(upbeat music) - [Narrator] "The Home-Scale Forest Garden" is brought to you by Brookfield Renewable, a provider of renewable power supports Public Television, reminding the public to make safety a priority.

Know the risks, use caution in and around water, information available at safewaters.com.

- [Speaker] Since 1979, Adirondack Fragrance has offered artisan made place-based fragrance products made from our region's unique botanicals, providing aromas inspired by the mountains, forests, and fields, adirondackfragrance.com.

- [Narrator] And by Richard and Deborah Macsherry, the Northern New York Community Foundation.

And by these additional sponsors.

(upbeat music) Closed captioning, sponsored by Reed's Incorporated.

- Welcome to the Home-Scale Forest Garden.

I'm Loraine O'Donnell with Dani Baker, creator of The Enchanted Edible Forest Garden, and author of the book, "The Home Scale Forest Garden", on which this series is based.

In these eight episodes, we are visiting Dani's Garden in Northern New York at different times of the year, we're also taking a peak at a subtropical garden in Florida.

Well, it's November and it's getting close to winter.

So what do we need to do to get ready for the coming cold season?

- You know, Loraine, it's crucial to protect plants during the winter season to ensure their survival and also to maintain garden health.

Things like sub-zero temperatures and foraging from wildlife like deer can severely harm plants.

There are a variety of chores that need to be done to protect them and to get the garden ready for next season.

- Our special correspondent, Yatile Patterson, had an opportunity to visit Dani and help with these late autumn chores.

(upbeat music) - Between now and the first of the year is the best time to clean out your bird houses, so they're nice and clean for the new birds coming to nest next year.

So would you open that?

- Yes.

- Let's see what's in here.

- Let's see.

- Oh wow, okay.

So there were at least two different birds that nested in here.

And then I think maybe a little mouse.

So I'm gonna gingerly start cleaning this out and we might see a mouse run out or not, let's see.

- And you will see me running.

- Okay, nope, we're not gonna see a mouse run out, good.

Okay, so we're gonna take the contents out.

We can just throw it on the ground.

And I see there's stuff under the screen.

So not all bird houses have a screen, but this one does.

And I wanna make sure I clean out what's underneath.

All right, I don't feel there's any need to sterilize this.

I think the winter cold will do the job.

So I'm just getting all that stuff out and get it off of here.

And then we'll put this back and we're ready for a new bird to come.

- So like what kind of birds would come in here during the winter?

- Chickadees, will start scouting for boxes in January on a nice day in January.

And that's still winter, isn't it?

That's why I like to have them cleaned out before the first of the year.

Little later you'll have Bluebirds possibly, yes.

We always want Bluebirds and Sparrows, wrens.

(music whooshing) Now I'm gonna demonstrate a really easy way to start a new plant.

I'm gonna take a piece of this flag tape, and I'm gonna tie it around this garden staple.

This way I can mark the spot where I do the layering.

It's called layering.

And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take a low lying branch of this clove current bush, and I'm gonna clip it right to the ground so it has contact with the earth right in this spot there.

Okay, and then I'm gonna just throw a little bit of compost on top, semi composted wood chips.

And by mid spring, I bet you there'll be roots and there'll be a branch coming up through the wood chips.

And I'll wait a little while longer and then I will clip the branch at both ends and dig up the roots.

And I have a new plant to either pot up or plant in a new spot.

Another thing you can do is called tip layering, where you actually hold the tip of the branch down to the ground.

So I'm gonna take this tip and push this down around it.

And almost, that's pretty good.

And put some compost over that.

Now the reason I use this tape is so that I can pull it up and we can see where I am doing the layering.

So next spring it'll be easy to find the plants.

(music whooshing) Now we're gonna do a chore that's really important.

We're gonna paint this trunk white.

- [Yatile] Why are we painting it white?

- In March when the sun is really hot, it warms the dark bark really fast and gets it very hot.

And then in march, as soon as the sun sets, it gets super cold.

And that contrast in temperature causes the trunk to split.

And once it splits, it lets in disease, or it can actually just kill the tree by splitting.

In fact, this is an Asian pear.

I planted an Asian pear right here.

And the first year, that's what happened.

I didn't paint it and it split and it actually killed the tree.

So we don't want that to happen anymore.

All fruit trees really need this.

And if you go to an orchard, you'll often see the trunks painted white.

And that's why.

So we're gonna paint it white.

Would you help me by just holding this up so I can get under it?

Let's hold on, there, right there.

And then we'll drop it down and I'll paint underneath.

So you can use a diluted latex paint, or in this case, this is a milk-based paint that comes in a powder form.

And then I just mix with water, so let's see.

Oh yeah, that's good.

So we're just gonna paint all around the trunk on all sides.

Usually a paint job like this lasts a couple of years, and then I have to replenish it during the second year.

