Summary Exploring the Food Forests of Zaytuna Farm - YouTube (Youtube) www.youtube.com
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Geoff Hi, Geoff. Welcome. To the wild food forest is Zaytuna farm. It's 1 of my favorite places of food forest,
Geoff all kinds of stuff going on here. Nice to
Geoff be edible. Some of it supports species.
Geoff But there are acres and acres,
Geoff of food forest here that we planted with students to
Geoff give them experience. And now we're a community. We have 8 shareholders of
Geoff and a lot of fit
Geoff for us on the common area. Always knew this was gonna happen. Now we're bringing them into maintenance. Because everybody has their own small intense food forest around their own share, around their own house area. I'll take and show
Geoff you mine as I develop a new 1, but this is the wild system,
Geoff let me show you what we're doing with it because it's really, really interested.
Geoff So I swing around. Come past a driveway, and we slip onto the other side here. There's a large tip here with and dragon fruit. A dragon fruit on tip poll, what a classic combination that is. And then as we swing around, you can see that we really are in heavy maintenance, we're.
Geoff So let me take you through that section and show you what it's like. Now here's our dragged fruit over. Tip Poll has to be cut yet. But we go past this beauty, and we go into this section here. We here's some young coffee.
Geoff And behind us is Chap gibraltar carver. I'm going underneath a custard apple and going next to a Mango and past the gu. And the first thing you know this is we've cut most the ice cream beans and tip point the tip, dan as poll. These are all gonna res sprout, but they're producing all this material. Look at this material.
Geoff It's everywhere all over the ground. And now the tops have gone for mulch through the chip or... Oh, actually, this is a fu jo here. Now Open up to the light it's gonna go well. But we're we're taking material to the goats.
Geoff We're shipping green material for the compost. We're shipping branches with the compost. And we still have surplus material on the ground, and it's going on top of Singapore daisy. Now Singapore Daisy is a plant that people are terrified of. That usually means it's some I'm gonna like because it's a hard worker.
Geoff I like exploiting hard workers in the plant world. There's a lot of benefit to exploiting hardworking working elements. And if you're prejudice about your workers, you don't get a good result. We get a great result. So we suppress it with branches.
Geoff And when we suppress it with shade. And by the time we've got shade, we've got the result we want, a canopy of food forest. So we've got citrus opening up to the sun here. We've got... Bun your pine.
Geoff We've got lots of gu. Got a rose apple back there. There's lots of jo. The system's opening. There's lots of bamboo.
Geoff We've always got lots of bamboo. But this is extensive. It goes for quite a long way. So I'll crunch my way through this area. There's under stories here of food crop This taro grows pretty well in shade, and you can always extend it out to a more productive garden.
Geoff I'm trying not to trip over all the organic matter that's produced every year and consumed by the soil. And we're cutting some hard work elements down, like here's a little cass and the stump sweet sprout. So there's lots of volunteers trying to keep working for us. There are elements that want to... Produce organic matter, fast, rugged carbon pathways.
Geoff Here's a coco, again like a terror, a root crop. It'll hang in there pretty well as a biological reserve. Anytime we wanna move it out to the sun, it'll go really well and produce loads of food. There's a palm here, and The palm here is a jelly, a food pro producer. Food tree.
Geoff Good palm produces. A a fruit and is a my sealing fungi associate to harvest phosphate. Now here I have a Cas, that's actually almost suppressed by a climbing in the yam, which is a great edible. Root crop, a perennial edible, fantastic crop, biological reserve here, but also great food, there's lots and lots of root crop in the food forest here. Lemons, well, we're overs supplied with lemons.
Geoff Grow supply with citrus. It's just everywhere. There's unusual crops like Ass cherry is a small ass cherry here next to the lemon, highest fruit in the world in vitamin c. And there's a custard apple. Here's a Brazil cherry, and I'm going underneath a mulberry, which is this time of year.
Geoff So it has no leaves. And everywhere you look, There's different diverse elements doing different jobs of performing forest functions. It's literally a forest. Lots and lots of time in the end. We've always got root rot.
Geoff As a mango emerging into the light, And on we go, species out to species. Oh, I can see a tame alone in the distance. They're a large leaf. Loves the under story there, Tam. There's lots of Tam through the forest.
Geoff Bananas getting shaded out. There's session event that's finished. More or less now they're mulch. And if we go on down, you'll see we come down to another track, coming through the forest, a well used track. Right at the moment, I'm sort of chunking my way through, the rough material.
Geoff Actually, I'm going pass the coral tree, which has not been collided. It's been copper because we really restrict the coral tree, another plant that people are worried about. But if you're put in the work, they're great carbon pathways, like all of the plants and trees keep me worried about. They're just worried about work hard workers. So Here's a key Apple or no nam called in South Africa right next to the track, a large bun.
Geoff It's merging. Take 18 years to fruit. It's hundreds I planted on the site and we'll we overs overflow with bun nuts in the end. Alright And then we've got lots of lots of coffee. There's probably a thousand coffee bushes all the way through.
