Weekly Food Forest Tours! Fruits, Veggies, and More! :)

General Fruit Growing
#61

This video is part 2 of the weekly food forest tour for 3/22/20.

Some of the pomegranates look like they are about to produce some leaves. Some of the other ones died back to the ground, but are sprouting back.

I had some leftover apple rootstock from my grafting a few weeks ago. I planted them and cut them back to just a few inches tall, to encourage them to create lots of new shoots. I plan to stool layer them to hopefully create more apple rootstock for next year. This is done by piling soil, leaves, sawdust, or other organic material around the new shoots to encourage them to each send out new roots. They can then be dug up in the Fall or prior to grafting season to create lots of free apple rootstocks!

The peach tree seedlings are looking good! The biggest ones are already about four or five inches tall! It looks like the oldest one may have just had the bud damaged, as it seems to be sending out some new shoots.

#62

This video is part 3 of the weekly food forest tour for 3/22/20.

I see some little peaches! :slight_smile:

My first cherry blossoms are forming! YAY!!! :slight_smile:

A baby spider is the guardian of the paw paw flower. There are a lot more flowers on the tree this year. It looks like there is about 30 flowers this year compared to about 5 or 10 last year.

I found a baby paw paw tree! I had planted it last year and thought it didn’t make it, but I was looking in the wrong spot, but I refound it!

The transplanted blueberries taken from shoots from the mother plants are doing really well.

I removed a lot of the plum blossoms on the little tree, still have a few more to remove.

The apples are starting to bud out.

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#63

This video is part 4 of the weekly food forest tour for 3/22/20.

I used some river birch limbs which were very twiggy, and stuck them in the ground around a young blueberry in a heavy deer traffic area with no other protection. So far it seems to be working really well.
There has been no deer or rabbit damage that I can see.

Also, something else very interesting happened. Where I stuck them in the ground, the other nearby native plants have had a huge growth spurt it seems. They are way way ahead of all of the other plants of their kind throughout the food forest. It could just be a coincidence, but I wander if it is something more, like the plants are benefiting from part of the branch being pushed underground and getting extra heat or moisture or something. This was really neat to see, and I’m excited to see how the blueberry does as well!

There’s lots of pear flowers! The tree is loaded! Hopefully it’ll be loaded with pears later this year! There may be a pollination issue with the tree, so just a fraction of these flowers will probably turn into pears. I assume that it is mostly due to the fact that I don’t have another pear tree blooming and also that some of the blossoms probably get infected and die from fire blight. However the tree is doing a lot better in terms of not getting fire blight since I’ve stopped pruning it, so hopefully we’ll have lots of pears this year.

The pear flowers smell nice too! They’re not super fragrant, but if you stick your nose up to them, they smell kind of like a fresh pear scent. :slight_smile:

The rootstock/seedling has some tiny pears forming! It is growing really fast too, already putting on about six inches of growth in some areas.

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#64

This video is part 5 of the weekly food forest tour for 3/22/20.

The grafts on the plum tree look like they survived, should find out for sure soon.

One of the larger apple trees is pretty far ahead of the other ones leafing out.

I plan to leave a branch with powdery mildew on one of the apple trees that has been pretty resistant to it before, to see if it can naturally fight it off and heal itself.

The largest plum tree has some baby plums forming! This is the tree that the plums don’t taste great in my opinion. They are definitely edible, but not something I would really love to eat. I might look into making jam or jelly with them or seeing if I can find a recipe to cook with them.

Almost all of the cuttings are starting to put on some green growth. I’ll probably pour some willow water on them to try to encourage them to put out some good roots.

#65

This video is part 1 of the weekly food forest tour for 3/29/20.

The grafted pears and apples are starting to really bud out well and are looking really good!

The grape vines are starting to put on some good new growth. There are even a few tiny grape clusters starting to form!

There are baby blueberries starting to form too! The blueberries seem to ripen at different times based on the variety and the individual bush, depending on if it cropped heavier or lighter the year before. It’s really beneficial in my opinion, as it spreads out the harvest window and stretches it over a longer period of time to be able to harvest fresh blueberries.

