The view is wonderful! When you point out something it shows up perfectly in the video. I admire you for taking the time to share your food forest with us. It inspires us all. If I haven’t walked through my trees in a couple days, I feel like I am missing out. A big shout out for not spraying and having faith in mother nature. Sadly many /most of us find that our fruit just can’t be sustained in this way. . I also like your southern accent ==just what the doctor ordered here in southwest Virginia 
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Good to hear everything is showing up well, thank you!
I feel the same way if I haven’t walked through my trees for a while also.
Yeah I definitely can’t hide the Southern accent. 
We got 5 inches of snow yesterday!
I know snow isn’t a big deal to most people, but we usually get snow only once or twice a year here if that, and 5 inches is a lot for here.
I love how the snow looks on the trees and plants, it’s so peaceful and scenic looking.
I almost took a very cold swim!
One of the peach trees has quite a few blossoms in full bloom. The snow last night partially melted yesterday and during the day today and will probably freeze some of the blossoms over solid after it drops below freezing again tonight. They seem to be doing fine though right now, it’ll be interesting to see how they do!
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This video is part 5 and the last one for this week of 2/16/20.
My largest plum tree didn’t end up being what it was supposed to be, but the flowers smell heavenly! They cover the tree and can be smelled from a long way away. I didn’t care for the plums it produced, but someone else liked them. It has a little astringency, and I have a low tolerance for any bitterness, and it also wasn’t that flavorful to me, but I’m glad someone else liked it. I’ll probably keep it just for the fragrance of the blossoms, and I also may graft some of it over to other varieties.
The black locust grew so much that it outgrew its fencing! I think I’ll have to cut the fencing off of the tree to remove it without damaging the black locust.
I have an older apple tree in the shade that hasn’t grown very much recently, trying to decide what to do to give it a boost.
The honey locust tree didn’t grow anywhere near as much as the black locust tree.
The apples and most of the mulberries are still dormant.
Some willow trees are starting to send out some new growth that looks really healthy. I might use some of the cuttings to make some willow water this year.
I’m planning to hopefully start digging some of the pools in the food forest soon! I’ll be using them to catch, hold, and soak in rainfall slowly, and also use the soil that I dig out to put out around the existing fruit trees to help the soil drain better close to them. Maybe I’ll have them dug out some by next week!
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I had cages on all of my trees, but they quickly grew so large it was changing their limb angle to be too narrow, so I removed them. Talking about fruit trees, my blue tick heeler knocked my potted fig I had moved outside over, then later chewed on the top like it was a stick. I cant win for losing…
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Yeah I’d like to move away from using the fencing around the trees if I can, as it is hard to work around the tree, and it restricts the tree growth occasionally like you mentioned if it is too small. I’ve been thinking about just doing the fencing around my entire food forest, which would be really nice, and plan to experiment with ways to naturally keep the deer off the trees and plants.
Week 3!
Welcome to week 3 of the food forest tours!
Here’s Part 1 for the week of 2/23/20, featuring rooting hardwood grape cuttings and willow, planting peach seeds in the natural raised bed, and more!
The grape vines haven’t starting budding out yet.
The blueberries are in all different phases of blooming. Some have swollen fruit buds and others are blooming like crazy! I don’t prune back the tops of the blueberries (or any part) like I’ve seen some people do. I leave it to make as many blueberry flowers as it wants to, that will soon turn into yummy blueberries. Hopefully they survived the snow and freeze!
I don’t think I’ve shown this section before that has some of the hardwood grape vine cuttings that I’m trying to root. These cuttings are from my table grape vines in the first part of the video. I’ve stuck willow hardwood cuttings among them to hopefully get some willow trees also and to see if they’ll help the grape vines root as well. I used some of the leftover pieces of willow and made some willow water that I poured over it all a few months ago when I stuck the cuttings. Hopefully we’ll have some rooted grape vines and willow trees soon!
I planted some peach seeds in the natural raised bed. See the link below for the video from when I made the natural raised bed originally. It’s just been a little over two months since I built it, and you can see how much the leaves have already broken down. The worms are feasting, and the soil looks super rich and healthy!
The soil was so healthy, almost every time I planted a seed, I disturbed a large worm, and the worm crawled out of the soil to say hey and find a new spot. I’m glad they’re enjoying being there and helping to create the healthy soil of this raised bed, and I hope the peach seeds do well here!
None of the pomegranates are budding out yet. Hopefully they have made it through the cold weather alright and will be budding out soon when the weather gets warmer!
This video is part 2 of the weekly food forest tour for 2/23/20.
The older peach tree has a lot of flowers blooming currently. Some of the blossoms were completely covered in snow and ice, hopefully they survived. The vegetative buds at the ends of the branches look like the beginning of some leaves are starting to grow.
I decided to cut off the rootstock branches on the young peach tree to let it put more energy and growth into the main variety. I had to cut off more than 50% of the tree! (Gasp!) I’ve heard it repeated a lot that it is best to not cut out more than 30% of the wood from a tree. I actually prefer to cut as little as possible, usually just damaged or dead areas, and way less than 30%. This tree is so young and vigorous though, I don’t foresee any negatives to cutting it back so much at this time. I am actually hoping that the main variety will now send out some vigorous growth this year. If 50% was removed on a larger tree, it would most likely change the whole structure of the tree and send up an army of vigorous waterspout shoots in reply, but for a tree this small, I’m thinking that it should be fine and will benefit from the rootstock branches being removed.
