The Dancing Treetops family Farm food forest and garden tour – June 2025
Welcome to the Dancing Treetops family Farm YouTube channel.
We’re gonna take you on a tour of the Dancing Treetops Family Farm dream.
It’s been a year since we started documenting our journey with this YouTube garden channel, and today we’re gonna bring you along as we walk through our organic zone 9b food forest and gardens.
Our gardens and food forest have more than 250 perennial medicinal and edible plants plus lots of pollinator companion plants, a few decorative plants, and many more annual edible plants.
We call it the Dancing Treetops Family Farm dream, because most of our plants, including fruit trees, are grown in containers, since we’re still looking for the perfect location for the Dancing Treetops Family Farm.
Here, we make more plants, experiment, and gain knowledge through failures and successes to prepare ourselves for our dream of owning an organic, regenerative U-pick food forest, orchard & flower farm plus plant nursery.
#gardentour #edibleplants #foodforest #organicgardening
the dancing treetops family farm food forest and garden tour June 2025 welcome to this tree fun YouTube channel today we’re going to take you on a tour of the dancers family farm dream it’s been a year since we started documenting our journey with this YouTube garden channel and today we are going to bring you along as we walk through our organic zone 9b food forest and gardens which have more than 250 varieties of medicinal and edible plants plus lots of pollinators companion plants and a few decorative plants as well we call it the dancing treetops family farm dream because most of our plants including fruit trees are grown in containers since we are still looking for the perfect location for the dancing treetops family farm growing our own food means going back to our roots while mom grew up on conventional farm and dad studied conventional farming we now follow regenerative sustainable no till growing practices without using synthetic fertilizers and pesticides we’ve got five kids our oldest is 22 and our youngest is five and they are the main reason why we left the city behind 9 years ago we started growing our own food when our oldest son was born with lettuce on a fire escape we moved on to a few pepper plants in a tiny shared backyard and for years we had a mango tree towering over the duplex we went in South Florida but we both grew up growing food foraging and tending to animals so the dant family farm dream is our way of giving the kids a little of what we had growing up being in tune with nature and picking fruits of trees and bushes as a teacher and mom’s a stay at home mom so we’re on a tight budget and grow from seeds and cutings use what we have to make more plants and we also rescue plants we’re on a mission to build good soil and grow good food without using harmful chemicals combining permaculture with agroforestry regenerative growing practices and working with nature is our way of farming for the future we have big ideas taking one step at a time towards realizing our dreams we still live on the outskirt of town but the city is moving closer every year before we get to our food forest and garden tour we want to thank all of you for being here and watching our videos please consider hitting the like button and consider subscribing to our channel whenever you watch like save share and subscribe to our channel you support our dream of expanding the Dancing Tree Tops family farm and we can’t wait to take you along on our journey before we start the tour we’re going to give you a look back on what our food forest used to look like this is our wood chipper this used to be full of palm meadows this is going to be our backyard one day this area is where we’ve been cutting down palmettos we’ve been starting to cut down some of them but we’ve got a lot more left this is our vegetable garden we grow potatoes tomatoes corn watermelon and other types of food we call it the density tree of family farm dream because we are not where we want to be yet we have a little more than an acre that we grow our food on but we only grow for our own family the dream is to get enough acreage that we can create a U pig food forest with a variety of fruits and greens that we can provide to the public to food forest lovers to plant lovers to nature lovers just like you imagine a you upic farm that’s a combination of a food forest and a botanical garden that’s what we’re looking to create and so the dancing treetops family farm dream is the space where we create where we experiment where we make more plants where we learn and gain skills and it’s where we get tons of food for one family we grow our food without any chemicals without any pesticides and herbicides we use natural fertilizers organic fertilizers if anything and it is just a way for us to feel peace about the food that we serve our kids and that we serve ourselves we have four main areas where we grow our food this is our inground food forest then we have the mostly container food forest area we have a sunny container food forest next to the side of our home and a front yard food forest area where most of the plants are also grown in containers with a few things in the ground and today we’re going to take you on a tour of everything so this is going to be a long video this is our inground food forest area which is very close to the road but in the beginning this was the only area where we could really grow something because we had sun here and it didn’t flood let me show you what we have so up here in the front is where we have the wood chip piles where local tree trimmers can come and drop off wood chips and we are so grateful that they do we’d rather that they come and give them to us instead of taking them to the