The 1 Fruit Tree Planting Mistake And the Trick for 3x More Food

Alright, this is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com, today we have another exciting episode for you. I'm here back in Puerto Rico and I'm here at the Caribbean Agroforestry Institute. I have previous episodes at the CAI, link down below, the original video where I share with you guys how they're growing here with permaculture techniques, the different classes they could do, as well as sharing experience from Stephanie, who's the plant mama here, and then that's the first episode. The second episode, these are all linked down below, is where we talk about perennial vegetables, which are the types of vegetables I want you guys to grow if you guys live in the tropics, link down below to that. And now this episode, we're going to dive in even deeper and get into the proper way to plant a fruit tree. I mean, I know a lot of you guys go out to the nursery and buy a fruit tree, you dig a little small hole, you plant the tree in a little small hole, you leave all the grass around it, that is not the way to plant a fruit tree properly. Today we're going to learn from Stephanie how to properly plant a fruit tree, digging the proper hole, using the right amendments, and more importantly, including the appropriate and best supporting plants. So let's head over to the part of the farm where she's planting out a new mamey tree today. Alright guys, so we're here with Stephanie, and we will be planting this tree right here, which is a mamey, and we're going to show you guys a proper permaculture style way to do this. Now, Stephanie, why hasn't people learned how to plant a fruit tree in this way before? I mean, most of the time they see people just dig a hole in the field, and farmers plant fruit trees just like monoculture, just dig a hole, plant the fruit tree, and then that's all they do. The grass is just growing around the fruit tree, and that's it. Why don't people use this technique, which I believe is more proper and actually better and healthier, so you create a healthier ecosystem, rhizosphere for the tree, it's going to succeed, it's not going to get sunburned and all these other crazy things. I mean, I guess sufficiency, I'm not sure why they do it that way, just to keep the system simple, and also because they're okay with adding lots of inputs, fertilizer, or pesticides or things like that. But what I'm looking for is, one, I want the fruit tree to do the best that it can do, with the least amount of my maintenance possible, so I'm thinking about what kind of other plants can go with my fruit tree, so that that way it has its whole, in permaculture we talk about a guild, its whole plant family around it that helps support it. But not only is that an opportunity to put in plants that are good for this fruit tree and help reduce my maintenance, but also that's an opportunity for me to put in other things that I might want to eat. Whether that's like today we're going to be adding in some support species of a Brazilian spinach ground cover, which is going to help cover the ground, keep the grasses back, but also make a wonderful, edible vegetable for me in the meantime, while I'm waiting the years it takes for this mamey to grow and make fruit, so I get food really quickly. I'm going to put in other crops that help, like this coleus, it's beautiful, also has some medicinal properties, it makes gorgeous flowers that feed the bees, but it creates a lot of ground cover and shade to keep the grasses back. I'll also be putting in things like the white turmeric, which is an amazing root crop here that grows very, very fast at this time of year, and will, again, hold more space to keep the grasses away, but simultaneously making the ground cooler and more moist for our fruit tree, creating some shade, some microclimate, some pollinators, some food for me, there are just multiple layers, and that's what we're looking for in permaculture. Why have something do one thing, let's have something do many things, and if I'm going to go to the trouble of digging a hole for this fruit tree, I might as well just widen it up, plant a bunch of these extra things, now I'm not needing to come mow and weed whack right next to this tree, the grasses aren't choking it out, it's not out here just getting blasted by the sun, having no pollinator support, all of these things, so by way of picking all of these companion plants, the mamey tree does better, I get food, and I get less maintenance, so there's just like upside, upside, upside in my book. Yeah, and it's like, you want to give your fruit tree friends, you don't want to just put your fruit tree alone in the field, it's going to get lonely, so have them friends, and the other thing is that when you want to check on your fruit tree, you can come check on your fruit tree, but then also harvest your vegetables at the same time, so you're not just like, oh I got to go out and check my fruit tree, no, I'm going to check my fruit tree and harvest vegetables at the same time, right, so it's definitely a much better use of your time, in addition of course, some of these are nitrogen fixing, they're actually going to help bring fertility to the soil as well, instead of her buying added fertilizers and just putting fertilizers in, which are synthetic and man-made, which are not good, she has natural fertilizers. So comfrey is one of the ones we're going to put in there, which a lot of you might know about, amazing medicinal herb, great ground cover, awesome root, but it also accumulates a lot of beneficial