And this tree was just planted this spring, which is why there's no paint on it yet.

Okay, lemme do that.

All right, now let's see if we can drop it down.

Here, let me help you 'cause it's a branch, I don't want to break.

There we go, great, okay, now I'll reach down here and get what I missed.

- And so we're gonna paint the whole tree.

- Yeah, this is the whole trunk.

We're gonna paint the whole trunk because Asian pears are particularly vulnerable to this, as are cherry trees.

In fact, I have a whole row of cherry trees over there.

We can show you in a minute the damage that was done because I neglected to paint those as well, so a word to the wise.

- And so white paint is just a whole lot better than using any other color.

- Yeah, the white paint reflects the light a lot better and keeps the tree cool.

And then when the temperature drops at night, it's not as big a contrast and it's less likely to split the bark.

It's really important to protect your trees and bushes from rodents that burrow under the snow in the winter and eat the bark.

So if you have a single stem tree or bush, you can use these hardware cloth barriers, which work really well.

But if you have a bush that has multiple branches coming up from the ground, you can't really fit one of those around it.

So I use window screen, metal window screen.

So I buy a roll and I cut it, in my case, about a foot wide.

You have to cut it the height of your average snowfall.

So here we rarely get snow over a foot, but if you get two feet of snow, you'll need to cut it about two feet wide.

And what we do is we put it around the base of the thank you, that's perfect, the base of the plant and flush to the ground, and then clip it with a couple of clothes pins.

And I do this for each of my bushes that I think is vulnerable to mouse predation or vole predation under the snow.

- [Yatile] And so these will stay here like this up until spring.

- Right, right.

And then I remove them because grasses and other plants will grow through them, and then I won't be able to use them again unless I take them off before things start to grow.

This is what I call an upside down tomato cage.

I fabricated it to keep deer away from a seedling.

It's been on here since this tree was maybe a foot high.

But now as you can see, the tree has grown beyond it and it's higher than a deer can reach.

So I'm gonna remove the cage, let me see.

Oh, there we go.

And I'm gonna pull it straight up.

I like to wait till all the leaves are gone to do this, so I'm not knocking any leaves off.

And whoops.

There you can see these garden staples that are hanging from the cage.

That's how I secured it to the ground around the tree.

So now the deer will come maybe in the winter and they'll eat these lower branches, but the main big branches here will remain intact and it'll grow up from there.

And now I can use this to put around another seedling.

- What type of trees benefit the most from this?

- Well, in my experience, the deer will acquire a taste for just about anything.

So I would protect every seedling just to be safe.

(upbeat music) - There are some plants that we wanna protect from deer.

Is there anything that our deer can eat in our garden that won't interfere with plant growth?

- You know, in the cold season, deer that come into our garden, they can eat comfrey and strawberry leaves that are close to the ground, and there's enough nutrition stored in the roots of these plants that they'll come back fine the next year.

But if a deer eats the growing tips of a tree seedling, that's much more injurious.

Plants also need protection from the cold.

One way we do that is we put extra mulch around our plants, that helps insulate them from Sub-Zero temperatures.

(upbeat music) It's time to add some extra mulch to a few plants.

The first one is this Rhubarb.

So I'm gonna put about half a bucket around the base on each of these Rhubarbs.

- [Yatile] Why is this so important this time of the year?

- The mulch helps keep the ground warmer around the roots, and also as it slowly decays, it gives a boost of nutrition to the plant when it starts to grow again in the spring.

(music whooshing) Another chore you can do really any time of year is spreading branches.

Now, first I wanna say something about this stuff.

These branches are coming up from the rootstock and they're really not part of the tree.

There's the Asian pear tree right here.

I will wait till spring to cut these out.

It's not a good idea to do any pruning this time of year for several reasons.

First of all, the, branches hold nutrients in them over the winter that the tree uses to grow in the spring.

If you cut them away, you're removing all those nutrients.

Second of all, a tree is not able to fight off fungal disease as effectively this time of year as it could during its growth phase.

And third of all, certain kinds of pruning cuts encourage growth.

And the last thing you wanna do this time of year is encourage the plant to grow, because it's going into a dormant state and you don't wanna disrupt that.

So I'm not gonna mess with these, but what I am gonna do is spread some branches.

The ideal angle of a tree branch is about 45 degrees from the main trunk.

And you can see that these two branches are more like 30 degrees.

So I'm gonna use these spreaders.

They come in different sizes, and I'm just gonna put it between the two branches so that I end up with more of a 45 degree angle than a 30 degree angle.

You can do this anytime of year, but I just noticed the need since the leaves were down, so I'm gonna do it now.

I'm gonna push this one away and put that in like that.

All right, that's it.

This way, the branches are at a better angle to hold fruit.

If you look up at this tree, you can see there's some shriveled up dead fruit.

