Hello Jimmy and Aurora. I am so proud of you both. For over 30 years I have been implementing permaculture principles on my 4.5 acres in Southern Australia. In this location we can experience hot dry winds and temperatures of over 40celsius in summer. It has been a long process. Like you many plants did not survive due to lack of water, hot winds and hot sun. During those years I also had babies, homeschooled and worked. Establishing shade was hard but I now have lots of shady spots and micro climates, some fruit and nut trees and some vegetables. Initially we tried to grow wheat which was fine until we had to harvest it by hand. We had ducks, chickens and geese but found we didn’t like slaughtering them. We grew tree lucerne and salt bush to supplement the sheep. I am now trying to get vegetables to grow wild in the established parts of the garden and using the coppiced material from the main garden to form swales in the paddocks to grow more trees there. I no longer run sheep and eat a mainly vegetarian diet. Sometimes I feel I haven’t done enough but then I see the satellite view of my property on google maps and it is now one of the most densely vegetated and greenest spaces in the area. By no means is my property a model permaculture example but rather a conglomeration of one woman’s journey to do the best she could with what she had to make a greener, peaceful, productive haven and sanctuary for whatever beings may choose to live here. I wish you well in your journey. With much love, support and encouragement Kerry Australia 🦋
Your journey sounds wonderful Kerry. Hello from a fellow Aussie, up here on the Mid North Coast of NSW 🙋🏽♀️☺️ I’ve just started my food forest on my 3 acres, by fencing a strip 30m long and about 4m wide (we have feral deer to contend with), using pecan trees for my canopy. Obviously they’ll take a few years to get any height, but I’m happy to wait and plant out around and under them with different layers of other plants, mainly edible things, but also following permaculture and syntropic principles. I love how you say you’re happy with whatever you’ve achieved and what you’ll be leaving as a legacy, as I feel exactly the same. Every plant I plant is a step closer to reversing the damage done to the land and that feels good 😊
What a great video! I'm growing a mini food forest in Eastern Spain and experience many of the challenges you talk about; extreme heat, overworked soil, drought, etc. You are so right about the importance of establishing the pioneers first, or else all your new plants are likely to die (ask me how I know 🫣🤣) but, over time, as long as you reflect and learn, things improve. I'll look forward to seeing more videos! 🌱🌱🌱🌱
Awesome to see your progress, those are some really good learnings and very valuable to share with anyone who wants to start a similar journey. 🙏 I would like to add 2 things: 1. While manually working the soil, which really seems very clayey here, will help to quickly recover from compaction, it will not keep for long if there is no soil life and roots. So to combine with your learnings: I would only work the ground where I can densely plant and mulch afterwards. You've got a few weeks, depending on the time of the year, amount of heavy rain, drying out of sun, etc. until the compaction creates difficult conditions for growth again, because roots don't get enough air, and water is not absorbed well anymore. Your soil is/was kind of extreme in that regard, I think. But there are pioneer plants for any kind of soil and I would go heavily on those in the first phase and then chop and drop and replace them as soil conditions improve. 2. You mentioned that the mulch didn't decompose very well. I think in your case you used very woody material, with a high C/N (Carbon/Nitrogen) ratio. I would say the kind of organisms present in your soil are more dependant on a balanced C/N ratio to decompose quickly, because there is no fungal network yet to balance nutrients. At the same time moisture would only be present near the ground for the lack of shade. So decomposition is limited to the area where the material touches the ground. In a shady environment, with a rich funga and soil fauna (like earth worms and other creatures) that help break down and move around the material, the material can break down much more rapidly. So combining these two points I would combine cover crop / chop and drop mulching / support species -> especially nitrogren fixing pioneers with dead mulch. The living mulch can provide more shade and nitrogen, and roots. Something dead mulch can't, but is vital for a strong soil life. The dead mulch is a lot of organic matter which you just cant grow so quickly with living mulch. You don't want a too thick layer of dead mulch, that keeps off the rain / irrigation water (as you mentioned), but also you want to avoid keeping the ground cold long in spring by a too thick layer of mulch, as this also slows down soil life activity (and even plant growth). And you definitely need to make sure you add enough nitrogen to the mulch mix in the beginning, because the soil doesn't have enough in it's cycles yet, and so the decomposition will be slowed down by that -> so nitrogen fixers and possibly also manure, etc. added to the straw, leaves, woodchips, etc. You can even catch your own urine and dilute it 1/10 with water. Keep in mind the nitrogen fixers mostly release nitrogen when pruned -> above ground through the pruned organic matter, below ground through the excess roots that the plants push off. One more thing: Klaus Lotz from permadynamcs recently had a webinar on temperature syntropic agriforestry and he recommended to do synchronized prunings around summer solstice to initiate a system wide second growth spurt in the temperate climate.