nutrients, so whether I use it for making salves, or poultices for sore muscles, or for bones that need healing, or any of those things, or I just chop and drop it and feed it to my fruit tree, so it's a natural fertilizer as well. So I think one of the questions I want to ask you Stephanie is because we are here in the context of the tropics, in Puerto Rico, if you're in Hawaii or South Florida, you know many of these same crops you would actually be planting, but what are people that are more in northern climates, maybe Colorado or California or somewhere else where they don't have these specific crops, I know comfrey actually will grow pretty much all over. This comfrey actually came from Colorado. But what support plants would these people use that don't live in the tropics, because I know a lot of these plants are using our tropicals. So comfrey would be one for sure, there's a great plant in the north that grows like crazy called lovage, have you grown that one? Oh lovage, I've grown lovage, yeah. Oh my gosh, so aggressive, it grows so crazy. It got so tall. Yeah, I mean if you're looking for a lot of biomass to chop down, that's a great one for that area. Lots of nitrogen fixers, so you can even, well I'm going to use mostly perennials, I'm also going to use some annuals, in any space there's soil where there's something not growing, where I haven't planted one of these, I'm going to put in just chia seeds, raw chia seeds from the store, it'll in less than 60 days make more chia seeds, but it makes beautiful flowers, fast ground cover, and then I'll chop and drop it and feed it to the other trees, but it takes up that space so that weeds and grasses don't come in and any of these will grow in the north as well, there's also, any of your beans are great nitrogen fixers that are quick, but a traditional guild in permaculture would be putting some of the other taller trees with this tree, which we're not going to do here today, we're going to focus on the ground layer around the fruit tree, but in a bigger guild we'd be adding like our nitrogen fixing tree, so in the north you'd be looking for something more like a Siberian pea shrub, which would be a great nitrogen fixing companion to your major fruit tree, which might be an apple or a peach instead of a mamey like we have here. Alright, wonderful, so let's get started and see how to do this. Okay, let's go. So our main tree of this guild is going to be the mamey, which it grows very, very tall, it's a nice hardwood, makes giant fruit that are super, super delicious, but it's going to be a while on that, so I'm glad we have some other things to eat in the meantime, and if we were in a regular orchard setting, you would just see a million of these in a line and grass all the way up to it, and probably they would use some herbicide around the base to keep the grasses away, mowing it, weed whacking it, and chemically fertilizing it, but we're not going to do any of that. So we're going to find the spot that we want, and we're going to be looking to dig our hole for this, but we're also going to, I'm going to dig a test hole, make sure there's no big rocks or anything that I need to worry about here. Soil looks good, so this was an area that had really dense tree cover, and we cleared a lot of it, but left quite a few of the bigger trees for a nice microclimate here. So we've got lots of nice organic matter on the ground, so we've got a decent amount of clay in our soil, but not too heavy with it, but lots of organic matter in here, so I'm happy with this. If this was a soil that was more depleted, I might want to be adding some compost or something like that. There's some other tree roots in here, look at that guy, I'm going to chop that down. Okay, so now I know that that hole is going to be fine, there's not any big rocks or anything I need to worry about. So now, in a traditional setting, I might just plant it right in there, but then in we'd be smothered by weeds and grasses and it'd be choking it out, and also it'd be out here all alone. So what I'm going to do is go around this hole with my hoe and make some more space. Make it a little wider, get some of these grasses out, and then depending on how many plants I have, I would keep clearing around to make it big enough for all the plants that I want to do in the system. And so what's the range of hoeing around the circle, like how big of a radius, it looks like you're maybe about three feet each direction, two to three feet? I mean really the bigger the better, the more I can put in my intentional plants, the less I'm going to have to deal with grasses and vines and things like that, so it just depends on how many support species you have, and also how big of an area you want to plant. If this is in a backyard, you might want to be keeping it small. If you only have one tree, it really just depends on your space, but the more space you clear and replant, the better. It gives you more time to walk away. So I want to be able to plant this, I want to walk away, and I want to not have to come back here for a few months, even in the tropics, and all of my plants still be doing really good. So as long as I fill in all the space, I'm going to be able to make that happen. So I'm pretty happy with that. The other thing I can do if this wasn't too compacted, but if this was really compacted, I would take my broadfork and open up this soil. I'm not having too much compaction here, but either way, I'm going to go around and just loosen this up a little bit so my cuttings can get in there good. So if it