 These are some cold, hearty olives and also the grave of my cat, which I lost this past summer. Hey guys, today I want to give you something that many of you have been asking for, which is a food forest tour for 2021. That'll allow me as well as all of you to track the progress in my low-budget food forest. If you don't know who I am, my name is Matt, and I have been without income for the last 13 months. I did qualify for unemployment according to the emergency rules passed by Congress, but my state has botched the job so badly that I've only gotten paid for two weeks. My supply of beans and rice is dwindling, so the pressure is on to produce all of my food this season. Have you ever wanted to watch a fat white American starve to death? Well, hit the subscribe button because you just might. What have I gotten myself into? I like starting over here because it's my favorite part of the food forest. It contains the most diversity out of any parts that I've planted out so far, and I just want to share what some of that is. Right here, the main staple here is this almond tree. It's supposed to be partially self-fertile and I haven't been able to get a second variety yet. It looks like it might actually produce one whole almond this year. It's not a lot, but I'm excited to get a little bit of something. What else have I gotten here? There are a bunch of strawberries scattered about through here. Most of them I've covered up with a little bit of mulch because we've been going through a heat wave. This guy seems to be doing okay, so I've left him uncovered. Those other guys, as soon as they're well established, they'll push new growth from the crown and get up through the mulch. Just fine. I've also got gooseberry. I was able to get a few berries off of it last year. All of this stuff was just planted last year. It hasn't really had a lot of time to produce yet, but this gooseberry produced last year. I got three or four berries off of it. I've got this sweet scarlet gummy berry, and it was actually one of the best producers last year. Again, it just went in last year. This year it's completely covered in flowers, so I'm hoping I get a lot of gummy berries this year. Back here I've got a couple of honey berries. I've got this one and this one, and I don't remember the varieties. I've still got the tags on here. Looks like this is a berry blue right here, and this one, I don't remember what it is. Looks like this one is a honeybee, and I believe those are both pollinizers. I don't think they're ones that are typically grown for the fruit, but those are what were available to me locally. So that's what I got. I've got a couple little patches in here. Of these multiplier onions. Those are pretty pretty awesome. They overwintered in the ground just fine right here, and it seemed to be coming back full force. Right here underneath the almond tree, we've got this hops plant, and I did not realize when I planted it here that this almond tree will only get to about 15 feet, and the hops will get to about 20 feet. So I'm going to have to keep this pretty hecked back and probably move it to the base of a different tree at some point, but for the time being it hasn't completely smothered out the almond tree, so I'm going to leave it here, and I actually don't like hoppy beers, believe it or not. I'm actually growing this for the shoots, and you can pick these young shoots and basically treat them like a green or like a shoot like asparagus, great in soups, stir fries, that sort of thing. That's the reason I'm growing them. The hops I'll use, you can put a little sachet of hops in your pillow to help you fall asleep, so I use them for that. Otherwise I'm planning on just trading the hops to people who actually brew beer and maybe get a porter or something in exchange, something that isn't so hoppy. Over here I've got a couple of really sad-looking blueberries. There's this one, this one actually isn't too bad. It's got a lot of flowers on it, and this one here is a Chippewa. The one over here is, I always want to call it pink champagne, but it's not pink champagne, it is pink popcorn. I'm the type of person that I typically don't like to buy the weird colored fruit. I typically find that when you get pink blueberries or white strawberries or whatever, it's just a gimmick to get you to buy things. Sure it's nice to have something that looks a little different for visual appeal, but usually the fruit is garbage. The only reason I got this pink popcorn blueberry is because it had fruit on it when I picked it up at the nursery, and the fruit's amazing. Otherwise it would have been a no-go for me. Most of the stuff here were actually purchases. Most of my stuff isn't, but in this particular spot it's stuff that I invested a little bit of money in. These blueberries, part of the reason they look so sad is because they were marked down blueberries that I picked up. The Chippewa was a big box store. The pink popcorn was actually from a proper nursery, but they were like three bucks apiece. So if you can pick stuff up on the clearance rack at the end of the season, do that. You'll be able to get a lot more plants for the same amount of money. All the strawberries that are hiding in here, those are recent acquisitions that were brought over by the same friend who helped mulch all