 Hello dear friends, I am about to show you how to plant the Food Forest Starter Bundle, which is a bundle of about 30 of the easiest to grow most productive foods to grow here in Florida. This grouping of plants is ideal for planting the foundation of food forests and survival gardens. We're talking about serious abundance that you can create so you can truly break free from the grocery store and grow a lot of food. In this video I am going to show you how to plant your cuttings into pots, how to plant seeds into pots, how to then care for the plants while they're growing in the pots, and then lastly how to transplant them into your garden. Anybody can use this video as a guide to grow these plants, but we have created this video specifically for people using the Food Forest Starter Bundle and you can follow this guide exactly if you'd like to. Now some people make disclaimers. I would like to make a claimer and I've been inspired by Sam Thayer, one of my favorite poragers. I want to claim the knowledge that we're sharing, claim that I have grown a lot of food. I've grown all of the plants that we're talking about today, but I'm not an expert. I'm a plant lover. I'm super enthusiastic about this and I'm going to share my knowledge. By following this guide I want you to know that this is just one method. There's no right way, there's no wrong way. This is the experience that I have to share with you and this is my way of doing it that has grown a lot of food. I grew and foraged 100% of my food for a year in Orlando and these were staple foods for me. So, if I do share something and it's a little bit incorrect or there isn't a way that's potentially more effective, that's okay because I'm really gearing this for new people, for beginners and if you follow this you're going to get what you need to be successful. Some plants, sure, some things might not go perfectly because I didn't share things perfectly, but that's okay. You're going to make some mistakes, I'm going to make some mistakes, but I claim this information is coming through my experience and the experience of those that I trust and hold close to me. Alright, so let's go ahead and do some planting. Our method that we recommend is planting everything or almost everything into pots and then later transplanting them into the ground. So I'm going to go ahead and share with you how to plant cuttings into pots. Now the first thing that you're going to need to know in order to successfully plant from cuttings is what is a node? A node is the knob-like little scar or structure that you see on the plants and what we're doing is we want to make sure that we have two nodes that go above the soil and two nodes below the soil. So this plant right here, we have one, two nodes and so I'm going to make sure that when I plant this, at least two nodes are below the soil and at least two nodes are above the soil. A node is a very important place because a node is where the leaves or the buds or the branches or the roots come out of. And with the plants that we provide to you in this bundle, there are a minimum of four sets of nodes on each plant. If you have a plant that just has three nodes, you would put two nodes below and one node above. One thing that's important to do is you want to have the cuttings fit snugly into the soil. You don't want them to be like really loose, so I like to gently pad them in so that they are snugly into the soil. We've grouped the cuttings together into two different groups. One that you plant directly into soil, which is most of them, and two that you actually put into a jar of water to produce roots first. So every single one of them can be done directly into pots, but there are four of them in the bundle that are most likely to thrive if you do them in water. The four plants that you can do with this method is rosemary, sweet potato, the basil and the lemongrass. Of all four of them, the rosemary is the most important one to do this way. This one gives the highest chance of the success of these cuttings. To do this method is very simple. You simply place them into water, preferably unchlorinated water. Rainwater is ideal. And then you let them sit for a couple of weeks to establish roots. You can see the roots on this sweet potato that are not roots on this rosemary yet. What you do is you actually replace the water about every other day during that time. And once you have roots that are established, then you can plant these into pots to be transplanted later, or these could be planted into the ground. Generally, we would take these and we would then plant them into pots to be transplanted later. One additional note is for the trees with bark, you can lather some root hormone onto the bottom of the cutting, which you can use honey or aloe vera, for example, and these help to stimulate root growth. For the plants in our bundle, that would be applicable to the mulberry. But what we've done is we've chosen the easiest to grow plants from cuttings. So that is not something that you need to do. So each of these different seeds has a different planting depth. And the basic method is that you plant the seed twice the depth of the size of the seed. So first I'm going to plant the Ethiopian kale. And so what I'm going to do is just make a tiny little divot there. And I'm going to place a couple of seeds right there and then cover that right up. The luffa, I'm going to make a deeper hole there, cover that right up. And then the daikon radish, a little bit deeper than the Ethiopian kale. So I'm going to plant just like that and cover that up. Since I have all of these plants laid out here, I thought I would go ahead and introduce you to some of the young plants. That way you can identify them in case you have forgotten what they are. So I'm not going to show you all of them, but I'm going to show you a whole bunch of them. This first one is yuka. Here we have chaya. This is the sweet potato. Here we have titonia. This is the nopal cactus. Of course, rosemary. This is your Okinawa spinach with the purple leaves. And then