rains, it soaks in just in case the soil was really compacted. I want to make sure any surface water is stopped and sinks into the ground. And it seems like it's more work than digging one hole, but I only have to do it once. So in permaculture, we want to spend the most of our time in design and in installation, and the least of our time in maintenance. Actually, I thought you wanted to spend most of the time in a hammock. One would believe. The hammock is just, you can sit there long enough until you see something you have to do, which doesn't end up being that long. I would like to sit in my hammock more. Okay, now we're going to plant our main feature, which is our mamey. We've got a slight drop in the topography here, kind of going towards you guys at home. So what I'm going to end up doing is making sure that I have a little berm, which is like a little soil hill, downhill of my mamey, so that that way any water that's traveling along the soil going downhill will kind of settle in my mamey a little bit. Not a lot, I'm not making a huge berm, just something small so that in light rainfalls, that water stays and waters in my mamey, because I don't have hoses out here or irrigation, so it's got to just handle itself. Yeah, so for those of you guys who don't know these fancy terms like me, like a berm, basically, that's like a speed bump, right? So imagine there's like a speed bump on the downside slope, right? So we're higher up now, and as the water comes down, it hits the speed bump, and it stops, so it actually kind of sits where the trees planted, so the tree just gets watered automatically without any irrigation. So then I can see some roots coming out, but it doesn't look like they're too bad. So I'm going to put two fingers on either side, make sure it's loose enough. Sometimes they're really bound in there or big, and in that case, I'll kind of roll it around and put my knee on it to open it up, but we don't have too much of a problem with this one. And I just squeeze it until I have this. So this is a really nice root development where I've got some good roots, but they're not wrapping yet. If they were wrapping around, I would actually yank at them or cut at them or something like that to open it up, because otherwise, if you plant a tree that's totally wrapped with roots, you could come back here in six months and just pull the stem and the whole thing would come out. It wouldn't know that it's not in that pot. So we really wanted to let this beautiful Mame tree know that she's going in the soil now, she has room to grow, and make this her new home. So one of the things I would do, Stephanie, right now at this point is I would take a little bit of mycorrhiza and put it on the roots. Do you ever do that here, or do you think it's not necessary, or what do you think? So what I do is… And the mycorrhiza is obviously beneficial fungus, basically, or mycelium that will basically colonize the roots and help bring more nutrition and make it more drought tolerant. Right. Which we do that as well, but a little bit different. So I'll plant the tree, then I have these nice rotty wood chips here. So you're just getting more natural mycorrhiza from the land already without bringing in inputs like I would. Right. And also, I think we lost a lot of this on the way down, but I have a liquid ferment in my forest here where the mycelium is really, really strong. I'll go and get some of that mycelium-rich soil, put it in some water with a little sugar and a little worm castings, and let that ferment for 24 hours, and then I'll inoculate that into here. So what I'm giving it is basically the intelligence and the age of the deep forest out here in a more open field. That's probably better. But I have all those resources on hand, so sometimes we have to get them from somewhere else because we don't have them, but we're lucky enough to have them here. So now I'm going to… I put it in about how deep it was, so you always want to make sure you're not burying the stem. It's a little bit less of an issue in the tropics, because a lot of our trees will root along the stem, but in other places, definitely in Colorado, you never want to cover that stem, because it'll end up rotting or getting little funguses and not the beneficial kind. So I'm going to tuck it in, I'm going to fill it in. I don't… unless the soil is extremely depleted, I'm not going to use things like compost and stuff like that in this system, especially just in that hole, because then the plant doesn't really want to go out to get its nutrients, because it's like, oh, I have all of these nutrients right here, so I would never fill a hole anywhere in just compost. So you'd always, even if you were adding in compost, mix it in with the native soil, sometimes throw some rocks in there. If I'm planting an avocado or something that likes better drainage, I'll throw a few rocks in the hole, a little more sandy stuff, that way it gets that drainage it's looking for. So then I'm just kind of packing around, I'll hand press it in, and I'm going to make my tiny little berm, my tiny little dirt hill. It's not big, it's not hard, and compact it a little, and then that's kind of enough, it's a little like a moon shape, so when the water comes traveling along this way, it gets holed up here, just a little, right? If I get a deluge of a hurricane level water, I want that water to go away, I don't want it to flood my tree. But this is just enough in light rains, instead of the water traveling down, it's going to go here and water in my fruit tree. In addition, any organic