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#66

This video is part 2 of the weekly food forest tour for 3/29/20.

The seedling rootstock are starting to bud out pretty well. Each one of these rootstock are genetically different from the other one, since they were each grown from a seed. I like having the genetic diversity of having seedling rootstock, instead of clonal rootstock (where every rootstock is the exact same plant (clone) and there isn’t any genetic diversity. I will probably mainly be using the rootstock as a nurse rootstock just long enough to get the actual variety to send out its own roots and then I’ll cut it off. However it does give a little more flexibility if I have extra rootstock, as I can plant them in the food forest to help fill it in initially. With each rootstock being a seedling, I could let it grow out enough to produce apples and see how the fruit is, or it could be grafted over to other varieties later as it gets bigger. Seedling rootstock helps provide more options, and I think by creating these additional options, they are very valuable.

The peach seedlings are growing fast! The tallest ones are already about 6 or 7 inches tall!

One peach seedling is sprouting from the group that was planted on the edge of the apple rootstock bed. It could be that the others in this bed are just a little behind since they were planted after the ones in the circle bed, but it appears that planting the peach seeds shortly after harvesting them like the ones in the circle bed, may help increase the germination rate, and it was a lot easier that way also.

A few of the pomegranates are either leafing out from limbs that survived over winter or are growing back from the roots if their branches didn’t make it. It’ll be interesting to see which ones have the best cold tolerance and whose limbs can make it through the winter without dying. I’d love to hopefully get some pomegranates from them in the next few years and save the seeds to create new hardy pomegranate varieties that are well adapted for our area and that taste yummy too! :slight_smile:

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#67

This video is part 3 of the weekly food forest tour for 3/29/30.

There are lots of dime sized peaches!

I planted some cool weather crops around the fruit trees. Ironically it was in the high 80’s recently, but it should hopefully cool back down a little soon. I planted peas, beets, lettuce, onions, and I planted some carrots around the grape vine.

The frogs are really thriving in the food forest! I see at least one or two every time I go out there. The sounds they make are really relaxing and peaceful also. Hopefully they’ll help balance out the insect population.

There are cherry flowers on my other cherry tree for the first time! YAY! Both trees should hopefully be able to cross pollinate if needed to hopefully produce a handful of cherries this year. The trees are over 10 feet tall and should be able to easily carry a few cherries without hurting their growth this season. I’d like to get just a few to see how the varieties taste. I’d also love to be able to plant the seeds that may be a cross between these trees, which have done well compared to other varieties I’ve tried. Hopefully the seedlings would have a good chance of thriving here since the parents do, and hopefully they will be even more well adapted to my area and be super tasty too! :slight_smile:

I’ve been able to move a few of the trees and bushes into their new permanent (hopefully) home. I have just a few more things to move. I hope to finish moving things this week and get them planted before the weather gets hot so they can have some time to get well established before the hot weather comes.

The paw paw flowers look like red and green bells hanging down and have a neat tropical look to them.

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#68

This video is part 4 of the weekly food forest tour for 3/29/20.

I planted the seed for the cool weather crops mentioned in the last video really quickly. It was a few pounds of seeds total, and I was done in about an hour. I generally try to just scatter the seed evenly over the area, putting more seed on bare patches of soil. If there is a variety that I don’t have that much seed for or I really want to observe it, I may plant it in a specific area that I can keep track of easier. I didn’t have much carrot seed, so I planted the little bit of seed that I had all on one mound around one of the grape vines.

The soil was pretty bare as I just created the mound pretty recently, so the seed should most likely come up pretty well. If I’m planting fewer seeds in an area with lots of dense foliage from wild crops, I may cut back the foliage in patches to close to ground level, leaving the cut growth in place as a mulch and planting the seeds on top of it or mixing it in a little bit depending on what type of seed it is.