landfill up here in the front you can see we have lots of sweet potatoes and bonadoos that we used to feed our family and our chickens just harvested some not too long ago i’m going to see if I can plug that in this one right here let’s see if there’s anything on it yep there’s something on it look at that beautiful the chickens will get most of the greens we get the sweet potatoes and bonatas and if I find some greens without any damage I’ll also add those to dinner aren’t those beautiful cut some more over here that I harvested right here we have our shampoo ginger in front of the unknown banana patch these are bananas that we’ve been given by other people bananas that we don’t know the variety of we’re going to see if they’re any good and if they are we will make more so we have a pigota flower right behind the shampoo ginger i’m going to bring a shovel along because you just never know here in Florida we got lots of critters lot of snakes in the front we have some chia a loquat we just cut down this tatonia Mexican sunflower a house avocado that came from the compost pile have some teardrop hibiscus some edible ginger right here bit more chia and then we have our black beauty mulberry that fruited for the first time this year but we never got to try it because someone came in and chopped it down you can check out our video food force vandalism to learn more about what happened we have more chia some beauty berry and if you turn around here you’ll see we have more bananas isn’t that beauty chia everywhere we use chia as green manure for other plants sweet potatoes everywhere some taro cranberry biscus with some citrus over here we have some more Mexican sunflowers they are one of our main fertilizers for the garden so we just squirt them wherever we can we have a pumpkin maybe a seminal pumpkin or some sort of squash everyone’s here if it’s not a seminal pumpkin the only pumpkins we’ve actually planted around here would be the seminal pumpkin but time will tell down here we experimented with some pervinal peanut to see if the pervenal peanut will create a ground cover in part shade time will tell then we have some grape vines over here that we originally had around the house but they have seeds in them and the only one the only ones eating these grapes were our youngest son myself and the chickens so they got put in food forest and they will provide food for the wildlife have some native plants for the firecrackers the hummingbirds love them we have a little bit of elderberry over here but that’s about it for this front yard for forest area we have a lot of shade in here some dab light but the fact that it’s so close to the road makes us hesitant to put many things over here especially after the vandalism incident next to the inground food forest area we have a wild patch we used to have a blackberry bramble in between a whole bunch of pomemettos this up front used to be full of pomemettos we cut them down and covered them with butchips and most of them have stayed down and what happened was that these blackberry brambles all of a sudden got room to grow and while they’re really thorny they provide a food source for ourselves and for the animals so we just let them grow and then we have this volunteer elderberry in the middle what a beauty it is we grow a lot of elderberries i grew up with elderberries as a child and it is just one of those things that my family used to eat during the fall season when it was flu season and when we moved here to Norththeast Florida and saw that they were growing in the wild it was a no-brainer and we have been propagating lots of elderberries we have them everywhere on the property but this one is a volunteer and look how tall it is with lots of elderberries coming you can see the blackberry brambles from the other side they’re almost ready oh there are a couple here our son our oldest son has been over here picking some he loves this blackberry bramble patch and he was one of the kids who tried to get in and get to them before we were able to get the pomemettos down around him so he’s very excited to have this access in this native area we also have a lot of Biden’s Alaba and Florida Bettney that has seated themselves but this is the only area that we just kind of let go wild because those plants really tend to spread a lot but one day they’ll be part of our native food forest pig area this is one of few areas in the food forest where we have full sun so we’ve made a little chili pepper patch in here that we pick some peppers from every week and we’ve left some tomatoes up just to kind of hide them from the road this is the spot where we showed you from years ago we have the wood chipper right here and this used to all be the meadows and right here we have the latest rescues from Andrea’s property that was going to be torn down and developed into Airbnbs i think we’ve had an AB come in here these are Andreas Amillis beautiful look how big this is so pretty monstera marillis some cedas and these are the paw paws the big one looks very sad still hoping they’ll come back the small ones look okay then let’s see what we have down here this is a new area we just lifted we’ve got a bunch of pimmens cedars most of them are eastern red cedars lowquats beauty berries and I need one of these leaves to rub on my skin we have been getting rain and that means mosquitoes out but the beauty berry leaves actually help a little bit see we got over here this one is a native Aelia the Petemont then we have Simpson stopper right here these are cotton roses grown from seed then we have a rusty black ha this is from an Ay tree giveaway more beauty berries think these are scarlet hibiscus some elderberry this is one of our living walls with mapups on it see we actually have some coming right here they’re so pretty right