matter that's eroding down is going to stop here too. And over time, this won't be like this anymore, it'll all kind of fill in and become more on level. And then some things we could do if we wanted, we could reinforce that with seeds or what have you. And this is like a tiny example, but you can do this on a really big scale too, on like hillsides with giant swales and berms, it's the same effect, it's just on a micro scale, and really oftentimes a thousand little changes are more effective than one giant change. And also if, you know, the risk is less. If you're just doing this for the first time and you want to cut a 400 foot, 10 foot wide swale and berm and you're not really sure exactly what you're doing yet, that could be not great. It could go bad in a lot of ways. This is a great way to play, and then you run out here when it's raining, and you look at what you did, and you see if it's having the effect that you want. If it's not, you just play in the dirt a little bit more and shift it in the ways that make sense for your system. Okay, so now at this point, I want to have a nice ring of comfrey around this. So I'm just going to come around and make little holes. I'm just, here's my planting spot for the tree, so I'm not messing with the roots of the mamey tree. This also, you could stop here. If you want, and you don't have any other plants, this is better than just a hole with a fruit tree. You could just do a comfrey ring, which sometimes I do. And then this looks like, say you're looking at a clock, what hands on the clock are you putting holes? Um, I'm pretty, like I'm a, I plant like, I plant like I cook, a dash of this, a dash of that. So maybe like every two hours, three hours. It really depends. No, no, on the hands of a clock. So say there's 12 where you're at, and then we go to 3, 6, 9, and 12 at the top. So, like, how many, how many different planting holes are you doing right now? I don't know. Eight? Alright. But I have a lot of comfrey. Alright. So you could just do four. Okay. Um, I kind of go with, especially here, where things grow just so, so fast, if I don't fill up every inch of this soil, there's grass growing back and other weeds and things, and like, I'm going to pull off, you know, now you're just literally putting like little pieces of the root in there that will then take hold and regrow. And like some will be better, like these crowns, and so those ones I know are going to come up. So I'll usually rotate between, like, a root, and it also gives me an eye early, right? So where they are at, yeah. Yeah, I want to make sure I know where that ring is. So you got, so far, three in. We'll put one here. Four. Put a root in here. and throw them in there. Put one there. Six. There's a one there, and there. And then, you know what? I got another root, so why not? Let's just stick it in there. Alright. So a bunch of them around in a circle. Yeah. And about, about a foot away, approximately, from the trunk. Right. And then I'm going to take my extra cuttings that I have. So those are just all the greens. From the top, just the leaves. So you're chopping and dropping and leaving them some mulch there. I'm just going to put them right there. Right around the bottom. So now let's move out another round. Nothing's ever wasted in nature. No way. No garbage. So now, I'm going to come outside of what I just did, and in this case, I'm going to do it on the outer edge. So how many inches out from the comfrey circle? Maybe four. Four more inches out. Okay. So I'm going to plant that white turmeric, but I want to harvest that white turmeric when it comes up. So that's why it's important. If I was not going to harvest the roots, I could do it close to the mamey tree, but because I am going to harvest those roots, I want to come a little bit out, and they'll be ready in about three months. Three months, huh? Oh, yeah. Wow. And then, what that also does is help, like, when I come back and dig them out, I've now made it even a little wider. So I could put something else in, or I could leave them there. Whatever I want. So then, our little white turmeric roots. So you can see the... And you can get turmeric from the store, as long as it hasn't been irradiated, it's still going to sprout. Ginger, they all plant just like this. So that will make one. This will make one, probably two, but I'm going to just go ahead and... It's already wanting to go, so I'm going to put that top up, but they're very forgiving. You can kind of put them any direction you want. Yeah, it's important, guys, if you guys are going to get stuff from the stores, I would recommend organic, because sometimes on non-organic stuff, it could be irradiated, they could add things, so it doesn't sprout inhibitors and whatnot. Fungicides and, yeah, sprout inhibitors, all kinds of things. Or order from somebody that just grows organic turmeric or ginger for eating, actually, online, which I've done a lot, ordering from people from Florida and Hawaii. Alright, so once again, just going around the clock, she hasn't planted, I mean, every, let's see, eight minutes is my estimation. Eight to ten minutes. And think, like, defensible space. That's kind of what we're creating, is the more we can step back and fully protect this mamey, one, the worst thing for fruit trees happens all the time in systems where they're weed-whacking around fruit trees, is you're trying to weed-whack that grass really tight, and what happens? You get a little close... And you hit the tree. One second, and you girdle that tree with a weed-whacker, and you will kill