Very interesting comment, thanks for sharing and thanks for the kindness too! I'm considering your second point, with the nitrogen and the overal needs for something to decompose. And thanks for the info about the prune of temperate climate, will check him out! Thanks for stopping by our video and wishing you a lot of growth friend
Great work, guys. It takes courage to jump in and start when you don't have practical knowledge. You've clearly learnt some great lessons which are so important. The only thing I would change from one of the lessons is the Living Mulch part. A cover crop at first may be useful for degraded soil, but longer term, it is a lot better in most cases to find some sort of grass that grows well in your area to provide a perennial source of mulch. In the productive months, it should be fast growing, and respond well to pruning. Many kinds of elephant grass are usually suitable, though I'm not sure off the top of my head what would be available in your climate. Anyway, great job once again! Look forward to seeing what you learn over the coming years!
7 місяців тому+1
Excellent! I am 20 years into the same experiment ( in drylands Brazil) and we are still correcting "mistakes".Evolution- constant change.Thanks for the video...
They are not "mistakes" ;) They are experience ;) I would say from where you started, using the straw as mulch was the right choice at that time. It was better than having no cover on the soil ;) Getting living roots into the soil is very important, but takes time and getting those pioneers started is helped by the straw and leaf mulch. Be persistent and keep at it! What you are doing is great :)
Thanks for sharing your mistakes. I watched a few other videos, sorry to hear that land is so hard to find, so tightly-controlled, and so expensive in Europe. I have a 4-acre edible forest garden in the US that I started in 2010. I subscribed to follow along with your journey. Wishing you happy harvests ahead.
Except for a small vegetable garden, I have opted to let nature do the work for me. Starting from a plowed conventional farmland, I have first let it be covered with weeds for 2 years to decompact the soil, then I have stuck 1 m long cuttings (20 cm are buried and 80 cm above, so that the weeds do not shade the cuttings and kill them) of supporting trees that grow here very easily (poplars and willows, 1 m apart) in rows. From there you can introduce whatever you want, pruning or sacrificing the support trees to introduce other plants and mowing the alleys to obtain mulch, starting from much better conditions.
@@pijusmagnificus6382 thank you for sharing your experience. How far into this process are you? And where are you based, climate wise? Have you tried direct seeding some support species? What kind of growth are you seeing on the poplars/willows in the first year? Very interesting approach that deserves attention as it may be a more passive way to go towards abundant/ climax species.
Thanks for making these videos. They are particularly helpful to me, as I am just starting my own Syntropic Food Forest in South West Hungary, so we must have a very similar climate. (I also live between hills as you guys seem to do.) The soil here is also clayey, although probably not as bad as yours. Good luck with your experiment, and please keep the videos coming! :)
Thanks for sharing! About your last point, how did you choose the plants to fill all available spots in your succession x strata table? And where did you leave gaps?
With pleasure. Filling the available spots we'll do with anything we can get our hands on! Because we can clearly see the density is lacking on all stratas and all successions. We already sowed wild plums and we are considering adding Robinia's, mulberries, willows and poplars, comfrey, mint, catnip, elderberry... Anything that we see growing well around us basically and that gives our target plants a nice support.