of this. They were thinnings from his strawberry patch. So those are all free. The gooseberry I did pay, I think I paid full price for that because it is a favorite of a friend of mine, and I love them as well. So I wanted to make sure I had gooseberries no matter the price. Gummy, I believe, was a markdown as well, and mostly got it because it's a nitrogen fixer that just happens to produce fruit. I haven't done a lot of support species yet. I've got seeds for stuff that I'm getting started, but they're not in here yet. One of the honeyberries was a clearance rack special, and the other bought as an emergency because I needed a pollinizer. I didn't expect the first one to be fruiting the first year. I managed to get one fruit last year. They did flower this year, correction. This one over here produced a couple of blooms, and then we mulched, and it stopped flowering. And I don't know if that's because of the heat wave we got, if the mulch cooled the soil down so it stopped flowering. I don't know if I'm getting fruit off of them this year. I did last year. I don't know if I will this year. Next year I should for sure get fruit off of them. Multiplayer onions were from one of our local hardware slash general goods store. It's a local chain, and they have the cheapest plants. That's actually where the almond came from as well. Their bear root trees are so cheap, and it's amazing to me. They're like half the price that they are anywhere else. Most places are around 20 bucks, a little over 20 bucks. This guy, almond tree, $13. If I'm going to pay full price, that's a good full price to pay. The multiplayer onions also came from that same store, so the multiplayer onions and the almond. If you've been following along for a while, you know that I didn't have irrigation at all last year, and tree wasn't very well developed, so there was some dieback at the tips of some of the branches, but that's fine. I'll end up pruning that out as I go to shape the tree. I'm not in a big hurry to do that. I'll get around to it when I get around to it. The multiplayer onions, I think they were three bucks for a bag of five of them at that store, and they overwinter just fine. They're dividing. I've probably got a dozen of them this year, and they'll continue to divide and produce perennial onions for me. I want to show you where I cut my teeth out here, but we got to take a quick drive to the other side of the property. Come on, let's go. This is where it all started. These apple trees right here, they're probably 30 years old. I don't know, I've been told when they were planted, but I don't remember now, and they needed a lot of work when I got here. I ended up taking some six or eight inch cuts out of these trees and just letting them rest after that first big cut that I did just so they could recover, and I could start shaping them, because the thing is, I've seen too many old, crotchety men fall off ladders and have to be life-flighted, so anything that I'm going to work with or harvest from, it's got to be accessible from the ground. It's got to be something that I can get to without a ladder, and it's more than just the apple trees growing in here. If we take a closer look, we've got a lot of the, here's our native irises that are growing in here. Here's a little bitty native hazel right here, so get lots of nuts off this. There's an even bigger hazel right here in the middle of these apple trees. There's a hazel. I don't know if you can see. These are the native strawberries. They don't get very big, but man, do they pack a lot of flavor. It'd take you a while to pick enough to do anything substantial with, but man, they're nice to just eat out of hand. I just do a quick turn, you can see. That's the landowner's new man cave, and that's where my RV was parked this time last year, and that's where I'd been living before I moved up onto the other side of the property, and that's why I'm no longer over here really working on and maintaining this stuff. See that the apples didn't get pruned this year, probably won't until next winter. Try to come through and get it cleaned up again. If I turn even further, see this is one that I haven't really, this is one that I haven't really started working on yet. It's down on its side, still living and producing just fine. In fact, since I've been managing these apples, they've started producing a lot better, although deer got all of them last year. I think this one is a yellow transparent. I think that's what we figured out. We don't know what the other ones are. I haven't been able to figure that out, and there was another one right here. You can see what's left of it. It had fallen down like this other one, and it was just growing back from rootstock. It wasn't the original grafted tree, so I'd cut it back to the ground and left the stump there so that I could grow some more rootstock to craft apples into. And of course, the landowner being the landowner and being part of that generation came through with the tractor and just ripped it right out of the ground without bothering to ask why it was left there. So no apple rootstock for me. I'm going to have to start growing stuff from seeds or whatever. So I had a very small garden while I was living up here, and it was in this space here. I knew it was getting bulldozed when they