here is the longevity spinach, similar but with green leaves. We have our toilet paper plant. Here we have pigeon pea. We have a smaller one here and then a larger pigeon pea here. We have Moringa. This is the Everglades tomato and this is the seminal pumpkin. There are six, seven seminal pumpkins in this little pot. This is papaya and there's a few papayas in this little seedling pot. In my right hand here we have sorrel or roselle and here is the cranberry hibiscus. And there's actually a volunteer pigeon pea or gandules there and there's also a volunteer biden's alba which you'll see that popping up. This is a plant that had Moringa that didn't grow but you can see a biden's alba plant in here. So those are just some to get to know some of the young plants. Now again we recommend planting everything in the pots of the cuttings and the seeds and the reason why is because you want to really nurture these plants to have the highest likeliness of success because you're getting a limited number of cuttings and seeds. If you have a lot of cuttings that you're working with and a lot of seeds that you're working with then you can directly put a lot of cuttings into the ground especially the hardiest ones like yucca and elderberry for example. And some of the many of the seeds they can be directly planted in the ground. They can be even just scattered out. Dicon radish for example and your amaranth or your Ethiopian kale. And so on the website if you want more details about which ones you can do directly into the ground for seeds and cuttings, which ones can be broadcasted, which ones are self seeding and are going to keep coming back, the website has the details for each of those. Now that you have your cuttings and seeds into the pots in the soil, let's talk a little bit about watering, how you care for them, how you get them to grow and nurture them. There's a basic rule of thumb that you can use here to keep things real simple and that's you want to keep the soil moist. The roots they want to stay in moist soil and there's a very simple method and that is you want the soil to be the consistency of a rung out sponge. So if you pinch the soil, first of all it stays together, it pinches into a ball. Also you'll see my hands, they have soil on them, they are dirty. That's a good sign. So I've got a ball here and then what I want to do is the pinch test. So what you want is not a stream of water to run out when you pinch it and not no water. The ideal scenario is about a drip or two. So let's see what comes out. No drip. So this is pretty well watered, I like how it's holding together, but this could have a little more water and you want to do this drip test a couple of minutes after you've watered, after it's had a chance to sink down so that you can see how it's holding the water. This plant on the other hand, I'm scooping the soil off the top, it does not form into a ball, it's dry. This plant could really use some water and you want to keep these pots moist so that the roots are nurtured and moist. So how to do that? With the cuttings, you're going to want to water every day for the first few weeks or so, probably every day for that whole first couple months as you have them in the pots and the seeds, you're going to water every day twice a day for the first few weeks until they are established, until they have an established root system. Then you can move to every, sorry, once a day and you can even maybe move to every other day but you want to keep the soil moist like that rung out sponge. One other note about watering is you want to water them gently. These are establishing plants, they're vulnerable, they need us to care for them. So you want to water in a way that doesn't disturb them and there's no exact rule of thumb for that but I'm holding three different plants. You can see the chaya, how sturdy this is, like this can handle a stronger spray. This one, the Okinawa spinach, also pretty sturdy, that can handle a strong spray. But these pigeon peas, you can see how easily they're knocked over, you want to water those more gently so they're not getting smashed down, you want the plants to be upright. And then this, which I just put in today, you just want to make sure you're not blasting it and knocking it over. So water them gently with the cone or whatever method on the hose or with your watering can that just fuses it so it's not a heavy blast. So I want to talk a little bit now about how to know when your plants are ready to be transplanted. And this is going to require some, you know, intuition, some getting to know the plant and learning more and more. There's not a set fast rule. And honestly in most things there's not an exact set fast rule. You really just need to start to feel in and the more experienced you get the more comfortable you'll get. But what you want to do is you want to look at the plant. There should be a good amount of plant growth. Definitely doesn't have to be this much. This rosemary is probably about six months old. So you can look at the plant and you want to have substantial plant growth. You want to see that the plant's been growing and that it is starting to fill out. So your plants are definitely not necessarily going to be this big but they're going to have some growth. The next thing you can do is you can take the plant and you can flip it upside down. You put your finger between the stem as to cradle it and give it that support. And then you take the pot off. And that might require a little bit of squeezing. And then you'll want there to be substantial root growth. The soil will be held together by root growth. And you actually want, in case you missed this earlier on, you do want to pack your plants in tight into the pot. With cuttings you want those to be really snugly in there, tight into the soil. But the roots will hold it together. This plant is absolutely ready to be transplanted. You won't necessarily have root growth this strong. This is pretty substantial. But you want it to stay together. You want it to stay together strong. As far as