What a refreshing and honest summing up of your beginner Syntropy journey! Thank you for posting. I agree with your comments, and have made some of the same mistakes! I have no knowledge of using big machines for soil preparation as I have done everything manually.
Hi Jill! Thank you for your encouraging words! You thank us for the video yet without people like you taking the time to respond and share about your personal reflection, where would we get our energy and motivation from? :) These experiences seem to want to be shared more than anything :)) I appreciate you say its refreshing. We don't have so much experience with big machines neither so we'll find out about that later on. Till next time Jill :)
Hi Jane! Thank your finding us! Funny timing as we arrived at Marc's place for a visit almost exactly at the time you posted this comment! We found a different piece of land in the South of France, a bit more fitting to this project, we are borrowing it so who knows where life brings us, but there's no time to waste on overthinking and worrying about the title of proprety as we feel that this land is everything we need right now. (We also made a video to show this new land we found, if you want to hear more :) Hope you're well!
Sounds like a fitting name. Intuition sure is the driving force. Intuitive growing, playing... not sure I find farming the most representative! perhaps we'll come to another one, thanks for your comment :)
Thanks for taking the time to produce this video and share your lessons. I've learned from some of the same mistakes, especially planting too big and not enough density. I question one of your solutions though. You mention using a subsoiler and then tilling. My understanding is that's it's best to use those 2 implements, but in the reverse order. First till, then subsoil to break up the hardpan. This is because the tilling implement will create a hardpan. So it will reverse the work you have just done with the subsoiler. I understand that the subsoiler will disturb the planting bed a little, but I think you can fix it with a rake quickly. And if you are planting in density, you'll be digging the line up anyways. I'm curious to see what others think about preparing the bed. Maybe I'm mistaken. Personally I've used only hand preparation, so I could be wrong. I look forward to seeing future videos. Keep up the good work.
Hi Roger, great to hear from you, your support on Facebook is much appreciated. We get a lot of energy and confidence from acts like yours, we understand that there is truly potential in the experiments we run since we are not the only ones seeing that very potential. About the tilling/subsoilling order, you make an interesting point. We honestly don't have enough experience to make a conclusion yet, perhaps trying both and comparing could prove what's optimal. How did you do your hand preparation? Thanks again for the support Jimmy and Aurora
@@jimmyaurora7 it might be either way is fine. I'm not sure how much hard pan is created by a single run with a tiller. But I feel there is little disadvantage to subsoiling last. I use the double dig technique. In Haiti I use a pic to do it. In Michigan, USA. I use a shovel to dig the first layer and a tool similar to a pitch fork, but shorter and stronger to loosen the deeper layer.
If you have like 45+cm of rainfall a year gardening is much more fun because the life cycle is fast and the soil regenerates quickly. Otherwise the mulch decomposes slowly and such. In the rainy tropics a fallen tree decomposes in like 2 years, in temperate climates with little rain - 20 years or longer. Btw did you ever dig deep (1m or deeper) to know the composition of your soil? ..in case it has a hardpan (a compaction layer that doesn't allow the roots to penetrate). And what is the bedstone rock of your native soil, limestone?