put the man cave in, so I went ahead and dug out all of the compost and good soil that I'd built up here and moved it into the new garden. But this is what I'm growing in, this nasty clay that's here. Let's see what else we can look at. So here's a little area where I had some perennials planted, and I knew they were going to be working over here, so there's the man cave. We're just right over here to the south of it, and I cut most of this down knowing that it was probably going to get bulldozed and I wanted to be able to save cuttings from different things. Here's my goji, and honestly this is the best it's looked. It's finally getting pretty established in this spot. I cut this down to basically nothing and took a bunch of cuttings from it, but I mean this might actually fruit this year if it can fruit in our climate at all. I was hoping that some of the raspberries that got left behind might re-sprout here, but I'm pretty sure everything that I'm seeing is a blackberry. That could be wrong. We'll see how it works out. So I did completely cut back all of my fig trees so I could take a bunch of cuttings and I was hoping that if they didn't get completely bulldozed they would re-sprout from the stumps, and we can see that they're starting to leaf out. Here's one of them. I believe this is, I believe this is Celeste. It might be Olympian, and if we come over here we see the other one. It's either Celeste or Olympian starting to sprout back as well. So I mean it's a minor setback. I'm glad that I cut the trees down and propagated a bunch of them so that I didn't lose them completely, but looks like these will re-sprout and then maybe in a few years we'll get some fruit. I had another fig in this general area. It was a Texas ever-bearing I believe is what it's called, and it is nowhere to be found, and it was a pretty small tree to begin with so I didn't get a lot of cuttings. I don't think that one's going to pop back, but I got cuttings so I can get it re-established somewhere else on the property. The one thing over here that does not appear to be recovering at all is these mulberries. I've got a couple of Illinois ever-bearing. It's a dwarf mulberry, or at least as dwarf as mulberries get, and I don't know, do a scratch test. It looks like it might still be healthy underneath the bark, but no signs of leaves yet, and so I'm not sure if this guy is actually going to leaf out and do anything this year. We'll see. There are a few nice big white oaks on this side of the property, and I'm hoping that this year I'll actually be able to get some acorns I've been so busy the last few years that by the time I even think about coming over here and gathering them the squirrels have already absconded with all of them, but underneath these oak trees out here where all this grass is, that's the landowner septic field. So this is where I come to scythe and gather mulch for the garden. One last pit stop before we head back up and just want to stop here at the creek and show you this. You can see how much higher the water level was, and unfortunately the neighbor downstream from us took out a beaver pond. I used to be able to catch trout in here, but as you can see there's not going to be anything left in here. The water level is only a couple of inches at this point, but there are a couple of notable things down here to take a look at. For starters, this is stinging nettle, and there is a lot of it. Stinging nettle lows really wet environments, so creek side is one of the best spots for it, and it is honestly one of my favorite greens. I haven't made it out to actually harvest any yet this season. I'm kind of behind for it. You want to get it when it's pretty young, but this is still a pretty good time to pick it. I also love it as fertilizer. It's one of my favorite fertilizers. So the other notable thing down here by the creek, this is one of one of the few places on the property where mature trees were left, and we've got a lot of these big leaf maples. Not only can you tap them per SERP, just like sugar maples, which I haven't done yet, but it's on my list, you can actually collect these flowers, and they make the best fritters ever. Mix up a simple batter, some flour, some baking powder, a little bit of salt, and enough ice water to make a really light pancake batter. Dip them in there, fry them up. They are one of the best things you can eat this time of year. Hey guys, it is now approaching 1 a.m., and I am at the limits of what my mind, body, phone, and internet can handle. So I want to make sure I get this uploaded in time for everyone to watch it, so I'm gonna go ahead and cut the video here. This is not even half of what I filmed today, so I guess that means there's gonna be a part two? Go ahead and subscribe if you're not already, so you can catch that. I've got a lot of other money-saving tips that I wasn't able to share in this part of the video. If you can't wait until next week for more Food Forest inspiration, I'm including a playlist to other YouTubers and their Food Forest, so you can go check some of those out. Spacings. Yeah. So Steve Solomon recommends wider spacings than the other books tell you to. You don't have to subscribe to the channel now for future permaculture experiments, and then select one of these videos to continue the journey.