They were pears, we call them mummies.

We wanna remove them.

- How do we remove them?

- Well, we're gonna use the same tool we use to pick fruit, and we're just gonna get underneath and it comes right off.

You hear how hollow this sounds?

The reason we wanna remove them is they may harbor disease and we don't want them on the tree in the spring 'cause they could spread that disease to the new fruit.

So we're just gonna take them down and we're gonna feed them to the pigs.

(Dani laughing) Would you like to do a couple?

- Yeah, let's see.

- All right, I'm gonna go for this one here.

- Yeah, okay.

You can twist, it might help.

There you go.

- Ah, too easy.

Okay, let's see, what's another good one?

Let's go right here, I don't think any of them are good.

(Yatile laughing) - [Dani] Twist.

- [Yatile] Did I get it?

- [Dani] No, I don't think so.

- [Yatile] Not quite, okay.

- There you go, there, okay.

So we'll just get the rest of them so that there won't be any disease on the tree for next year.

(music whooshing) This time of year, it's important to add a little extra mulch to some plants.

And here we have a bed of Alpine strawberries.

Now I want you to notice, there are already quite a few leaves that have fallen.

'cause when you have an edible forest, there's a lot of leaf mulch that naturally falls.

But we just planted these alpine strawberries this spring, and I wanna give it a little extra protection.

Would you help me?

- Yes, so we're adding extra leaves on top of the leaves that are already there.

- Right.

- And you set for protection, but for what else?

- Well, mainly to keep the ground warmer around the strawberries.

And also again, these will decay and provide a little extra nutrition.

- Nice, so how do we do this?

- Well, we're just gonna take handfuls and throw them over.

We're gonna like this and yep.

And then just smooth them out.

We just need a couple of inches.

My neighbors are kind enough to deliver these already shredded leaves.

Shredded leaves are really better than unshredded leaves because first of all, they don't mat down.

And second of all, they don't blow away as readily as flat leaves that catch the wind.

So I'll just, yep, this is great.

Don't they smell great?

- They do.

- All right.

- It smells really nice, it smells like fall.

It does, let's move backwards.

Can you move back a little bit and we'll get this other bunch, yep, very good.

- Here.

- Yep, great.

(leaves crunching) That looks pretty good.

[Woosh] These are asparagus ferns.

If you don't cut a stalk of asparagus, it'll grow into a beautiful fern like this.

And they're very decorative this time of year.

You don't wanna cut these back until the spring because they're still providing nutrition back to the roots, even this time of year.

(upbeat music) - In northern climates, we prepare for extreme cold weather.

How do we prepare for extreme hot weather?

- Our southern states experience some of the highest temperatures in the country, with intense tropical sunlight.

This poses significant challenges to our gardens.

- We visited Pike Food Forest in Florida to find out how gardens there remain productive and resilient even in face of prolonged hot spells.

(upbeat music) - I'm here in Jupiter, Florida with Amanda Pike, in her incredible forest garden.

And Amanda, you know, up in the north country where my garden is, our challenging season is winter when it's really cold.

But here it must be summer when it's super hot.

How do you manage that?

- Right, so summer is our hardship season.

It's extremely hot.

There's lots of rain, so we want to counteract that.

Wintertime tends to be dry.

And so if you have dry dieback, like your ground cover dies, and then you have torrential flooding, you're gonna have lots of erosion.

So we do plant a lot of fortress plants, what we call fortress plants along our walkways.

So ginger, turmeric, things like Achira, anything with tubers, sweet potato.

These will sort of block some of the erosion.

Also, they will die back in the winter, providing a natural mulch and grow again in the summer, shading the ground.

But we also make sure that we have constant plants growing.

We add mulch continuously.

We like the wood chips, which you can get for free, from arborists, to suppress growth and hold down the soil, but to promote soil creation, we prefer oak leaves, pine needles, leaf litter, which are often just in bags, roadside, that we collect.

(upbeat music) - Even though the climates are so different, mulch works in both environments, protecting against freezing temperatures and sweltering heat.

- Yes, mulch helps keep soil moist in the summer and keeps roots warm in the winter, piling on lots of mulch supports healthy root systems.

- And even though it's late fall and there's definitely a crisp chill in the air, there's still lots to harvest in an edible forest garden.

(upbeat music) - This is Turkish rocket.

Now, we harvested some of these leaves in early April, and I wanna point out that there's still fresh leaves to harvest in early November.

This is the great thing about perennial plants.

The purpose of me being here today though, is to harvest some seeds.

So these are Turkish rocket seeds that are pretty dry now, so I'm just gonna collect a bunch of them.

These seeds need to be stratified, which means they need to be kept cold for a period of time before they can germinate.

So I'm gonna pick a bunch of them and I'm gonna put them actually in the freezer over the winter.

And then in late winter, early spring, I'm gonna plant some in a pot.