We did dig approx 70cm and found some colour variation (brown on surface and lighter as it goes deeper, until it even gets like blueish). We don't know the bedstone rock neither, that would be interesting, how would you find out if its too deep to find? Thanks for your ideas George
Hello Jimmy and Aurora. I am so proud of you both. For over 30 years I have been implementing permaculture principles on my 4.5 acres in Southern Australia. In this location we can experience hot dry winds and temperatures of over 40celsius in summer. It has been a long process. Like you many plants did not survive due to lack of water, hot winds and hot sun. During those years I also had babies, homeschooled and worked. Establishing shade was hard but I now have lots of shady spots and micro climates, some fruit and nut trees and some vegetables. Initially we tried to grow wheat which was fine until we had to harvest it by hand. We had ducks, chickens and geese but found we didn’t like slaughtering them. We grew tree lucerne and salt bush to supplement the sheep. I am now trying to get vegetables to grow wild in the established parts of the garden and using the coppiced material from the main garden to form swales in the paddocks to grow more trees there. I no longer run sheep and eat a mainly vegetarian diet. Sometimes I feel I haven’t done enough but then I see the satellite view of my property on google maps and it is now one of the most densely vegetated and greenest spaces in the area. By no means is my property a model permaculture example but rather a conglomeration of one woman’s journey to do the best she could with what she had to make a greener, peaceful, productive haven and sanctuary for whatever beings may choose to live here. I wish you well in your journey. With much love, support and encouragement
Kerry Australia 🦋
Your journey sounds wonderful Kerry. Hello from a fellow Aussie, up here on the Mid North Coast of NSW 🙋🏽♀️☺️ I’ve just started my food forest on my 3 acres, by fencing a strip 30m long and about 4m wide (we have feral deer to contend with), using pecan trees for my canopy. Obviously they’ll take a few years to get any height, but I’m happy to wait and plant out around and under them with different layers of other plants, mainly edible things, but also following permaculture and syntropic principles. I love how you say you’re happy with whatever you’ve achieved and what you’ll be leaving as a legacy, as I feel exactly the same. Every plant I plant is a step closer to reversing the damage done to the land and that feels good 😊
What a great video! I'm growing a mini food forest in Eastern Spain and experience many of the challenges you talk about; extreme heat, overworked soil, drought, etc. You are so right about the importance of establishing the pioneers first, or else all your new plants are likely to die (ask me how I know 🫣🤣) but, over time, as long as you reflect and learn, things improve. I'll look forward to seeing more videos! 🌱🌱🌱🌱
Thx for this video! Also, I like the editting.
Awesome to see your progress, those are some really good learnings and very valuable to share with anyone who wants to start a similar journey. 🙏 I would like to add 2 things:
1. While manually working the soil, which really seems very clayey here, will help to quickly recover from compaction, it will not keep for long if there is no soil life and roots. So to combine with your learnings: I would only work the ground where I can densely plant and mulch afterwards. You've got a few weeks, depending on the time of the year, amount of heavy rain, drying out of sun, etc. until the compaction creates difficult conditions for growth again, because roots don't get enough air, and water is not absorbed well anymore. Your soil is/was kind of extreme in that regard, I think. But there are pioneer plants for any kind of soil and I would go heavily on those in the first phase and then chop and drop and replace them as soil conditions improve.
2. You mentioned that the mulch didn't decompose very well. I think in your case you used very woody material, with a high C/N (Carbon/Nitrogen) ratio. I would say the kind of organisms present in your soil are more dependant on a balanced C/N ratio to decompose quickly, because there is no fungal network yet to balance nutrients. At the same time moisture would only be present near the ground for the lack of shade. So decomposition is limited to the area where the material touches the ground. In a shady environment, with a rich funga and soil fauna (like earth worms and other creatures) that help break down and move around the material, the material can break down much more rapidly.
So combining these two points I would combine cover crop / chop and drop mulching / support species -> especially nitrogren fixing pioneers with dead mulch. The living mulch can provide more shade and nitrogen, and roots. Something dead mulch can't, but is vital for a strong soil life. The dead mulch is a lot of organic matter which you just cant grow so quickly with living mulch.
You don't want a too thick layer of dead mulch, that keeps off the rain / irrigation water (as you mentioned), but also you want to avoid keeping the ground cold long in spring by a too thick layer of mulch, as this also slows down soil life activity (and even plant growth). And you definitely need to make sure you add enough nitrogen to the mulch mix in the beginning, because the soil doesn't have enough in it's cycles yet, and so the decomposition will be slowed down by that -> so nitrogen fixers and possibly also manure, etc. added to the straw, leaves, woodchips, etc. You can even catch your own urine and dilute it 1/10 with water. Keep in mind the nitrogen fixers mostly release nitrogen when pruned -> above ground through the pruned organic matter, below ground through the excess roots that the plants push off.