your fruit tree by weed-whacking too close. So this keeps any mowers, weed-whackers, as, you know, far away from my fruit tree. And if they accidentally hit the leaf of a turmeric, or the leaf of a comfrey, they're just making mulch. So that's not a big deal. But if they hit my tree, even really fast, it will probably kill it. Yeah, to me, what this reminds me of, Stephanie, is like a fort, right? You're protecting the king in the middle, and then you have all, like, the people with their swords, you have, like, the different kinds of layers, you know, of, like, the king's men right around them, and then you have another protection layer, and then you have, like, the walls of the fort around them, and... We will protect you! So at this point, just because I'm backing up, I'm going to go ahead and add in some of my woodchips here. Okay, so woodchip mulch that are, once again, rich in biodiversity of microbes. And they already have some mycelium. Yeah, I saw some of the white, the white stuff in there. Right there. Right? Yeah, it looks like nice woodchips. And then, I think we lost a little bit of our water, but then I'll inoculate it with the ferment that has the intelligence and fungal life and bacterial life of the forest. And that's a Korean natural farming. Yes. So now, one of my favorite things to do in between, especially if I was going to keep the white turmeric for a long term, in between the white turmeric, I can add the Brazilian spinach because the Brazilian spinach will stay as a ground cover, and the turmeric can grow right through it and above it. But the turmeric goes dormant half the year. So this does not, so this will hold that line even better. So we can come in. This can be done just from cuttings. These were grown from cuttings, but then I rooted them in a pot. You could just put them in if it's a rainy time, or you have irrigation, you could just put them in. So now, is this outside the turmeric or in the same circle as the turmeric, but just like offset, I see. And the same thing, we'd be going all the way around. Alright guys, so we got 10 of the Brazilian spinach, or Siso spinach, around the mamey. And what are we doing next, Stephanie? Now we're going to just add a little border of color that's also going to help protect it, but I'm not going to go around this time, I'm going to do it a little bit different. This is just from a design perspective, this is my main path. So I want that to be a little bit more open so I can see into what's happening here. So I'm going to kind of do the taller things on this backside and on the downside, so that way when you walk up through this space, you'll see the Brazilian spinach and the turmeric and the comfrey and the mamey, and it'll kind of be back set with our taller things. In addition, we're going to be able to block a lot of the midday shade by putting them in a certain space, so if there's something you want to block, say you have a windy area that's going to whip this tree around and you want to make it a little calmer for that tree until it gets established, you'd be putting some of your things that grow a little taller on that windward side to buffer that wind, or if you have a raging western sunshine coming in that you want to block, or a cold pocket that comes in that you want to divert around something, you'd be using your trees to help either allow in something or block something out depending on if you want more of that energy or less of that energy. So I'm thinking from an aesthetic perspective, it'll be really nice to be able to see all the plants as you walk down the main path, and so a lot of the taller ones will be a backdrop, plus they'll be able to help control some of the hottest time sun until this is ready to kind of be on its own. So this is coleus, which is just a beautiful ornamental that also has some medicinal properties. I'm always going to spike the bottom so I get a nice sharp edge, and then anytime you're doing cuttings, you want to make sure there is as few leaves as possible, because the leaves are going to respirate and let out a lot of moisture, and we don't want these to dry out, and we don't want this plant to be supporting its leaf growth. We really want it to focus on developing roots, and so we're going to make a bunch of cuttings of this, and then we're going to do a little bit of chaya. So chaya is a perennial green that we've talked about in our last video about all the different perennial greens that you can grow, and we talked about them and looked at the big ones, but these are the cuttings. We're doing the same thing, so we're spiking the bottom, we're taking all the leaves off, we're topping the top, and we're just going to stick that in the ground and that'll root right out for us. If you have a place that's drier or less forgiving than it is here, or if we're in the dry season, I could put these in pots, grow them out that way, and then transplant them as rooted cuttings instead, which would give me a higher ratio of success. But I have a lot of sticks, so I'll just plant twice as many sticks as I would want at the end of the day, and if half of them die back, that's okay, and if they all grow, then I can just cut them back if there's too many and feed them to our fruit trees. So I'll cut a couple more. So the size of the cuttings are what, like 10 to 12 inches approximately? And then how much is, well I guess we'll see how much is stuck under the ground. Yeah. About half? Yeah, as long as you get half underground when they're this size, that's great. You just don't want a big stalk sticking