We haven’t had a rain in a few days, and rain isn’t in the forecast until a few days from now. However the soil is pretty moist so some of the seed may begin to start sprouting even without the rain. If not though, the coming rain should water in all of the seeds good and hopefully they’ll sprout soon!

I love the way the water looks in the food forest. It gives an extra peacefulness to it, and it’s attracting a lots of neat frogs too! The water kind of completes the ecosystem.

Speaking of water in the food forest and ecosystems, in addition to frogs I’ve found two types of water beetles. The larger one seems to be a type of Dytiscidae Dytiscidae - Wikipedia and the smaller ones seem to be Hydrophilidae Hydrophilidae - Wikipedia . The first kind’s larva are supposedly called water tigers, due to their aggressive appetite. Most larva of the second kind also appear to be predatory, and the adults are scavengers.

The blueberries being naturally protected by the branches stuck in the ground are doing really well! The nearby plants are also having a mysterious surge in growth. These plants that are growing nearby will also provide a kind of secondary natural protection as the limbs will probably rot soon and fall down, but the stalks from these plants that dry up when they die will create a natural replacement with absolutely no work!

The variety of pollinators that I’ve seen are really amazing! There are so many small wasps and other types of small insects that we don’t think of too often that can help play a huge roll in managing a natural balance in insect pests. By creating habitat and food for them, we can help them help us by keeping the fruit pests in check. I’ve never been into bugs in general, but the more I learn about them, the more I am blown away by all of the different types, relationships, and roles they play in maintaining a balanced ecosystem.

WARNING!!! Natural Farming/Permaculture Philosophy Ramblings :slight_smile:

The more that I learn and know, the more I learn that I really don’t know. I think nature has been created to be in balance, and we tend to step in and assert that we only want leaves or wood chips as a mulch around them, or that we only want certain plants to grow around them in certain areas, or that everything has to look super neat, manicured, and tidy or else it isn’t perfect. Don’t get me wrong, I think a lot of the things we learn and things we do for our plants are super helpful and beneficial. I wander though if there are just as many things and maybe more that we do that are not helpful. As I learn more and more, I tend to step back more and more, helping to set up the basics to create good locations and areas for the plants to survive and then really just mainly observing and nudging here and there ever so slightly to create abundant food systems with little work at all!

End of Natural Farming/Permaculture Philosophy Ramblings :slight_smile:

The pear rootstock/seedling looks to be maybe a Bradford pear or other similar type tree, however it seems healthier than those trees growing nearby. A little bummer, but I could still use it for grafting or I may just cut it down.

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#69

This video is part 5 of the weekly food forest tour for 3/29/20.

We saw a few different types of water life in the last video, and as I was about to start this video, a little frog jumped out to say hello. I love seeing all these frogs in the food forest!

The elderberry got munched pretty hard by a deer, but it looks really healthy and should bounce back pretty quickly.

With each passing week, my hopes dwindle that the grafts on the plum tree will survive. I didn’t wrap the tips in Parafilm like I did the other grafts, so I think they probably they probably dried out and died. I also didn’t soak the cuttings in water before grafting and the cuttings were sitting out a while, so that probably contributed to the grafts failing probably even more so.

If you know of a good recipe for cooking or processing plums, I’d love to hear it! :slight_smile:

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#70

I’m still waiting on my plum trees, (otherwise referred to as the lying freeloaders) to produce anything.
We did get most of a recycling bin of them from a friend one year and the big winner was plum sauce. So many ways you can use it and so much more tasty than anything you can buy!

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#71

That sounds delicious! I definitely want to give it a try. I’ve never canned before, but definitely hoping to change that soon. :slight_smile:

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#72

This video is part 6 of the weekly food forest tour for 3/29/20.

I uncovered the plum and apple tree that were hidden. The plum tree looks really healthy, and the apple tree hasn’t budded out yet.

I dug 5 new pools in the food forest this week near the back section, and I have made mounds around all but 3 fruit trees in the food forest, and I hope to finish the last 3 very soon and make the existing mounds bigger around the other fruit trees.