One more thing: Klaus Lotz from permadynamcs recently had a webinar on temperature syntropic agriforestry and he recommended to do synchronized prunings around summer solstice to initiate a system wide second growth spurt in the temperate climate.
Very interesting comment, thanks for sharing and thanks for the kindness too! I'm considering your second point, with the nitrogen and the overal needs for something to decompose. And thanks for the info about the prune of temperate climate, will check him out! Thanks for stopping by our video and wishing you a lot of growth friend
Nice comment!
Great work, guys. It takes courage to jump in and start when you don't have practical knowledge. You've clearly learnt some great lessons which are so important.
The only thing I would change from one of the lessons is the Living Mulch part. A cover crop at first may be useful for degraded soil, but longer term, it is a lot better in most cases to find some sort of grass that grows well in your area to provide a perennial source of mulch. In the productive months, it should be fast growing, and respond well to pruning. Many kinds of elephant grass are usually suitable, though I'm not sure off the top of my head what would be available in your climate.
Anyway, great job once again! Look forward to seeing what you learn over the coming years!
Excellent! I am 20 years into the same experiment ( in drylands Brazil) and we are still correcting "mistakes".Evolution- constant change.Thanks for the video...
They are not "mistakes" ;) They are experience ;) I would say from where you started, using the straw as mulch was the right choice at that time. It was better than having no cover on the soil ;) Getting living roots into the soil is very important, but takes time and getting those pioneers started is helped by the straw and leaf mulch. Be persistent and keep at it! What you are doing is great :)
🙏🙏🙏❤❤❤
Thanks for sharing your mistakes. I watched a few other videos, sorry to hear that land is so hard to find, so tightly-controlled, and so expensive in Europe. I have a 4-acre edible forest garden in the US that I started in 2010. I subscribed to follow along with your journey. Wishing you happy harvests ahead.
Thank you so much for taking the time to write this beautiful comment and support, it means a lot to us .
Good list, I think I will cite this in a future video!
Except for a small vegetable garden, I have opted to let nature do the work for me. Starting from a plowed conventional farmland, I have first let it be covered with weeds for 2 years to decompact the soil, then I have stuck 1 m long cuttings (20 cm are buried and 80 cm above, so that the weeds do not shade the cuttings and kill them) of supporting trees that grow here very easily (poplars and willows, 1 m apart) in rows. From there you can introduce whatever you want, pruning or sacrificing the support trees to introduce other plants and mowing the alleys to obtain mulch, starting from much better conditions.
@@pijusmagnificus6382 thank you for sharing your experience. How far into this process are you? And where are you based, climate wise? Have you tried direct seeding some support species?
What kind of growth are you seeing on the poplars/willows in the first year?
Very interesting approach that deserves attention as it may be a more passive way to go towards abundant/ climax species.
great video and lessons!! wel done... not many ppl share the true mistakes !! wishing you all the best! greets from Greece
@@alexfilippidis thank you Alex for your message and wishes, same to you :)
Thank you! from India!
@@karavi2000 thank you too!
Lots of good remarks very useful
Thanks for making these videos. They are particularly helpful to me, as I am just starting my own Syntropic Food Forest in South West Hungary, so we must have a very similar climate. (I also live between hills as you guys seem to do.) The soil here is also clayey, although probably not as bad as yours.
Good luck with your experiment, and please keep the videos coming! :)
Thanks for sharing! About your last point, how did you choose the plants to fill all available spots in your succession x strata table? And where did you leave gaps?
With pleasure. Filling the available spots we'll do with anything we can get our hands on! Because we can clearly see the density is lacking on all stratas and all successions. We already sowed wild plums and we are considering adding Robinia's, mulberries, willows and poplars, comfrey, mint, catnip, elderberry... Anything that we see growing well around us basically and that gives our target plants a nice support.
What a refreshing and honest summing up of your beginner Syntropy journey! Thank you for posting. I agree with your comments, and have made some of the same mistakes! I have no knowledge of using big machines for soil preparation as I have done everything manually.
