Oh Pablo what am I gonna do with you
so I figured you guys were owed an update today on our trees for those of
you who are new to the channel we have a roughly 600 tree permaculture orchard it
sits on about six and a half acres of land it's built on a slope there's about
a mile of swales and berms that are dug to retain water and all the trees are
inter planted so we have a mix of chestnuts hazelnuts elderberries
mulberries apple Siberian pea shrub butternut and black locust trees all
scattered out in our pasture the dream that I have is that someday I can have
this silvopasture where I can graze animals and harvest tree crops and have
this great sort of cornerstone business for our farm admittedly that's several
years off but I'm really excited about it we put the permaculture orchard in
back in 2017 over the course of last year I spent a lot of time mulching it
and weeding it and trying to my best to maintain it i replanted at about 45
trees or so last fall you know kind of basically patching in the trees that
didn't take and that didn't quite grow or thrive putting in new trees and right
now they're just sort of sitting and chilling underneath the blanket of snow
but I figured today would be a good day to go out there and check on them and
see how they're all doing so come along folks
let me get this camera off the first thing I actually want to do though
before we're actually looking at the trees themselves which actually just
know I've seen a lot of rodent activity over here by the Ducks see these little
trails you kind of see them right here these little pathways represent rodent
activity and if you look out here there's actually a fair amount of it the
barn cats have been feasting a lot down around here but they are not nearly out
here as much as I'd hope for I'm certain to think I might need to start trapping
my theory is that the duck house has been attracting a lot of the rodents
because the Ducks spray their feet everywhere and there's just like a lot
of waste feed that gets dropped around on the ground and I'm pretty sure that
that stuff gets picked up by the rodents which probably isn't good so I'm
probably attracting a lot of rodents here's another one you'll notice our
Scarecrow lady she fell down forced and broke in a windstorm and the grounds too
frozen to get sort of her up off the ground so it's gonna kind of rest there
until the spring now down here you can see this is a blackcurrant shrub that I
have actually used to have it planted over there in the fall I'd when it went
dormant I moved it over here my thinking is that I'm gonna actually start putting
a lot of just different random berries and shrubs right down along this area I
pour so much water out from the Ducks so much water drains right down here it
seems like such a good opportunity for you know just watering plants by using
the Ducks waste water and so I want to start getting more plants down around
here the first one I put is that current but there will be a lot more to come
over the next few months especially in the springtime off I'll probably plant a
lot of things over there you can see some sort of animal tracks yes maybe a
fox
this one here looks like it I don't know I'm terrible it I think that looks like
a deer right hoof hoof like that so they probably came up through the cedar swamp
over here and went thattaway if anybody has any advice on some good books for
good reading material related to tracking animals I feel like I see so
much stuff in the snow like here's another set of tracks well here we are
with our trees see you nice and chestnut in here every tree that has one of these
orange tags as we're going through here you'll know they were a tree that I
replanted this fall I'll leave a link to the video up top if you guys want to go
back and watch that process things are looking pretty quiet
so he's tough to tell what these are without the tags I think this is an
Appletree actually there's a black locust look at those thorns they mean
business so the reason I planted black locust in our permaculture orchard is
because it's a nitrogen fixer it brings nitrogen to the soil helps the plants
around it it's also great for pollinators and it also makes for some
great lumber if you make it grow straight I'm looking at some of these
like this guy and that's that one's quite the curvy spine that it's got
right now but that's okay I just let them grow natural I think they're really
cool-looking trees so I have this theory of maybe feeding some of their leaves to
the Ducks and see how that goes look at this I think this was the biggest black
locust we grew look at this so just for your frame of reference this was about
the size of this probably last year at the same time it's actually even
sprouting a second branch to it look how big this thing is it's up over 10 feet
I'd say maybe just about 10 feet here's an elderberry plant it's got
damaged that's a shame yeah so this whole row is inter planted its
elderberry black locust elderberry black locust elderberry and I mean just to see
the difference in what a range of black locust trees can do so you have that
tall one right over there you have this medium one right here and
here's a little baby black locust right here I planted all of these black locust
trees at the exact same time but unfortunately they don't grow all the
same time this elderberry is looking pretty good though yeah that's healthy
about a month ago when Alison and I were cutting down our Christmas tree we found
a vole up on the top of the pasture my guess is that most of these tracks that
you're seeing here from voles there's quite a lot of them
we get out here actually I'm worried worried for my trees so many tracks here
we have an apple tree just a little baby apple tree growing here looks like
somebody's been eating at the bark it just probably signs of rodent damage
that's not good what you gonna do this is a mulberry tree another mulberry
another apple tree this one looks like it's doing a little bit better
somebody's definitely been nibbling on this apple tree I planted a lot of the
apple trees they're actually wild apple trees with the idea that they would
probably get eaten a lot by the deer I wanted to have them almost as like decoy
trees from our mulberry and our chestnut and our butternut our elderberry really
wanting to let those things try to thrive so I guess that philosophy sort
of working now this is a butternut tree that I planted this fall you can see by
this tag here there's another good black locust
get those thorns the wood is really rot resistant it's very durable find it's so
relaxing to be out here even though there's not that much to see right now
because it's all under this blanket of snow so this summer I made the decision
to just try to give up on trying to mow our swales I tried for a long time to
