- Hi, Geoff here, and I'm at Zaytuna Farm
in the food forest.
This is one of the older food forest sections here.
And it's been really interesting, because we're actually
in transition here into an eco community,
and people are moving in and settling in
at different speeds and different fatigues
and there's all kinds of maintenance
and lack of maintenance around the farm.
We've established so many food forests here
of all different sizes and all different ages
and all different combinations.
And now, it's a rest period, not a lot
of maintenance going on in the general common area.
A lot of big food forests are in the common area
and I find it really interesting
to see how they handle themselves.
Very little attention and they stretch out
and nothing really dies, nothing goes wrong
and you can really see how much biomass they build.
I do work in the food forest every day,
but I just come in and cut goat forage at the moment.
But it happens to be the right time
of year to do chop and drop.
So I'm chopping and dropping some
and taking some for food for my goats,
my Nigerian milking goats.
So I'm involved every day and it's a great time
of reflection, just to look at it
and see what it looks like
as a truly wild system in position.
This is one of my favorite tracks here.
It goes right on through
from almost my old strawbale house,
right the way through the education center.
Let's go for a walk and I'll show you what it's like.
It's like a wild woodland actually.
It's got a beautiful feeling to it.
Guava's here, they're coming into fruit right now.
We're going to have a massive guava season.
I've been making a lot of guava vinegar.
And there's odd things everywhere.
Here's some khat, which is used for herbal remedies
to bring your metabolic rate up,
but it's also a drug plant, actually,
in Yemen and Ethiopia and other places.
But I use it for homeopathic medicine
and this is, it's not male marijuana.
It looks a bit like male marijuana, but it's not.
It's mugwort, it's a Artemisia Vulgaris,
which is a vermifuge and has many, many uses.
It's used in dream pillows
and it's a great plant to feed your animals, to worm them.
It also makes smudge sticks from the dry material.
It rots really interests me, very pungent smell.
A very interesting plant.
It's an anti-arthritic herb if you take it regularly.
Very bitter, you can make bitters out of it.
There's all kinds of herbs.
There's an interesting black locust here.
Great big pods and big spikes too.
Not many of those 'cause so many spikes.
Native lily pilly and there are many bunya pines,
giant bunya nuts all the way through here and lots of mango.
There's the odd jackfruit actually,
and lots of understory of coffee.
There's mulberry, Tipuana tipu.
I'll show you Tipuana tipu as a pollard.
There's lemons, quite a lot of lemons
and lemons are on right now, they're just coming through.
When I look through, there's windows I can see,
loquat, quite a big mango at the back,
always mulberry, and custard apple.
Lemons are coming here, little lemons on everywhere
and bamboo, little avenue of bamboo.
I remember we planted this 'cause it was a bit wet here.
Hard to imagine now.
Casuarina, which fixes nitrogen with a Frankia bacteria
and phosphate with a mycelium fungi.
And I'll show you, I put climbing yams up these
and suppress their growth with an edible root crop climber
that comes down in winter, but goes up in summer
and boy it's going up now.
Cocoyam is a root crop.
Ah, there's all sorts going on in here.
It's full of surprises.
Most of 'em are food, some of 'em are support species.
There's the odd banana here and there,
getting a bit shady for bananas.
And it's just an interesting thing to walk through.
It literally feels like a wild woodland.
You could maintain it a bit more.
We do maintain where we have more people involved
around our camping shelters.
I think it'd be a bit scary
to camp in here for some people.
It's so wild.
We manage it a little bit more manicured
around our camping site.
Here's our climbing yam on it.
It's really going to bully this little casuarina here.
That's all right.
Some things need to be bullied in here.
It's so rampant.
It's really controlled by rampancy
and we have so much organic matter.
It's in surplus, our first surplus organic matter.
I think it should be everybody's first surplus, really.
Oh, climbing cactus, the dragon fruit.
I've got 'em going up a lot of my Tipuana tipus,
which is one of our great legume trees.
And a Kei apple, that's rare, South African.
Interesting stuff, arrow root with a red flower
it's got a root crop, plus it's great animal feed.
Feijoa, feijoas are coming on now.
There's little feijoas everywhere.
Pineapple guava, great little fruit, wonderful little fruit.
And here's one of our custard apples.
Mexican tree fern, they just look like a fern.
It's actually Schizolobium, it's a legume tree.