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#73

This video is part 1 of the weekly food forest tour for 4/5/20.

The grafted apple and pear trees are really starting to put on some good growth! The rootstock was starting to grow too, so I had to remove it so that it won’t grow up, and all of the energy will be focused to the main variety.

The grape vines are putting on some good growth, with lots of baby grape clusters. One shoot had three small grape bunches on it.

The first muscadine is covered with muscadines! It looks like this year’s crop may be even bigger than last year’s, which was huge! The other muscadine has just a few clusters showing up so far. If it doesn’t produce a big crop this year I’ll probably remove this second one.

Lots of small blueberries are starting to show up on the blueberry bushes! They are still very spread out in development, with some still flowering. That just means a longer blueberry harvest! Yay!

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#74

This video is part 2 of the weekly food forest tour for 4/5/20.

The fig trees are starting to grow back from the roots!

The peach seedlings are doing really well, with some already topping off at about 9 inches tall!

I planted a seedling muscadine from one of the previous videos, at the base of the first peach tree. This seedling was the largest one in the other video, I’ll put a link to those videos below. It should fill in the space between the peach tree’s lower growth and upper growth and should create a nice connected canopy. If it does really well this year, we might even get a few grapes next year!

This video is of all the muscadine seedlings I transplanted.

This one shows an update on the muscadine seedling near the end of last year and what it looked like then.

The baby peaches are getting bigger. They always grow really well up until about the size they are now, and then the bugs get them. I have planted a few types of plants around the peach trees and other trees in the food forest to help discourage the bugs and insects both visually and by scent. Hopefully this will help leave a few peaches that are in good edible condition.

There are more cherry blooms than I thought there would be! They have covered a large bloom time which has been really nice, to help ensure good cross pollination if necessary.

A few of the paw paws look like they’re pollinated, not sure yet, but it looks like they may be! I have read about a few self fertile paw paws, so this may be one, as I doubt there are any paw paws in the woods nearby, since I have walked through a lot of the nearby woods and have never seen any, there could be though.

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#75

This video is part 3 of the weekly food forest tour for 4/5/20.

Some of the transplanted blueberries are producing a handful of blueberries their first year after being moved to the food forest and separated from the mother plant. I’ll put a video of that method below. This method doesn’t produce nearly as many plants as using cuttings, but it is so much easier and the plants will usually have a semi established root system, and as a result will usually grow much quicker and even produce a handful of blueberries the next year after being transplanted.

I enlarged some of the cages around some of the fruit trees to give them more space to put on some good new growth and still be inside the cages to keep them from getting eaten by deer until they get a little more established.

The blueberry being naturally protected by twiggy sticks and limbs is still doing great and really putting on a lot of new growth. It seems to be working really well so far with no deer damage!

The baby pears are getting bigger and it’s looking like we’ll have a lot of pears this year!

I moved the three seedling apple trees from previous videos to the food forest and planted them near the some of the other apple trees, and two of them are starting to leaf out!

The top of the elderberry got munched by the deer, but it is putting off a whole lot of growth in other places now!

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#76

This video is part 4 of the weekly food forest tour for 4/5/20.

I moved a table grape that I grew from a cutting into the food forest! It was the only survivor from being planted in a really bad spot. I planted it in front of one of the bigger apple trees surrounded by lots of other edibles.

The black locust is putting out a lot of healthy growth, and hopefully it’ll flower and have some seeds next year.

I almost stepped on a bird. :slight_smile: There was a spot where I had left some medium sized limbs on the ground, and some plants had grown up through it. When I walked in the spot where they had been, just less than two feet away, a good sized bird flew away. It happened a second time also. I’ve read about some birds that live in habitat like this being really beneficial in eating insects, so I’ll probably try to recreate the habitat so they can have a more permanent home in the food forest.

One of the mulberries looked dead, but I think it’s still alive. It looks like it may have had some winter damage.

I see a few baby mulberries forming!