keep up with it but they just grew so fast and furious and I couldn't get a
mower up on the hump because it's just of the shape of it and so I've just sort
of let him go wild I'm hoping the trees survive and do OK in spite of that that
decision not to mow very much risk I'm undertaking you know so like where I'm
walking right here I mowed all of this down so that it was nice and clear but
on the humps I wasn't able to mow and I'm worried that a lot of the rodent
activity I'm seeing is a result of the additional grass that I left this year
that grass wasn't there last year and and this amount of rodent activity
wasn't there last year either so those have me a
little concerned about that risk but if it doesn't work it doesn't work but all
in all I don't see anything too egregious all the tree tubes are staying
up the trees that should be there there everybody's looking relatively healthy
at least as healthy as they can in the early stages of January
oh you guys see little barn cat she's hanging out way down there she's waiting
for me she's probably wondering what the heck I'm doing up here it's like come on
dude what are you doing some of you have had questions for me about our
permaculture orchard in terms of how we developed it I figured this would be a
good time to take a minute to answer those and the main question that I
always get is how do I get started really for me the most important first
step in terms of getting started here is to really think about what sort of tree
crops you want perennial street crops are awesome because once you get them
planted and once you get them established you get production from them
year after year after year so unlike an annual vegetable bed that requires a lot
of ongoing work every single year once you get past some of those initial years
and once you get past just some of the basic maintenance you'll have to do
those trees are gonna provide an abundance for you and for your family
for such a long time so if you're thinking about doing tree crops on your
homestead I would say run to it because it's such a good opportunity and then in
terms of getting started really think about what you want what do you want to
eat do you like chestnuts do you like apples
I found mulberries to be an awesome fruit elderberries I believe have such
great medicinal properties and just sort of possess a lot of potential that
people haven't truly explored that's why I planted about 200 elderberry plants
here so but really make that list and once you have that list start to think
about what sort of space you have to work with what's that space like what's
the shade characteristics what sort of drainage do you have and when you have a
sense of that you can actually start to really map out where you want those
trees to go you know the important thing to remember when you're growing trees is
yeah once you put it there you're more or less stuck with it there unless you
want to cut it down or try to transplant it which has a tremendous amount of risk
and requires a ton of work and so you know making the right decision to put a
tree in a place is important but then the other thing that's that's important
is just making the decision to plant that tree because the longer and longer
you wait and the longer and longer you take to deliberate the
less time you've had that you've given yourself to have him get established we
planted this whole permaculture orchard back in the fall of 2017 we've had our
first full year of growth in 2018 as I'm looking at 2019 expecting to get maybe
just a little bit of production especially from the elderberries and
maybe the mulberries and then as I look out probably four or five years from now
that's when I expect like the chestnuts to really start to get up and to full
steam ahead I guess my best advice to you is really think about what you want
to do in 2019 and do it in 2019 I think the spring and summer are such a
great time to do your research and prep your growing orchard to make sure you
have everything right make sure you're smart about your soil make sure you're
smart about your placement make sure you're smart about drainage and water
but then really by the time you get to the fall it's the perfect time to plant
bare root trees which are nice and cheap and easy to acquire and they go and
great when you when you hit the fall period and so if you could think about
it right now and map out where you'd want to do it and really do your
research and do some of your work over the course of the spring and summer and
then by the time you hit the fall and put those trees in you're gonna be in
such awesome shape and you know your homestead is gonna become more
diversified your homesteads gonna become more resilient because you have those
tree crops another question that I've received recently it was actually on
Instagram was people asking about how our hazelnut Grove is doing and I got to
admit of all the things that I've done here and I know I've got a handful of
regrets the hazelnut thing has been the the biggest failure of all of them the
hazelnuts themselves I've got some shrubs that are still there but most of
them have gotten mixed in with the weeds the situation I have for the mowing
right now is a mess and I'm pretty much ready to just start from scratch and try
to redo it in 2019 or just maybe abandon it but the whole hazelnut situation
didn't work out the way I wanted it to so as you look out here right we've got
eight rows so there's the berm which is the trench that sits right down there
and then there's the Swale just beyond it
that's where it sort of catches the water i've got tree plantings on both
sides for the first five rows up and then the last three I actually left the
berm side unplanted really the reason I did that was was a couple fold one I had
just run out of energy and resources to try to keep planting trees back in 2017
and then - I wanted to see how this stuff performed I wanted to see what
worked and I wanted to see what didn't work and and really have the space to
expand in the future and so I'm gonna probably start expanding this spring and
summer with probably some additional plants and some additional perennials
I'm really thinking about a couple different crops up top there if you guys
have any suggestions on that one let me know I'd love to hear your thoughts so
there you have it that's the update on the permaculture orchard if you have
questions or any thoughts or comments for us about what's going on with the
permaculture orchard don't forget to leave them down in the comments and if
you want to learn more just keep watching our videos and we'll keep
telling you more about them and please don't forget to subscribe and I will see
you guys next time here at Gold Shaw Farm where we're trying to build a farm
in Vermont