Hi Jill! Thank you for your encouraging words! You thank us for the video yet without people like you taking the time to respond and share about your personal reflection, where would we get our energy and motivation from? :) These experiences seem to want to be shared more than anything :)) I appreciate you say its refreshing. We don't have so much experience with big machines neither so we'll find out about that later on. Till next time Jill :)
Thanks for the feedback!!!
@@WouterDeWitte-i6o thank you! 😊
Bonjour, meilleurs vœux. Merci pour les conseils.
Meilleurs voeux à vous aussi :)
Merci bcp! En espérant que c'est accessible en anglais 😊
for me your english it's clear, best regards . Daniel.
thank's for your sharings
Wonderful! Thanks for sharing. Are you going to farm the same plot this year?
Hi Jane! Thank your finding us! Funny timing as we arrived at Marc's place for a visit almost exactly at the time you posted this comment! We found a different piece of land in the South of France, a bit more fitting to this project, we are borrowing it so who knows where life brings us, but there's no time to waste on overthinking and worrying about the title of proprety as we feel that this land is everything we need right now. (We also made a video to show this new land we found, if you want to hear more :)
Hope you're well!
Intuitive Farming is what I call it.
Sounds like a fitting name. Intuition sure is the driving force. Intuitive growing, playing... not sure I find farming the most representative! perhaps we'll come to another one, thanks for your comment :)
Love it!!
Thanks for taking the time to produce this video and share your lessons. I've learned from some of the same mistakes, especially planting too big and not enough density.
I question one of your solutions though. You mention using a subsoiler and then tilling. My understanding is that's it's best to use those 2 implements, but in the reverse order.
First till, then subsoil to break up the hardpan. This is because the tilling implement will create a hardpan. So it will reverse the work you have just done with the subsoiler.
I understand that the subsoiler will disturb the planting bed a little, but I think you can fix it with a rake quickly. And if you are planting in density, you'll be digging the line up anyways.
I'm curious to see what others think about preparing the bed. Maybe I'm mistaken. Personally I've used only hand preparation, so I could be wrong.
I look forward to seeing future videos. Keep up the good work.
Hi Roger, great to hear from you, your support on Facebook is much appreciated. We get a lot of energy and confidence from acts like yours, we understand that there is truly potential in the experiments we run since we are not the only ones seeing that very potential. About the tilling/subsoilling order, you make an interesting point. We honestly don't have enough experience to make a conclusion yet, perhaps trying both and comparing could prove what's optimal. How did you do your hand preparation? Thanks again for the support
Jimmy and Aurora
@@jimmyaurora7 it might be either way is fine. I'm not sure how much hard pan is created by a single run with a tiller. But I feel there is little disadvantage to subsoiling last.
I use the double dig technique. In Haiti I use a pic to do it. In Michigan, USA. I use a shovel to dig the first layer and a tool similar to a pitch fork, but shorter and stronger to loosen the deeper layer.
If you have like 45+cm of rainfall a year gardening is much more fun because the life cycle is fast and the soil regenerates quickly. Otherwise the mulch decomposes slowly and such. In the rainy tropics a fallen tree decomposes in like 2 years, in temperate climates with little rain - 20 years or longer.
Btw did you ever dig deep (1m or deeper) to know the composition of your soil? ..in case it has a hardpan (a compaction layer that doesn't allow the roots to penetrate).
And what is the bedstone rock of your native soil, limestone?
We did dig approx 70cm and found some colour variation (brown on surface and lighter as it goes deeper, until it even gets like blueish). We don't know the bedstone rock neither, that would be interesting, how would you find out if its too deep to find?
Thanks for your ideas George
@@jimmyaurora7 Please ask local gardeners, the older ones should know.. Or in deep gulleys where the rain carves out the soil to the bedstone rock.
Buna! Cum se poate lua legatura cu voi?
La jimmyaurora7@gmail.com 😊😊