Seabuckthorn and why it deserves a place in your food forest

So Seabuckthorn, why do we have it in our garden? It's from Europe and Asia and we're in Ontario. What does it do for the food forest and what does it do for us? Seabuckthorn is a very large part of the food forest here. It's a pioneer plant when it comes down to it. It can grow in almost nothing so you don't need to do any maintenance on it. It's going to nitrogen fix. It produces these berries which will go into it but they have a lot of benefits for us cognitively, immune system wise, like they're loaded man. And the plant itself, even though it's not native here, it's incorporated itself into the lush ecosystem. And we'll go into 0.5 here and I'll show you what we're looking at. I'm sitting on the deck overlooking the pond and the Seabuckthorn is growing in with everything else around it. It brings a nice habitat for ladybugs. Ladybugs love it man and they're one of the best predators there are for pests. Like we had someone come down from Vancouver and he was staying with some family 40 minutes down the road and he came and he's like, wow you guys have no bugs here. Like we have bugs, you'll see the dragonflies going by, you will see the odd mosquito or fly, wasps and bees bounce all over, but none of them are really attacking you. It's a balanced system and it just works. The kiwi is taking over but that'll be for another video when we show you around. Today we're going to talk about Seabuckthorn and why I think you should think about adding it to your system considering it's not invasive in your area. So you say why do you why do you think I need Seabuckthorn in my food forest? Well we're coming up on fall here. You know it's going to be sick season soon and everyone you know is going to be on and off sick for the next couple months. This is how you will protect your families and yourself from that and not get sick. Did you know that one orange has the same vitamin c content as a small handful of Seabuckthorn berries? So you can mix it in with anything. You can make teas, you can we make ice cream, it's incredible. You can make popsicles, smoothies, throw it in with some yogurt, put it on some toast with some butter. It's truly just a diverse vitamin c to have in the pantry and if you eat that once twice a day you'll get sick far less. Like people around you will be sick and your body, your immune system is just going to be fueled so you're going to be able to fight off the infection when you get it before you actually get sick. But that's just one of the reasons. Do you see how much Seabuckthorn there is in this system here? We have Seabuckthorn there, Seabuckthorn there behind us where we just were with all the berries. Down at the pond we have Seabuckthorn. It's everywhere and yes still we have space for the peaches and we still get a harvest of apples and our pawpaws are doing incredible but the Seabuckthorn it can kind of take over. So what we do is rather than just pulling them out as weeds we let them grow berries for the season and then we go and cut them out and while cutting them out we're just cutting them into small bits and we put them in the freezer so the berries will fall right off. It's the easiest way to harvest them and then you're doing two birds with one stone. You're clearing an overgrowth of trees to make space for new growth next year but when you're doing that that whole year that that weed was able to grow not only did it produce you vitamin c but they're also they're nitrogen fixers right so they come into an area that is abandoned or has poor soil quality whether it was from erosion, over tillage, whatever and they pump it back full of nitrogen to help some leafy greens start growing up and eventually as a forest starts to fill in over them they can't tolerate the shade so once they become an understory they'll slowly die out and that's why they're called a pioneer they come settle and then they've done their job but in the meantime while we have them here like this is so much vitamin c it has cognitive properties it has a lot of amino acids and some different omegas in it it helps with clarity mental retention so if you're a student if you're working a hard job it can just help you have that clear head space I mean that's even just nice to have in general you can live things a little fuller and if a berry or eating some aronia here and there some sage in in the in the diet fresh fruit like peaches if it makes you feel better it's probably better food for you so we have the medicinal and really healthy for you factor and the nitrogen fixing and the bringing in beneficial bugs but we also have natural rabbit protection so the trees themselves don't really keep the rabbits out but as we're harvesting through this we're putting all of our prunings around trees because these things are barbed I don't know if you can see that but that's a barb like these are not fun trees so we don't get any rabbit damage on girdling the trees so it's healthy for you it's going to help your soil it's going to help your pest problems and it's going to help your rabbit problems let me know why you would not put seabuck thorn into your food forest so all that I'm doing is I'm taking the pruners and I'm cutting everything off of the branches that have the berries that I want to harvest but just to show you guys how beneficial the trees are for the bugs here like we we just look at the tree and there's just there's ants going up the tree there's a wasp flying around it's it's become a part of the ecosystem so they must be looking for punctured berries or maybe the wasps will poke a couple open I'm not sure but just to see that they're loving the seabuck thorn it was a good addition but they got their turn they got help from the seabuck thorn now I'm going to take my turn I'm going to take all of this what you're going to do is cut them off in about foot to foot and a half sections and place them right in the freezer because sometimes it can be a little hard picking them off let me see if I can get it to focus come on sometimes they just well this one's not popping but they pop easily while you're pulling them off and they're kind of annoying to be picking so if you put them in the freezer and then just give the sticks just a bang the berries tend to just fall right off so that's what we're going to do here that's what we've done in the past and we just keep it frozen we have the berries we can if we want to make a fresh ice cream if we I mean it's winter half of the year so you got to have it in storage but it's not going to be fresh but it's vitamin c and it's who knows maybe school will be a little easier we'll see so yeah there it is in my opinion I think that you should have seabuck thorn in your food forest if you don't think so I'd be curious to know why so leave it down in the comments and we can have a good conversation about it but seabuck thorn it's it's nice because there's nothing else really fruiting right now so we have the time to harvest it and might as well fill that time on the calendar but yeah thanks for tuning into the food forest guys I'll maybe I'll show you a seabuck thorn ice cream recipe our pears are coming in another probably month month and a half but yeah we'll see you next time thanks for watching 2026 permaculture legacy