This quince tree has a lone fruit on it, which we're gonna harvest today.

I'm just gonna clip it up, it came right off.

It's perfectly ripe and I'm gonna put it in here.

- Nice, and so what are like some of the things you can use this for?

- Well, this is a Russian quince.

It's a variety that you can actually eat fresh.

It's sweet enough, most quinces are not sweet enough.

You can slice it thin and eat it fresh, or you can cook it and make it into a great jam, or you can add it to other fruits in pies or tarts, and it gives a really nice flavor and texture.

(music whooshing) We've been harvesting these Goji berries for about a month, and they continue to ripen well into the fall, even into early winter.

I think they must have a natural antifreeze in them.

But just today I'm gonna pick a few to freeze.

So we're just picking some off here and there aren't many left.

What I don't pick, the birds will enjoy, when I'm done, I'm just gonna cover this container and put it in the freezer and then I can put them in cereals or you know, just eat them frozen in the winter.

[Woosh] These are horse radish plants.

They're pretty prominent, but these leaves are all gonna die down and then we won't know where the plants are, which is why I am digging the root right now.

By the way, the leaves are edible as well as the root, and especially when the plant first starts growing in the spring when they're nice and tender, but still quite spicy.

So let's see if we can find a root.

Lets see what we got here.

Ooh, there's a root, look at that.

Okay, there's a horseradish root, so I'm gonna take my clippers.

I think this root started here and went over here and created that new plant.

So I'm gonna take a couple of clips here, all right.

This is a horse radish root.

So the way we prepare this is we're gonna skin off, we're gonna wash it first, then we're gonna take the skin off.

Then we're gonna chop it up into little pieces and pulverize it.

Maybe add a little vinegar and it'll be just like horseradish you buy in the store, only a little bit stronger.

[Upbeat Music] - Even in November in northern New York, the garden still yields crops.

I never would've thought that.

It's definitely one of the many differences between a forest garden and a traditional garden.

Now, as a harvest winds down, what steps need to be done to get ready for the next growing season?

- Well, this time of year is the perfect time to plan your garden strategy for next year.

How do you want to replace a dead plant?

What kind of spring ground cover do you want to install?

And it's a great time to design new projects.

One such project might be planting a foundation planting.

You don't need a large yard to grow perennial food plants.

You can plan to incorporate them just on one side of your house, like in this example.

(upbeat music) Earlier this fall, I sheet mulched around this entire building and I did a to-scale drawing of the building and all of the trees.

And also planned where I'm gonna plant bushes and maybe another couple of trees next year.

- Excuse my pun, but "wood" you explain why there is wood on the ground?

- Right, well, as I was doing this planning, I was marking the spots where I'm gonna plant new bushes and I couldn't put the stakes into the ground because there's cardboard that hasn't decayed yet under the wood chip mulch.

So I just laid them with the end pointing to where I plan to plant a bush.

- So sometime next year we should expect to see new plants.

- That's right and I'm planning them, the ones, you can see how shade is over here.

I'm gonna put bushes that really like shade there.

But on the sunnier side, I'm gonna put bushes that really like the sun.

So that's part of the planning process.

And I've been studying how the sun moves around this building for the last three months to figure that out.

(upbeat music) No matter what side of the house you want to plant perennial food plants, you can always find options that will grow well there.

- Dani, I have so enjoyed visiting the Enchanted Edible Food Forest throughout all four seasons, and it's been such a pleasure to collaborate with you and learn what it takes to establish and maintain a food forest garden.

- Thank you, we encourage viewers to consider creating their own food forest gardens, which are adaptable to any scale and to any climate.

Establishing a garden like this fosters a habitat for many native species, supporting biodiversity, and it creates a resilient landscape that yields an abundant harvest with minimal labor, year after year.

- I'm Loraine O'Donnell with Dani Baker.

Thank you for watching The Home Scale Forest Garden.

Happy gardening!

- [Narrator] The Home-Scale Forest Garden is brought to you by Brookfield Renewable, a provider of renewable power supports public television, reminding the public to make safety a priority.

Know the risks, use caution in and around water, information available at safewaters.com.

- [Speaker] Since 1979, Adirondack Fragrance has offered artisan made place-based fragrance products made from our region's unique botanicals, providing aromas inspired by the mountains, forests and fields, adirondackfragrance.com.

- [Narrator] And by Richard and Deborah Macsherry, the Northern New York Community Foundation.

And by these additional sponsors.

(upbeat music) Closed captioning sponsored by Reeds Incorporated.

- [Narrator 2] Dani Baker's award-winning book, "The Home Scale Forest Garden, How to Plan, Plant and Tend a Resilient Edible Landscape", is available from Chelsea Green Publishing at chelseagreen.com, and wherever books are sold.

(gentle music) (gentle music)