good morning this is angela with park roads permaculture
i am hiding in the shade of my cecile brother rose
and i wanted to talk with you all today about the concept of opening up a canopy so in permaculture
um if you were doing food foresting forest gardens and you are trying to establish and
set up a perennial agricultural system in which trees are your dominant crop you eventually get
what's called a closed canopy which is when your system is matured and all the trees are
reaching in and basically touching each other and you have a woodland or forest situation
and that can be really great i talked in one of my recent videos about
how important that succession is for creating shade and conserving water and setting up wind
breaks and microclimates even on a property as small as my quarter acre here in portland oregon
however today i want to talk about what happens when you open up the canopy and how
sometimes good management of our permaculture systems includes being a force of disturbance
in which we open up the canopy to benefit certain plants or elements in our system
so let me show you down here at the back of my yard what i'm talking about
so i have to walk this gauntlet of
golden raspberries that are on either side of this pathway down to my chicken coop
i love to put things where i will utilize them and if i put berries along my pathway
i know that i am going to access them on my strolls through the garden so as we
move farther down you can see that this area is quite open and sunny i used to have raspberries
all the way down to the chicken coop and it was just too many too many raspberries
for our family and so i cycled them out and i'm now starting to put in more shrubs in this area
i actually had a tibetan cherry here and it died uh really disappointed it was hard to
source one when i ordered it it wasn't very good looking and i was worried it wasn't gonna make it
um and it didn't and the company gave me my money back but just frustrating because i still haven't
been able to source a tibetan cherry i wanted sort of a shady meditation area here eventually and i'm
not quite sure what other tree i'm going to put i would love to source another tibetan cherry in the
future but for now i have young june berries in a mature blueberry that i put in to kind of build up
the shrubby layer of food producing crops here but eventually this will be a closed canopy for now
super sunny just put down some leaf mold around these and then i will be putting chop and drop
mulch over so when we talk about a closed canopy we are talking about the opposite
of what i'm standing in right now we're talking about an area where the trees have provided cover
and are basically touching each other and only dappled sunlight gets through that's great for
a lot of perennial crops a lot of things that thrive in a woodland setting this high bush
cranberry was everywhere leaning all the way out and touching my strawberry field strawberry hill
i think it's strawberry hill rose and touching the chicken coop and so i couldn't get through this
path so i chopped and dropped a bunch of that back just for access but at the same time the
large branches here were shading plants that really need access to sun so i've
talked before about how pioneer species generally like full sun and poor disturbed soil that is not
unique to annual crops there are many perennial pioneer species that need the same
things including this plant here hipafyramnoities which is the sea buckthorn or seaberry so what i
ended up here is in a situation where my highbush cranberry was shading this female and this female
with sea buckthorn what you get with any amount of shade is you get die back in fact you can see here
in the mail they die back from the shade of their own branches so the middle tends to get very dead
where it shades itself needs full sun now why do i have these two little females in this big male
uh this male was sold to me along with two other plants that were both supposed to be females
i had them in the ground for a number of years and when they flowered for the first time they
all flowered with male flowers i was very very very disappointed so i had to rip out the two that
were supposed to be females and replace them with different ones from one green world nursery where
i know the quality of their stock and these will be females they do have female flowers on them
but it means that my male is much bigger and he's going to get a pretty good prune back the leaves
of this make an edible tea for medicinal tea for humans and an edible crop for chickens and ducks
so when we're thinking about a closed canopy layer when we're thinking about the shade and
water conservation that we get out of mature big shrubs and trees in our system we need to be aware
of what are the needs of the support plants in our system my c buckthorn here is a nitrogen fixer
and produces a very rich oily fruit very very high in vitamin c in the late fall and
i want to make sure it gets what it needs so while it's okay for it to coexist with this very large
high bush cranberry which i probably wouldn't have put in if i had known it was going to get
this big it will get a big take back this fall i need to make sure that i'm diligent about
doing chop and drop here i need to make sure that i am mimicking browsers in the forest by reducing
the higher branches and dropping them onto the forest floor and that way i'm opening up the area
to sunlight let me show you what else i mean so as you come back here you can see it's very shady
in this area and before i did that chop and drop there all of that over those sea buckthorn was
also very shady i also had a similar situation going on back here with my early fuyu persimmon
next to it i have a gumi berry elly agnes multiflora
nitrogen fixer companion plant for this persimmon guild unfortunately much like my
sea buckthorn it requires full sun so what you get is it got real scraggly looking down below
because the high bush cranberry and the persimmon were both shading it too much so i limbed it up
quite a bit and dropped it as chop and drop mulch which will release nitrogen as it
decomposes under my fuyu persimmon and i also took back some branches of my persimmon here
i was careful to select branches that do not have fruit on them flower buds on them
i took out a branch here to open up some more uh sun to come in here and access these goomies up
here in the corner so that way my nitrogen-fixing gummy companion plant in this guild can still
persist it isn't totally shaded out because i still want it but i am able to have a mature
persimmon growing here at the same time just a little bit of maintenance a little bit of removing
the elements that are adding too much shade and preserving some of the sun filtration
so that those plants that need additional sun can go ahead and succeed in this spot
you can see here more of the buds on my early foo you persimmon persimmons are very late to
leaf out and late to flower there's going to be a ridiculous crop of them this year
i hope so as we look back across this part of the garden you can see here how we have
this area of intense sun because there is no over story canopy tree here yet
there is just some of the newly established shrubby edible crops and an herbaceous layer
of comfrey and mint and a few other things in here as well but eventually there will be an over story
tree here too and i will need to continue to do some chop and drop because while a closed
canopy may be ideal for certain permaculture food forest situations there are times when
it's really really not and we want to preserve that sun access especially if you are like me
and you have a small plot i only have a quarter acre so ideally if i had a different system all
my sea buckthorn would be in a wind break on a miserably poor very sunny windy spot in my garden
out apart from everything else but this is the only space i've got this was the worst quality
soil in my whole yard when i started gets very very intense sun back here seemed like a good spot
but as these other plants have matured i have realized that there has to be some maintenance
to preserve the high density planting in my system and that's okay so if you're working on having an
intensely cultivated small plot of land or even a large farm where your inter-cropping requires the
filtration of a little bit more sunlight down into the bottom of your woodland areas or your
forest garden by taking the time to hack back material as you go through the garden when you're
harvesting or just strolling it you are mimicking those browsers and you are dropping material to
the forest floor to the garden floor that will become more humorous but you are also opening up
and that canopy you are opening up the garden to sunlight so that those plants that need it have
access to it and can produce more for you so if you got something out of this video please give it
a thumbs up please consider subscribing and check out my patreon in the description i'll be back