up, because again, they'll just kind of dry out. So I'm going to go on this side here, and I'm going to plant my coleus right in the ground like this. The coleus don't care much at all. You can leave them in a pile in the corner of your house and I feel like they would root. And this soil is nice and moist from the rains we had. If it wasn't soft and I wasn't getting enough penetration and they weren't going deep enough, then I would probably come in here with a broad fork or maybe my shovel and loosen it up a little more, but we're doing pretty good here. And if I was going more into the grassy area, I would want to be pulling that grass back just like we did with this. But because this is less grassy and more mulchy from the trees above, I can get away with not doing as much. But I might want to pull a couple of these vines out, but these are very, very tolerant and very quick to grow. So we're just going to shove those in, I might go a little deeper, I might get my shovel in and make a little hole. This is the chaya. So if your land is not so soft, then I'll just make a nice hole, stick that in, and then nest it back around. These are so much easier to pull, this kind of grass, than those big clumpers. I love the broad fork for this because when you're doing the broad fork, it has the eight tines, and when you open it up, you can just stick your sticks right into all the tines that the broad fork left. So that's how I do it on big swaths. A couple more coleus. So the last thing we're going to do is, we still see quite a bit of soil. If I have a ton of more woodchips or leaves, I could come in and just mulch it really heavy, that would be fine too. But because I don't really want to haul all those woodchips down here, and also I think I could add another system in very quickly, which is those chia seeds. I use them all over the place right when I bare soil, so I don't want any of this bare soil. One, it's erosion, two, it's an opportunity for weeds to grow in, but it's also an opportunity for me to get another crop into here. Chia seeds don't have big root systems, so they're not going to compete with any of this stuff here. They're inexpensive, they make chia seeds very fast, they make beautiful flowers for the pollinators. So I'm just going to go all around this open space with that, and then I'm going to come back in later once they sprout up. They're going to sprout up probably in the next three to four days, and they'll dominate this space, and then as they get taller, if they're in the way of anything, I'll just yank them up or chop them and put them down as mulch. Then any that are in a good spot, I will let go ahead and go to flower and make more chia seeds for me, and then as they drop around, they start to naturalize, and anytime there's an open spot, the chia seeds will start to come up on their own, which is great. And I get chia seeds. So that's our little mini-tropical mamey guild here, mamey, comfrey, white turmeric, Brazilian spinach, a little coleus for beautiful color and for more shade, and our chia kind of back protection wall from some of the intense sun, as well as creating just a nice microclimate for our mamey and giving me lots of edible, nutritious greens while I wait for the years to come for this mamey to give me fruit. Alright Stephanie, so I just showed you guys out there in YouTube land how to plant out a mamey fruit tree with all the surrounding support plants, so the plant now has a community as well as a community of microbes through the wood chips and your K&F ferment that you did. I want to ask you a few questions now. So number one is, what knife tool were you using? Let everybody know what that is, because that seemed kind of handy for people, and I'm sure people are wondering, what's that knife tool you just kind of made like a precision hole instead of like digging up a big area so you don't have to disturb the soil that much, because that's very important not to disturb the soil as minimal as possible. So this is called a Horihori, which is a certain kind of garden tool from Japan. It's a mix between a shovel, a hand shovel, and a knife. This one comes from an amazing company, Bare Bones, if you're ever out there in YouTube world and you want to send me some more tools, I love them! But I did buy this, I don't work with them at all, but it's my favorite Horihori of all. It's super durable, it has a super serrated edge here, then a sharp edge here, and a sharp point. It also even has this little cutter in here, whether I'm using twine on one of my trellises and I want to cut it, or I have a stubborn root or vine I'm trying to get out, I can slice it that way. It's heavier than a lot of Horihoris, but I can pry on it. I've broken so many tools because I'm pretty rough on them, but this one I can pry anything open and it's an amazing, amazing tool to have in the garden. Cool! So aside from the tool you use, anything else you would recommend that people use like the resources, like the wood chip mulch, I strongly believe in wood chip mulch and fungal-dominated mulches and or composts, so you want to say a few words about this also, because when you go down to the nursery you're buying bag compost, which is all bacterial compost. People forget how important the fungal colonization and they are to especially, I mean fruit trees. Fruit trees need more fungally-dominated soil, whereas vegetables generally need more bacterial based soil. Yeah, absolutely. So if you can think of these trees are meant to be in forests, and forests that have trees have lots of fallen down