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#77

This video is part 1 of the weekly food forest tour for 4/12/20.

The grafted pears and apples are doing really well. A few of the pear grafts may not make it, but it’s looking like I might get 100% success on the apples. I grafted the pears before the apples, so maybe my grafting skills improved as I went along. I’ve heard apples are one of the easiest fruit trees to graft, so that may have something to do with it too.

There are a lot of baby grapes on the grapevines this year so far. Some new shoots even have 3 clusters of grapes on them! Sometimes you train a grape vine and then have to retrain it. :slight_smile:

The blueberries are getting really big really fast this year. I’m glad to see they are not only doing good, but are thriving with no pruning, no irrigation, and no inputs at all really! No work and tons of blueberries, that’s hard to beat! :slight_smile:

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#78

This video is part 2 of the weekly food forest tour for 4/12/20.

The grape cuttings are looking good and most of them seem to have a few inches of growth. So far they seem to be making it at about 100% success.

The fig sprouts are getting bigger.

Almost all of the pomegranates are growing back from their roots, if the small tops died during the winter. As they get bigger, the tops should get more cold hardy and die back less and less each year, same for the figs. One variety that is soft seeded hasn’t started growing yet. I’ve heard that the soft seeded varieties aren’t as cold hardy, so this variety may have died during the winter.

The small peaches are starting to get some size on them. The bug damage seems to be minimal so far, hopefully it’ll stay that way.

Peas are starting to come up, and the other cool weather crops are looking good.

The cherry trees really surprised me how many flowers there are!

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#79

This video is part 3 of the weekly food forest tour for 4/12/20.

The apple trees are starting to put on a lot of growth!

I’ve done a lot of earthworks this week, shaping the food forest and digging out some pools in the food forest. These earthworks will both create dry and wet spots in the food forest and will trap a really good amount of water and hold it in the landscape.

In between the fruit tree mounds I build small ridges of soil that can grow smaller plants like some berries and vegetables. In the middle of these ridges I may even plant some pomegranates, figs, and have grapes run up them as a natural trellis. The water can run off these ridges and collect in the pools, where it is slowly absorbed into the landscape and also creates great habitats for insects and animals.

One European plum is growing like crazy! They aren’t supposed to grow well here, but this variety has already grown almost 12 inches!

The vegetables that will be planted on the ridges and mounds around the fruit trees should yield a huge crop while the fruit trees are smaller with no work. I usually don’t thin them at all, except maybe harvesting greens, and selecting the weaker crops to eat. The other ones will naturally select the strongest plants that will shade out the weaker plants, which will fruit, and produce seeds to create the next stronger generation for my area. It’s so little work to grow and creates a huge harvest!

The younger pear tree has temporarily stopped growing, but hopefully it should resume growing again once its roots grow into the new well draining soil and the soil health increases with all the veggie and wild cover crops.

Fireblight is affecting and killing some of the later blooming flowers on the pear tree, but there seem to be a good number of blossoms that are doing really well!

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#80

This video is part 4 of the weekly food forest tour for 4/12/20.

I show what my pools look like after they have been dug out but before they fill all the way up with water. It had only been about an hour since I had finished this pool and it was already starting to fill up with a little water.

The water will fill in from different locations, sometimes from the bottom, and sometimes from the sides. This one filled up from the bottom and two different spots on the sides.

I was building one the other day, and I had to hurry to finish it because it started filling up with water so fast! :slight_smile:

I’ve planted some blackberries on the southern side of my fruit trees. I’m using the twiggy branches as a natural protection from herbivores, since it has worked really well so far. I’m excited to hopefully get some blackberries soon, since they’re one of my favorite fruits!

A made a big mountain around one of my apple trees! The changes in elevation in the food forest with the pools and mounds seems to help keep out the deer, as well as providing a diverse habitat for attracting lots of different plants and animals.

The big plum tree doesn’t have almost any plums. I’m guessing a cold weather snap may have dropped the plums.

One of the serviceberries (saskatoons) is leafing out.

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