Conversion and ‘interventions’ begin…. Welcome to our personal (permaculture) experiments in Syntropy: converting an old family fruit tree garden into syntropic Food Forest for homestead, biodiversity and sustainability…
Inter-planting fruit forest tree rows etc.
Climate zone 9a, maritime/oceanic temperate.
Come along for the journey….! and to see how and where any accelerated growth occurs over time.
Instagram: @greenwisehq
Existing fruit trees: plums, pear, mirabelle plum, apple and fig.
New young trees planted 2023: apple, crab apple (Evereste polinator), nectarine, cherry, mirabelle, apricot….but more pioneer support needed eg. black poplar, honey locust, mimosa etc…
Cuz we’re trying to be green hopefully wise in terms of intervening here to boost the productivity and create an abundant fruit Forest uh that’s an overall plan but this is quite early stage um here in Southwest France say do river L do is not that far that
Way uh I should be speaking French but it’s not uh fantastic I’m afraid so maybe that’ll be for the future hopefully uh the occasional French video got a bit of a struggle otherwise but uh for those interested in this area as well um or Agro forestry in
General this is going to be a kind of experiment so you can come along and see how we get on with had the usual traditional Orchard of family Orchard space plum trees um that usual sort of setup and we want to convert that we were going to do permaculture and raise beds
And all that jazz and up there we’ve got a bit of a kitchen Garden next to the house um which has that kind of setup but uh last few months or so really researching Agro forestry there’s some great content on YouTube especially from New Zealand but and Brazil obviously uh Copic Agro Forestry
And that was kind of the missing piece because we now have a possibility to really accelerate everything and boost um the productivity and abundance in a smaller time frame so that’s going to be interesting and I hope you tune in to see various videos of things we’ve been
Doing we’ been quite busy to inter plan and um start doing rows um so I’ll just show you one example which is so setting up at the beginning is quite a busy time and we’re not going to be able to put as many things in as we want because there cost
Of money and we’re not great with finding seeds and plants just yet but I’ll I’ll chat about the LIE of the land in a moment because that’s quite important what you’re doing obviously is converting an area into like a forest floor so um and that will incre increase the soil
Metabolism and really boost the productivity of whatever you put in so here we’ve just got grass cuttings in two rows either side of the main tree bed which has Apple and two figs at the moment and going to put nitrogen fixes that could be a mimosa or Locust or uh so that
Would be a support species that you use to cut some leaves and uh Mulch and add to just as you do in a forest floor what Things fall down and and add to the soil here where it’s quite Sunny it gets very hot about 40° these days in the summer and then we
Get Frost recently but now we lots of rain which is great and it’s um late November 20 23 um so with that kind of climate it’s hardiness Zone 8 10 um sort of temperate sort of submediterranean almost um what we’ve got to do is protect against the sun quite quickly so
This has got to be covered um so you want the ground level maybe we’ll put strawberries in or or alafa or uh we need something there also just to add more stuff in between and that should help the fig trees and should help uh everything
Go um but yeah there’s quite a lot to do because we’ve got to sort this row out which is plums really and we put apples and um various things we got apricot down there and we’ve got nectarine cherries and so so these rows need more work and
What’s good with Agro forestry is you can interplant quite tightly um so you can also make little Consortium you can also make a little uh areas where you got your fig tree um bed around around the corn around the edge and then you could put like lots of
Strawberries again as ground cover and that should help both of them so it’s going to be interesting looking at what works well with what and we can see how that gets on we’ve got chickens in the middle another area here and um I’ve just put Woody material to keep that
Covered because we haven’t got to that but this is a great Quint tree here which is nice bit of shade in the middle there that could be pruned back and then we could have some more tree lines here um annual crops you’re thinking where is he going to put like corn and
Potatoes and all that stuff well in the tree bed you can put things like that um um or you could put but uh what we’re going to do is make another bed either side of annuals so that could be you know you even put perennials like um asparagus G or something like
That and as these trees grow up they’ll help to protect the um those anual crops so that’s what you can do and then with succession as the canopy layer gets higher you can cut that back um start a start a new row or uh just change the plantings but
Obviously the trees all is going to be helping to um boost the abundance and uh you want diversity because otherwise the trees are going to compete and uh the idea is the more diversity the more uh they work together and have relationships under the soil okay so
Anyway this area is going to be quite exciting because it’s kind of what we wanted to do to move here is to have a space like this where we could do an experiment and uh and now we know we can hopefully really boost things like that
Um but what you’ve got is a slight slope here so when it gets a lot of rain the water runs through here and you’ve got a ditch there which fills up with water and you also get run off from the fields Farm Farmers fields field and uh back here quite a lot of
Water and almost marshy area out the back there so at least there’s a woodland soaking up some of that sort of water and a tree row there and that’s important because the trees have got quite High there um and so that’s a shady area over there and they’re soaking up a lot of
Water um so this is more the sunny area to bear in mind for choice of trees and and we could put prial berries and or things on that side rhubarb or something although you can put rhubarb of course under under trees like this um they should grow very
Well um we also need to make a hedro on that side is a Windbreak as you can see I just put cuttings and Woody material um so um but gradually going to make it like a Hawthorn Black Thorn hedro um and again we could put some
Woody trees in uh to help feed the tree row you’ve got things like black popler honey locust um Hawthorn Blackthorn these kind of are quite abundant in the nearby hedge R and things so we can Source some of those trees as well some wild plum trees and things we can
Interplant um for instead of mimosa or things like that and again they should work the soil and keep it we’ll get pioneer species cropping up which probably Oak and things as well which uh all good that’s all I can say at the moment got some black some pop trees
There which we can prune as well and make another line over there and here um might have an experiment with doing a circular companion um with a central tree it could be a banana or something uh and then uh put anual crops and so so that that’s an idea we’re researching
Um that’s all for the moment so I will uh keep you posted in the next video as to how we get on but maybe that’s interesting for people to who are uh having these ideas it’s quite a bit of work and choosing plants and what kind of fruit trees you
Want at the beginning and we’re still doing that we’ve got another order of of trees we want to do towards the spring um but um we could have annuals growing all the way either side of these trees and the idea is it’s all happening a bit quicker uh
And obviously you can still use raised beds and things which are very useful um but here would be a self- sustaining system because they’re producing its own fertilizer uh which is uh quite a hopefully a good system however we’ve got these old trees which we’re kind of going to be transitioning into
Um as we add more plants so it’s a little bit slower for us we can’t afford to get everything in uh at the beginning which is ideal and but we can certainly move towards that okay