trees and lots of woody debris, and so that's the forest ecosystem is a more fungally-dominated system, and that's what we want this to be. While we are like walking the edge here between a more forested area and a more grassland area, which is more bacterially-dominated, we want this to be a fungal-rich area so that this Mame tree gets all that it needs. So what I did is grab some of the fungal life from the deep forest, where it is very fungally-dominated, even better if I could have found an old growth Mame tree, and then get the soil from that, that would have already collected all of the microbial and fungal life that Mame loves. And so you can really like jump your soil forward to a mature soil microbiome when you're bringing in these bacteria and fungus from a similar section of the land that you're trying to create, or the tree itself, and or like if you have a, you're starting an apple farm and you can get wood chips from an old apple orchard and have those sitting around for a while, that apple wood is going to naturally attract more of the fungal life that's related to apples. So things like that. And these are, these wood chips are pretty broken down. I would use, the broken down ones are awesome because then they already are being inoculated with all these things, but fresh ones work as well. They're going to get inoculated pretty quickly. And though focusing on that wood really feeds that fungus, if I just kept this open with leaves or something like that, I would be promoting a little bit more of a bacterially-dominated soil. So I'm really looking to what is the final ecosystem this tree is creating and wants to be in and thrives in, and how can I import as many of those factors as quickly as possible into this system, so that like we talked about, it's a family. It's not just a family of plants, it's a family of microbes too. Everybody's invited to the table, and we're all going to be better for that system. And yeah, let's have a party. Party! Plant party! Microbe party! Microbe and plant party. So in the context of like your system where you live, I mean I'm looking at the forest just like 20 yards in front of me, and it's easy for you to collect microbes. What about a person who lives in a residential house in Orlando, right? Where are they going to get microbes from a mamey tree when they want to plant mamey in their yard, or if they're in Maine and they're planting apple trees, what recommendations would you give them to try to get some of that fungal activity into their soil and help them out a little bit? Sure. Well, and it's just finding the spot that is the healthiest forest ecosystem that's the closest to you possible. What I did actually, when I still sometimes if I'm near El Yunque, which is our rainforest that's here, that's very old growth, because this farm, while it was abandoned for 30 years before two years ago, it was cattle before that. So this is still a really young, immature, recovering forest ecosystem. So I've gone into El Yunque, the national rainforest, went deep in the hardwood areas and dug out some soil from there, and brought those microbes home and inoculated the water and raised them up and spread them around too. So anywhere that you can find that has the healthiest soil microbiome, and when you go into the forest area, just look under logs and sticks, and when you see that white mycelium running, you'll see this spiderweb-y stuff underneath those logs, and that's what you're looking for. The backsides of any of the wildest parts you can find. You can order all this stuff too, I just don't know where offhand to order it from. Yeah, so you could bring in mycorrhizae, which is a lot of different species, and you could get a shotgun species, which I do, but I also agree that it's probably better to get the local microbes instead of bringing in, but I would always recommend adding some mycorrhizae, I use the Plant Success brand, I've had videos about this before, which is better than nothing, but of course if you're planting apple trees in Maine, hey, try to go out to an apple orchard, dig up some soil and rotten stuff, hopefully they're organic, from there bring in the woodchips. I think I want to caution people too, while woodchips can be good, I would caution you as to the source, because some woodchips have been known to kill people's fruit trees and vegetable gardens due to chemical sprays that have not been broken down yet. Sure, and a lot of companies will chip up the telephone poles, which are disgusting. And I also too, besides putting virgin woodchips down, one of the things Stephanie did was she lets the woodchips sit a while, break down, because then they're going to have a lot more fungal activity than virgin woodchips that will attract fungi, let's bring down semi-broken down woodchips that already have a pretty good amount of fungi in there. I think that's really important, not many people will tell you guys this, because in chemical agriculture, the microbes and the fungi are not really being considered unfortunately. And this would look open like this, except there wouldn't be any plants, but this would have all been done with herbicide. They would spray a ring around where they're putting the tree with herbicide, plant the tree, and then continually spray a ring around the tree with herbicide to keep the grasses back. And instead here we went the almost complete opposite direction. Not less life, more life. How can we add as much life as possible? Bacteria, fungus, plants, seeds, roots, sticks, all of those things in, and then that ecosystem