Geoff This section in the forest. And they love the shade. They they they they boom the under store of a food, but they like a byproduct of the food forest actually, coffee by default, I suppose. In the background, there's a sw and on the sw bank is Gallon gal. Another root crop for spice.
Geoff Now this section was done a bit earlier, so we've already got an emergence, of copper. Reg growth. Poll, copper, p is higher like this. Copper is lower, so the ice cream beans coming back, and it will produce lots and lots of biomass to be cut next year. So a year later, we'll be doing this again.
Geoff And gradually, we suppress these to lower and lower numbers. There there only be 5 percent of the mass in the end and 95 percent of the mass or be fruit trees. Walking on through the food for us, we're going through lots of coffee here, starting to produce quite well. Coffee coming through. And res shooting.
Geoff Got lots. And lots of cut here. But every time we do it, the fruit trees get a boost of fe from that nitrogen in the ground the mulch at the surface and the exposure to light. And we continuously get more and more Biomass. His ice cream being shooting back.
Geoff Here's Lu k shooting back. And here's tip 1 tip shooting back. This is p. This is putting these hardworking working elements that fix nitrogen to work for us, Why would you not exploit the plants of the world that want to build soil for you. Here we have our camping shelters and we've got a bit more man going on.
Geoff We've still got plugs, and that's a tip of res sprout. But we've got a heavier maintenance, make it a little bit more user friendly to our campus. Not everybody understands to the wild look of a food forest. So here we've actually we've heavily prune we've taken away our branches, so people were not freaked out by the fact there might be snakes. And we've actually mode the Singapore daisy.
Geoff To be a lot more respectable. This is not so wild place. It's open to the public. And feels a lot safer. Another tip res sprout.
Geoff Mexican sunflower here that's also Weed species we use as a hard work malt producer. And we've even got some nice exotic flowers in here. There's a a whole mixture of fruit trees. There's some beautiful red hot poker coming up. There a gorgeous looking little feature in a amongst of food forest, mango, W, custard apple Brazil cherry.
Geoff Now here's a here's an ice cream bean, and that's re spray in after a a poll cut. Everything we choose res sprouts, and gives us more organic matter. Every year, to feed to soil, fixed nitrogen and and Putter participate in managed forest functions that give us a great diversity of food. And it can look tame like this. We think this looks pretty tame.
Geoff We're coming to the end of it now. We're back into the native reg growth forest, which has lots of weed species as well, actually. And that goes through 2, Mexican tri fern and I gotta put that 1 in, Shi a low low, beautiful tree we quite few of those. But our our native forest goes from weeds to native forest over a sequence of pioneer events. The reg region people wanna poison everything of course.
Geoff As soon as if they're poison subsidized. But this valley here below our campsite is classified officially as a rainforest emergent camp laurel canopy. Camp rolls weed it's stick right out the top. Are rainforest trees. Now the only way that's actually happened.
Geoff Is the camp laurel, the weed tree has actually pioneered without any help from anybody else. In fact, a lot of hindrance it's pioneered a native, rainforest. Our sequence, is pioneering true, to a fruit forest. Same game. Same system.
Geoff Just humans manipulating for their own benefit of diverse organic healthy food, and nature that's exactly the same thing with no prejudice whatsoever and pioneer through to a native forest using hard work, immigrant species they're very efficient, fast carbon pathways. I think you should listen to nature and see what nature does and how it works rather than continuously being in opposition. To the functions, they're all around, and we can use those as lessons to grow our own sustainable systems. Now here's a section of new food forest that's more intense. So here we have...
Geoff A row of leg trees on a sprinkler. Used to be a garden, but it's been converted. Here we have a diversity of fruit trees, with no support species and then a row of legumes on the outside edge and that repeats downhill hill as it's being established. So this is a more intense small scale food forest establishment. And that can be completely different to a wild ward area system that I've shown you.
Geoff Now here's a small section of food price, along a thermal mass wall. So there's a whole mixture of trees there and there are... Leg trees in a row on the edge. And then we have a garden. So we have a standard organic garden here.
Geoff But it's in the same proportion as the food for us. So as we go down, we get a repeated pattern of support species, should we praying in the foreground brand, black sugar be came is just there great producers. And the gardens diversity reduces and goes more and more into a main crop in the lower sec as we get further from the house. But on the opposite side, we have food forest being established. In between, s rows of legumes.
Geoff So we have here a more orderly system, a smaller system with more intense management. So we have trees, as productive trees between rows of legumes. If it's much more ordered than the big wild system, and we have compost, being put around each tree, then cardboard and wood chip. So you can see that happening right here. The wood chip has actually come from the leg choice.
Geoff The food forest and the support species are providing, with high quality wood chip mulch. Now as we go through, there are systems here with lots and lots of plants but no legumes, the legumes are in a row on the edge. Not too big in an area. Close enough for these legumes have an interaction. There's an area here yet to be planted.
Geoff Got why 2 fruit trees already gone in. An area that's been established a little bit longer and it's getting some fresh cardboard and fresh wood chip put in. More maintenance, more management, more ordered and disciplined, set up for the support spaces. But there you go. I hope you've enjoyed that.
Geoff