here in front of the living wall we’ve got chia growing as a part of the living wall then we have a dogo crab apple with some lavender that was grow cutings this is the japonica grown from a cutting more lavender down here doggo crab apples grow from cutings lemongrass grown from lemongrass that we got at the grocery store we’ve got a video for that if you want to see how to do that beautiful and bushy cranberry hibiscus down here we’ve got some color trees that the armadillo keeps on digging up it’s a little bit of root on it hopefully it’ll survive i’m going to give it some water it is a constant battle against amadillo here because we do not have any fencing up around the property so that is one thing we’ll definitely do once we get the farm lots of fire bush beauty berry part of the living fence this is a peach grown from a pit a seed grown peach and it’s thriving some hibiscus grown from cutings over here we have lots and lots and lots of arrow bearing mberries grown from cutings down here you can see our propagation bins let’s see if we can find something in here this one looks like it’s about to burst open let’s take a look what’s in here i don’t think that’s something I planted is it maybe no this is a weed these are weeds not planted weeds not planted weeds not planted let’s see what’s in here after we pull up the weeds let’s see what we have in here these are red plums yes red plums red plums grown from cutings can’t beat that let’s go and find the red plum trees these are two of our red plum cutings from last year i just cut one down to make the bush out a little more but hit that subscribe button and stay tuned so you can see our upcoming videos for how to grow plum trees from cutings and from seed this is This is our blackberry chalice that we built not too long ago you can go online and check out our video that we did on making this over here we’re going to build another blackberry chalice because we have so many blackberry plants so one thing we did was we added this little fencing to create a trellis for our black velvet beans they are coming slowly but they’re coming and then we have lots of different varieties of zone 9b thornless blackberries we have nachas apache oage ucha and a few other mystery varieties that we don’t know the name of and then of course we will keep on propagating them you can see one here that we are propagating to make another one look at the size of this oage blackberry isn’t that amazing this is a thornless blackberry one of my favorite things to do is picking wild blueberries in the woods oh you got quite a harvest there it’s kind of early for blueberry season but more will come this is a huge wild blueberry patch and they’re not quite ripe yet over here but you can see we have lots they’re loaded loaded with blueberries maybe it’s going to be a late May early June harvest got here while we have loads of wild blueberries on our property we are novice growers of commercial blueberries this is our little attempt to try to at least preserve some of our blueberries this year because usually they get eaten by the wildlife we have many different varieties that are supposed to grow well here in Northeast Florida so 9B we’ve got Sweet Crisp Windsor Tiff Blue Premiier see what else we have this is diffic there are so many i don’t even remember the names brightwell this is a bright wall at this point we still do not have experience enough to tell you which ones will do well and which ones won’t but we are trying them out to see which ones we want to proceed with and then we’re just figuring out how to keep the wildlife out of our harvest it might not look like we have a lot but this is actually the most we’ve ever had but this netting does not go to all the way to the bottom because we were trying to experiment with whether it’s okay to just have overhead netting or if we need to completely enclose them but it is blueberry picking time finally we have been harvesting wild blueberries for five weeks now and they are still going strong so it’s nice to be able to then follow up with the commercial varieties picking blueberries oh you found some big ones just put both of the green ones to chicken but try to get the blue ones there’s some up here those are the bright little ones is it good mhm not yet we don’t have any irrigation in the food forest and that is the one thing that we truly believe that you need if you are growing blueberries in Florida that is definitely irrigation so we are not trying to get too many blueberry bushes in until we can find a spot where we can put them in the ground and get some drip irrigation on them because watering these by hand with rain water it’s quite cumbersome and sometimes even impossible we’ve done our best and we are learning from our mistakes and we are learning new things about these blueberries all the time whoa do you see any i think there’s something over yeah there’s a tiny one where did it go right here see that hey let’s do this it’s a big one yeah it’s like a fast fat b put it to your collection how many did you get wow just for a couple of spotting potatoes from the grocery store very good good job buddy we have run out of storage so I guess this is going to be part one of the Dant Tubs family farm tour so make sure to hit that subscribe button and stay tuned for part two if you’re looking for inspiration to grow your own food without chemicals and without breaking a budget check out our playlist make more plants garden tips propagating fruit trees how to grow from seeds and much more or browse our YouTube channel page to find the right video for you we hope you’ll follow along as we document the journey to our dreams hit that like button and subscribe so you won’t miss a thing thank you for watching and thank you for making the world a little greener