jumps up as fast as possible. Wonderful. So yeah, we've learned a lot today here at the CAI, Caribbean Agroforestry Institute. And Stephanie, do you want to tell people about the CAI and why you started here in the Caribbean? And you know, you guys could come in person to volunteer, learn hands-on, come to the permaculture workshops, the classes you do here, so you could actually do rings yourself with Stephanie like I was able to do for you guys today. So tell them more about that. Sure. So we're an agricultural non-profit, and we do a lot of education for anything from little kids to fully grown people who act like little kids or act like grown people. Either way, you're all welcome. Anything from a half day to multi-day classes, from permaculture to herbalism, agroforestry, as well as we do some outreach projects, building community food forests around the island. We're working on that this year and really excited for schools and public parks and things like that. We do a little bit of private client work, but we're in July, pretty soon, mid-July. We've got a three-day permaculture immersion that's going to be absolutely amazing. Just get your hands dirty, learn everything from starting seeds, cuttings, building your soil, designing your system, installing your system, maintaining your system, making your own fertilizers, everything, all 15 organic, farm-fresh meals prepared for you by our awesome chef. Camp out. It's going to be a great time. And we have a variety of other classes on caribbeanagroforestry.org. We'd love to see you, and we do take volunteers as well. We put you through a good test first, though, no loafers. We work hard around here. We have a great volunteer here now who came who's a big fan of John's. So thanks for sending those guys along. Oh, you're welcome. So the other thing I'd say about Stephanie is that she has the biggest collection of plants and tropical edibles and other support plants that I've seen anywhere. She's connected with many people. Every time I visit her, I bring her plant genetics from people I know and rare plants, and then she knows a lot of other people she gets plants from. So this is a lady, if you guys really are wanting to do it right and have the most diversity here in the Caribbean, definitely want to reach out to her and get involved in some of the programs they have here. Every time I come here, it's just a treat for me to see how much more they develop, how much more land they've turned into permaculture food for us, and such amazing examples and amazing work of what they're doing here to literally turn around this formerly grazed land into something a lot more productive to produce local food, high quality food, in a way in symbiosis with nature instead of against nature, which is what big companies are doing. So Stephanie, you want to share once again your website and any social media that you do post regularly on, because I know you're mostly trying to be off your phone like I do because you're just in the garden mostly and in the farm. Yeah. So the best way to reach me is through the website at caribbeanagroforestry.org. My email is grow at caribbeanagroforestry.org. And I kind of have a Twitter, but I don't really, or an ex, but I don't really post on it. I don't post on anything else. So you're just going to have to email me the old-fashioned way and come on down and we can have a real in-person exchange, which will be great. But I also do answer emails periodically when I'm not covered in dirt. Try when it's raining. When I'm not watching my swales. All right. Cool. Yeah. Swales, not whales. All right, guys. Anyways, I hope you guys really enjoyed this episode learning how to properly plant a fruit tree with all the supporting plants, you know, whether you live in a residential context, you know, in the middle of the country or here in the tropics, right? We want you guys to use more natural methods instead of these chemical methods that really pollute the earth and give your plants even a more challenging time to grow. She set this plant up for success. Okay. So maybe in a future upcoming episode, I'll have to come back next time I'm here and we'll give you guys an update on any of the made sapote plants in the nice ring here with all the supporting plants to show you guys actually what it looks like. So yeah, if you guys enjoyed this episode, hey, please be sure to give this a big thumbs up. More importantly, share this with other people so that they can learn the proper way to plant a fruit tree, permaculture style, so that they can have the best success and have the healthiest fruit and do, most importantly, the least amount of work and maintenance in the future. Because as these plants grow up tall, it's going to help shade this out from the direct sun so the plant won't burn. So you know, you'll be more successful in the end. Also be sure to click that subscribe button right down below so you don't miss my new and upcoming episodes. I've got them every five to seven days. You never know where I'll show up, what you'll be learning on my YouTube channel. Make sure you click the little bell so you get notified as many videos as you can. And finally, be sure to check past episodes. Past episodes are a wealth of knowledge, especially the ones that I've made with Stephanie here at the CAI. Links down below to those in the description to check those out. I definitely recommend you guys watch those. So with that, my name is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com. We'll see you next time. And until then, remember, keep on growing.