Has a very, very sticky top, almost like a flypaper glue.
One of the fastest little rockets out of the ground.
This is a small one, I've got some big ones.
On you go, just wondering and wondering
what you're looking at, really.
There's unusual legumes here.
This is indigofera, which is indigo the dye.
And there's about 800 in that genus.
This is one of them.
And yeah, you won't starve in here,
but you won't eat the same thing every day, that's for sure.
You're eating something different every day of the year.
This is climbing yam.
This must be a pretty big one,
it'd be huge yams under here.
There'd be kilos and kilos of yam here.
This is going to go right over this casuarina,
totally suppress its growth,
and I think that'll make it fix more
of its Frankia bacteria nitrogen
and possibly, phosphate from mycelium fungi.
And then this dies back in winter,
comes right down to the ground, the roots swell up,
and that's when we take our yam.
But it's a perennial.
We'll always miss bits, and it'll come again every year,
something I'm playing around with.
And then we'll all vine root crop rampancy,
interesting stuff.
But let's walk on through,
and I'll show you another little avenue of food forest
that's been tidied up to make it a little bit more,
let's say, it's a little bit tamer
for our students to feel comfortable sleeping
in the camping shoulders.
Let's go this way.
And area's actually right here.
There's areas I've been working on in today.
I mean, this morning I was cutting.
You can see I've cut here for goats and I've cut in here
and as soon as I cut, I'll be cutting there tomorrow.
As soon as I cut the large ice-cream-bean legumes out,
I open the light to the fruit trees
and this is our rainy season now.
It's just starting and that's when we can open up.
It's actually might rain soon, actually this afternoon.
Typical tropical summer rain coming, but there's a lot
of spaces opening as I just harvest for goat forage
and chop and drop to feed the soil.
This is the pleasure of food foresting.
I think you can get lost
in the food forest and just fiddle around
for the rest of your life,
just mucking about with stuff.
There's a whole lot of pollard here,
I've cut in the last few days, opening it up,
more sunlight coming in now, opening up that section.
I'll just keep taking out the large legume trees
down to a pollard and they'll all come back over 12 months.
If I want to remove 'em permanently,
I'll cut 'em right off at the ground and abuse the stump
and I won't let 'em grow any leaves and they'll die.
So I'm going to teach a course on the specifics
of walking, working, and talking about food forest
and I'm going to get out there and do a bit
of work with students and also, cover the philosophy
of it all and what it feels like to create these systems
and living amongst them.
There's one right here with a giant albizia over the top.
That's a classic.
Got tree tomato over there, tamarillo, and European fig.
This is like a little show pony of food forest right here.
Another little interesting section.
But let's not get distracted.
Let's go and have a look at the tidied system over here.
So when you go through this bamboo avenue,
you actually slip through a of bamboo reality wall
over a swale 'cause we're going over a crossing pipe here
and we're in amongst campus and camping shelters.
This is part of our accommodation system.
And here, we've cut back the Singapore daisy and it's,
we've tamed to this system and it's the same stuff.
Oh, there's a pecan there.
We have a lot of pecans actually, that's the pecan nut.
They're deciduous in winter,
they lose their leaves in winter.
So here, it's a trimmed ground cover
and immediately, it looks a lot more respectable.
It looks tamer and there's not too many dangerous animals
lurking in the understory.
This is what our tipus look like when we cut 'em
and they come back, they're pollard.
All of this grown in one year.
We're cutting in this one soon.
A lot of the legumes are cut right back
at this time of year when the rain comes.
So when the rain is higher than the evaporation,
so rainfall higher than evaporation
after a period when evaporation's higher than rainfall.
Brazil cherry, I missed that one on the walkthrough.
Lot of Brazil cherry in the system.
There are some clumpers too.
There are quite a few clumpers, even flowering clumpers.
I've got red hot poker here.
There's a beautiful flower when it comes up
and I've got citronella grass clumps here
and a big pollard there.
That's all grown in one year, believe it or not
'cause this is the time of year we cut.
And there's an open space here
with a mango ready to fill that position.
You don't have to have wild-looking food forest,
you can have 'em looking quite tame.
You can have a heavy maintenance schedule
and a high production, or a low maintenance schedule
and a casual production.
It's completely up to you.
There's many ways you can do it.
I think I really need to help people understand this.
It's one of my missions,
because everybody loves a food forest.
(bright music)
(birds chirp)