The rootstock branches were all different sizes, so I used a few different tools to cut off the three branches. One was small enough be removed by hand pruners. The second one was large enough to need loppers to remove it, and the third was growing right up against the trunk of the main variety, so I needed to use a small hand saw to cut that one, so I wouldn’t damage the main trunk.
When using the hand saw, I generally like to remove the branch a few inches away from the target cut area, unless it was a really tiny limb, so that it removes a lot of the weight off of the area that I will be cutting, which will minimize damage such as ripping or cracking as a result of cutting a full heavy branch off.
All three rootstock branches were removed successfully with nice clean cuts. I’ll be hopefully mounding up soil around the tree soon which will cover these wounds, and hopefully I can add enough soil to cover above the graft union and encourage the tree to send out roots from the main variety and become an own root fruit tree!
About your black locust tree …
If it were mine… I would prune to a single , straight trunk,
As their best use,( other than a nitrogen fixer )
Is rot resistant post, and you may want a nice straight post some day. (Fence , trellis , pole barn , etc.)
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Thanks for the tip!
I definitely want to grow some like that, maybe by pollarding them to encourage them to grow a straight trunk?
This first one I just wanted to let it grow in a natural form to see how it grows and takes shape.
I hope to plant a lot more of these trees and will most likely be trying to grow some for the features of their great wood! The apple tree growing next to it has put on tons of growth. I don’t know if it’s from the black locust or not, but I’m really liking this tree a lot so far!
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whats nice is you can grow a post sized tree. harvest it and it will regrow even faster than the original did because of its extensive root system. if i had the extra land id grow 100 of these trees to harvest just for posts to sell to farmers. just as rot resistant as our cedars but a lot stronger and 3xs faster growing so its sustainable. only takes like 5 yrs to grow a post sized tree. their leaves are so thin i can still grow stuff like currants and honey berries under them.
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stefan sobkowiak advocates that every 3rd tree is a locust or other nitrogen fixer in an orchard. He utilizes a mixed orchard rather than a monoculture utilizing the idea of a triole of trees in his permaculture
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My black locust grew a little more than an inch in diameter its first year from transplanting. If it keeps up this growth rate, which hopefully the growth rate will just continue to increase each year due to the roots and canopy getting larger, I could hope to have a 5 inch post from this tree after 5 years, maybe even a 6 or 7 inch post.
Like you mentioned, due to their thin and low density leaves, I plan to grow a lot of things around and under them, and probably even using them as a natural trellis to grow some grapes on them.
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I really like Stefan’s video on his orchard.
I hope to eventually have a huge diversity of plants, including fruit trees, berry bushes, veggies, nitrogen fixers, native trees, bushes, and plants, fungi, and hopefully even lots of beneficial animals and insects to create a mini ecosystem that will hopefully help naturally keep pests and disease issues to a minimum. I’m sure I’ll still have problems, but hopefully they will be balanced out to have just a small effect.
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This video, part 3 of the weekly food forest tour for 2/23/20, discusses creating pools (mini ponds) in the food forest and how I barely prune my fruit trees to just remove damage most of the time.
I’ve started digging some of the pools for my food forest! This one is only about 6 inches deep right now. It filled up with water so fast that I didn’t have time to dig it deeper! I hope to create a lot more of these pools very soon, some smaller and some bigger all throughout the food forest.
I’d also like to connect them so that if one of the pools uphill fills up, it will overflow into the ones downhill. I’d also like to add some small fish in some of them, where I can get the water deep enough to remain filled. Some of them I want to purposefully have as seasonal pools that will fill and dry up throughout the year. These pools will hopefully be a great habitat for amphibians and other small creatures.
I did some pruning (mostly not pruning) to remove some damaged wood at the tips of the branches from some deer munching, and tried to minimize the amount of pruning on each tree to just take off what was needed.
I generally don’t clean my pruners in between trees. I’ve found that it’s really not necessary unless you are pruning a tree with an obvious disease issue. If the trees are healthy, I don’t worry about it.
my food forest is modeled off his videos. he’s only a few hours drive from me.
This video is part 4 of the weekly food forest tour for 2/23/20.
I originally was going to dig a pool in between the larger cherry trees. Then I decided to make it bigger, and then I decided I needed to focus on some other pools in more strategic locations first, that I could use the dirt to put around nearby fruit trees in more wet areas. I started digging the outline of this pool, which will probably be one of the larger ones, and dug about one half of the outline of its shape.
It will probably connect to the ditches located around each of the mounds of both cherry trees. At the point where these ditches connect to the pool, I’ll probably make a little mound, so that the water will fill up the ditch around the trees first and then overflow excess water into the pools.
Late winter has been a great time of the year to locate potential areas for the pools. The weather is cool and rainfall is usually high here this time of year, and as a result the water level is usually at its highest. Natural puddles can form in these really wet areas where the water drains to and pools up. I’m trying to get the outlines dug and maybe the first layer of soil dug out for the pools during this time of year, then later in the year when the rains and water level drop enough, they can be dug out deeper. When I dug out just the first few inches of soil recently, the pool filled up overnight. It makes it a little harder to dig when it’s underwater.
I’m excited to create a lot more of these pools very soon!
save up your pennies, then during the dry season, get a backhoe in there to dig your ponds . 
You read my mind, I had actually started saving for this recently.
I had saved up, but then I started thinking about how much it would cost, and how precise I could be with the machine around my existing plants, and I think I’ve recently decided to go at it by hand for now in my existing food forest. I can be really precise and careful around my existing plants and not damage them.
It will probably take me about 20 times longer by hand , but I’ve actually really enjoyed the work so far. By doing little by little, I can observe the effects the changes have more easily, and copy or change the methods used as needed.
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