how long it's going to take, it really depends in the winter or the summer, different times of the year. But generally with most of these plants, I think they're going to spend a couple of months in the pot. So you have a couple of months once you've put them all in the pots before you're going to end up transplanting them. But for more details on that and some of the specific plants like sweet potato, go to the guide and for all of this stuff, these videos are more of a basic teaching and the guide go into the depth and cover the individual plants that have their own uniqueness. All right. So now I'm going to show you how to actually transplant your plants into the ground. And I'm going to teach you a very basic method that's applicable to most of these plants. But there are some that are a little different and that you would want to refer to the guide just to check with that. But most of them, this is the way that it works. So I have a few materials here. I have per plant about one gallon or even a couple gallons of soil or compost. I've got water and that's going to be for every gallon pot, at least a gallon of water, but ideally a few gallons of water. And then I've actually got some clay and this I'm brand new to and I'll show you a little bit about that as we're planting. So leave your plant in the pot up until you're ready to plant it. You want to have the roots exposed to the sunlight as little as possible and ideally you want to do this in the evening, not in the midday to reduce transplant shocking. So you've got your area that's already mulched because you've turned your yard into a mulch area already. And so what we're going to do is we're going to dig out this hole. And you can use a full size shovel, you're going to need that in some areas or you can just use a little trowel as well. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to remove about one gallon of soil, about the same amount as the pot. So now that the hole is dug out, what I'll do is I'll add about a gallon of soil into the hole about the same amount of soil as the pot size is what I'm doing. So I add that in and then what I do is I mix that in with the native soil. So I'm going to dig that in with a shovel and get that mixed around in there. So I'm amending the hole this way. Now this is just our method. There are many different methods to do it. I've done a lot of this. Another basic method is that you don't add soil to the hole and instead you just pull back the mulch and add that compost around so that those nutrients will go, you know, get seeped into the ground over time. So different styles. This is one that works, both of those are styles that I like. So now I have an amended hole. The next thing you want to do is you actually want to water in the hole. A lot of people will just transplant directly in here without watering, but it's great for the roots to actually already have it be moist. Also the soil can be hydrophobic. So you don't need to know the words, you just need to know the concepts, you don't have to remember all the vocabulary. So the soil can be hydrophobic, which means it's actually afraid of the water or it's repelling the water. And by watering it in first, you help to reduce that hydrophobia, don't know if that's the way you'd say it either. So I'm going to go ahead and add a good amount of water to this hole so that the plant has a nice wet home to start in. So now what you're going to do is you're going to take the plant and you're going to put it into the hole and you want it to be at native soil level, which means the soil of the potted plant is at the same level as the native soil, the ground basically. With plants that are done by cuttings, you can actually have them down into a depression, but with fruit trees, you want to make sure that they're not buried. If you're planting fruit trees, then refer to our fruit tree planting guide because those we plant differently and you can find those on the resource guide. So again, you've got this at the native soil level, not above, and one other note is you got to make sure that you've cleared the roots of the hole as well, just to prevent the competition and the crowding. So I've got it in at the native soil level, I've got it nice and watered deeply, I've got it amended some the way that I'm doing it, and now I'm going to go ahead and add this soil back in. And what I like to do is take this soil and you want to make sure that it's tightly packed. Some people will just make the hole the size of the plant and you can do that as well. I tend to dig the hole out and then fill it back in. And so what I'm doing is I'm filling it back in tightly, but then as I go I will also water. That allows me to fill it in and it also removes any air pockets because you do not want air pockets in there. Now I'm really taking my time with this and as you're getting started, it's good to take your time and as a beginner, be intentional about it, but eventually you'll get much more effective and efficient and the stronger the plant like yucca and chaya, those pretty quick with. Sometimes it's literally just sticking and sticking the ground. Some of the plants you want to be a little bit more gentle with. So I filled it in, the soil is now at the level of the pot and what I'm doing is I'm packing it in nice and tight, it's watered in, I've got nice moist soil and that plant is sturdily in there. Then I'm going to go ahead and finish watering it off. Then the key is you want to have some mulch covering the area, but generally what I do is I keep the mulch a good couple inches back from the plant so that it's not getting buried. And one of the ways to remember that is donut not volcano. Some people tend to especially with fruit trees mulch right up onto the plant, not something that I do, not something that I'd recommend, you actually have a donut around it, not a volcano. The other thing that I'll do besides planting into their individual holes where I'm digging each one into a hole is I'll have beds. And so what I'll do is I'll have my deep mulch, I'll