can figure out how to iterate on that and there&amp;#39;s endless iterations of ways you can kind of continuously improve on your system so even these systems that I&amp;#39;ve put in five months ago now going into next year where I have plans to expand into block two because remember block one is pretty much almost full now so now block two is what I&amp;#39;m looking at next in terms of continuing to expand these agroforestry systems I&amp;#39;m now going to be changing even from five months ago I have different design considerations and different approaches and different ideas for installing there so go bite size start slow and continually graduate up and the best thing about that too is that you don&amp;#39;t have to make crazy Investments on the plant material side of things because that allows you to propagate that allows you to slowly build that critical mass of planetary material that&amp;#39;s going to allow you it&amp;#39;s going to facilitate your expansion rather than just having to buy tons and tons and tons of material for these massive installs you&amp;#39;ve just sunk a ton of money in you&amp;#39;ve made big mistakes at a big scale versus going slow starting off doing your own propagation learning iterating and then you look back three years later and you&amp;#39;ve converted a whole block into epic food for us so get out there we&amp;#39;ll go check some stuff out and hopefully that was interesting and valuable otherwise check in soon let me know what you thought leave a comment leave a like subscribe and see you real soon [Applause]

Transcript for:Syntropic Agroforestry: Transforming a Neglected Orchard into a Food Forest

Transcript for:
Syntropic Agroforestry: Transforming a Neglected Orchard into a Food Forest