make a trench in that mulch, I'll fill that with soil and then I'll do beds and I might do that for sweet potatoes or other annuals and with that you can just then plant directly into soil. That's kind of like a raised bed, but it's just an in mulch bed, a bed that's surrounded by mulch and you will basically follow a similar method with that, but you won't have to amend it because you're already planting into soil and you'll already have those beds made and again refer to the guide for different planting methods, I'm just showing you the most basic way to do it right here. So as you know this whole video series or at least part of it's here at Josh Jameson's and he's the one who just taught me about the clay and I don't know how I'd never thought about it, but he's adding clay which is going to retain the moisture and putting his finishing touch on it. Nice, that's a well planted rosemary. As I shared earlier we recommend planting your seeds into pots as you're getting started with the small amount of seeds that you have, but once you have the abundance then you can start direct seeding into the ground and for more information on direct seeding you can go to the guide. With about three cuttings of each plant you'll have what you need to get this food forest started, but there are three plants that we recommend early propagating from in order to start to create that abundance faster. That would be sweet potato, yucca and the perennial spinaches. So what we recommend from those is to let them get growing and established and then take cuttings from those earlier on so that you can start growing out your food forest if you'd like and we have more details in the guide of how you can do that. Now I want to share a little bit about what type of materials you need in order to be able to plant these seeds and cuttings into your pots so that you can have a really easy idea of what you need. So if you want to maximize the bundle, the seeds and the cuttings, then what you can expect is about 200 of these four inch pots and about 90 or so of these one gallon pots plus about 15 of these trays and you don't have to buy all of these. You'll often find them in abundance from other gardeners. You can volunteer with other gardeners, connect with other gardeners, put a post on Craigslist of saying what you're looking for. You could buy them but you can often find these resources for free. In fact, I don't recall ever buying them myself. We recommend planting most of the transplants directly into one gallon pots. The four inch pots can be pretty small for that but there are some that you can do the four inch pots for and for the seeds, a lot of what we recommend is either planting into four inch and then up planting them into the one gallons or some of them just planting directly into the one gallons. We have suggestions for exactly how to do that and we actually even have an exact guide that you can follow with the exact number of pots and how to plant them to basically just put all of this bundle into pots to get as much of it started at a time. Of course you can do whatever you want but we have created like a very simple outline that you can follow as a template and not have to do any real thinking about how many of this and how many of that and just follow that basic guide. Now as far as how much soil that you're going to need, if you're buying your soil in bulk from say a nursery or a landscaping supply, you're looking at between .2 and .6 cubic yards. A pickup truck, a small pickup truck is about one cubic yard and they get up to about two cubic yards so you're talking about a half of a smaller pickup truck but if you're going to be buying the soil you might as well buy it in bulk, get a full pickup truck, that way you have plenty for the garden as well. So .2 to .6 cubic yards is the amount you need, .6 being if you're going to plant almost the whole entire bundle. Now if you don't have access to that and you're buying your soil in bags, you want to buy the larger sized bags which are 50 quarts. So those are those big bags that you can get at the store and you're going to get between .3 and .9 of those depending on how much you're planting. And again, go to our website. On there we have a guide that shows exactly how many pots, small, big, how much soil, and a layout so that if you don't really want to do a lot of thinking but you want to just get everything into pots you can just follow that step by step exactly as we have it laid out there. So there you have it, that is how to plant out the food forest starter bundle. And again, as I've said numerous times, this is our recommended day away. We wanted to make it easy for you to follow and just give you a way to plug into. But there are other ways to do it. There's no right or wrong. This is the way that we recommend it. Now there's quite a few plants. There's about 30 plants in the bundle. That can be a lot. That could be overwhelming. Don't feel like you have to do all of them. You can share them with friends and give them away. The seeds can store for years. The cuttings you want to get in the ground, whether it's you planting them or giving them to friends. So if you are just getting started, we recommend just planting what you have in the bundle. There's no need to expand out from there. 30 plants is already quite a bit of diversity and what you need for a lot of abundance. And speaking of abundance, once you know what you're doing, once you've gotten your garden established, all of these plants can be propagated by yourself either from cuttings or from seed saving. So that way you can start propagating these, expanding out your garden, using these very same skills that you've used today and giving these cuttings and these seeds freely to others or making a small business of it to support yourself in your love for plants. So I hope this video has helped you to establish some confidence in getting these plants into your pots and into the ground and getting your food forest or your garden established so you can break free from the grocery store.