(pleasant music) (pleasant music continues) - [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.

- [Voiceover] 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.

(pleasant 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 peek at a subtropical garden in Florida.

Well, it's mid-April and there's already a lot going on in the garden.

- It's so exciting to walk around the garden this time of year, there are things already in bloom and things that you can already harvest.

- How important is it to have something blooming in the garden almost year round?

- Well, we wanna keep our pollinators around.

So if we have something blooming from as early in the season to as late in the season, they'll be there to do their job.

Bumblebees are already active.

They come out before honeybees.

(cheerful music) It's early spring and it's very exciting to walk around the garden this time of year, because there are lots of things that are already blooming.

This is an example.

This is a cornelian cherry.

It's a a small tree or large bush.

It's related to the dogwood and it has edible berries that are like cherries that ripen in midsummer.

But right now, it's finishing its bloom.

This starts blooming in March, even before Forsythia.

So you can see the entire tree is covered with lovely blooms, yellow, very bright for early spring, very easy bush to grow, not picky about soil.

It can grow in a little shade or sun.

So now we're gonna go take a look at the honeyberries.

So this is a native bush.

It has edible blueberries that will ripen in June, and right now it's full of flowers and the bumblebees are out pollinating.

So bumblebees, it's only around 40 degrees today, in the forties today, bumblebees can come out really early.

They're native pollinators.

Honeybees need 55 degrees or better before they start moving around.

So we're very grateful that we have the native bumblebees to pollinate these.

(transition whooshing) This is a Nanking cherry bush.

This is one of the earliest bushes to flower and the earliest cherry bush to flower in my garden.

I have maybe three or four different cherry bushes.

This one will have an edible tart cherry later on in the season, it originates in the far east.

It makes a really good hedge plant because it grows rather densely and it grows to maybe six feet tall.

The birds like to nest in it and it's just beautiful this time of year.

(transition whooshing) So this is an apricot tree.

The apricot trees are the first fruit trees to bloom in my garden.

You can see the lovely blooms white here and pink on some other apricots.

The thing about apricots though, is since they bloom so early, they're very vulnerable to early frost.

And to be honest, this has bloomed almost every year.

But I've never had fruit because we have these frost after the bloom that kill the possibility of having fruit.

To try to avert that, I've planted them on north facing slopes to try to slow the blooming a little bit.

But so far it hasn't worked.

(pleasant music) In this kind of gardening, Loraine, you study your land to identify micro climates, areas that are cooler or warmer than the surroundings that could benefit certain plants, like a cooler spot for apricots or a warmer spot for a plant that needs more heat.

- Even though it's early in the season, I see there are already plants ready to harvest in the garden.

- Yes, because all of the plants in a forest garden are perennial.

There are plants to harvest even very early in the spring.

Plants like Good King Henry, Turkish Rocket, lemon balm, and much more.

All great ingredients for a tasty spring salad.

(pleasant music) So here we have some perennial salad fixings.

So this is called Good King Henry.

And look at how big it is already.

It's a perennial spinach.

So if you look at the leaf, it looks very much like a spinach leaf and it tastes quite a bit like spinach, but it's perennial.

I planted this 10 years ago and it comes up every spring ready to harvest in April.

So I wanna show you this also.

These even has flower heads already and these are also edible.

So I'm gonna pick some of these for a salad.

And right next to them are perennial onions.

So these are at the scallion stage now, just as big as you would buy them in the store.

And I'm gonna cut a couple of these for the salad as well.

So I like an onion flavor in the salad.

I'm gonna do this, cut 'em up.

And I also wanna point out a couple of other things in this area.

So in this edible forest, we want to integrate other plants that provide the nutrients that our food plants require.

So this is blue lupine.

This is a legume that fixes nitrogen and it's actually self-seeded.

I planted them up by the fence and it self-seeded down here.

And look at how beautiful the leaves are.

And they'll have a stalk with a bluish flower that attracts beneficials.

They're not edible, but they're very pretty, and they're also very nutritious for the other plants.

I also wanna show you this.

So these are tulips.

They're not open yet.

And many people don't know that the tulip flowers are edible.

When I plant the tulips, I plant daffodils nearby, like right close to them.

Mice and voles love to eat tulip bulbs, but they'll avoid daffodils 'cause the daffodils are poisonous.

So this way I can actually preserve tulip bulbs and not have them eaten by the rodents.

I should caution you though, daffodils are poisonous to people as well as animals.

So be careful not to cut any daffodils to put in your salad.

(transition whooshing) So this is another perennial vegetable.

It's called Turkish rocket.

It's like a spicy mustard.

You can eat it raw at this stage 'cause these leaves are very young and tender.

Or you can cook it any way you cook a leafy green.

But I'm just gonna take a few of these.

They're pretty spicy, so I'm just gonna take a few of them for the salad.

And I wanna point out that this is self-seeded.

So there's some additional plants just starting up in the vicinity of these.

And I'm very excited about that because it's just the more the merrier and I didn't have to plant them.

So this is lemon balm.

So this is an herb.

It's in the mint family.

It doesn't tend to spread out through roots, but it does self-seed.

So you can see it's self-seeded a bit around here, but I don't mind because it's covering the ground and it has a very distinct lemon flavor.

So I'm gonna cut a little to be in the salad just to give that little lemon flavor to the salad.

But you can also use it for tea and in summer drinks and so on.

So just a few leaves.

There we go.

This is another perennial ingredient for our salad.

It's lovage.

It's a perennial celery.

You can see the leaves look just like celery.

The stalks look very much like celery, but it's perennial.

So I planted this maybe eight years ago, and every year it comes up, it'll grow very tall.

It'll actually grow to three or four feet tall.

But right now it's, I'm just gonna harvest a few leaves 'cause it's nice to have a nice celery flavor in a salad.

And the leaves and the stems are both edible.

(transition whooshing) So in this bed, we have two perennial plants that we can put in our salad, chives and sweet cicely.

So look at how tall the chives are already.

I'm so excited.

So I'm gonna just take a few chives, 'cause we already have onions, so we don't want too much of this onion flavor.

And then the sweet cicely.

So sweet cicely looks like a fern, but it's really an herb that smells and tastes like licorice or anise.

And it's a beautiful garnish.

Look at that.

It's a beautiful garnish.

It's very tasty and it grows very tall.

So this is a stalk from last year.

Look at how tall it grew.

So it's just starting out now, but it'll grow tall.

It'll have a flower that attracts beneficials.

It'll have seeds that are like fennel seeds that you can eat when they're green or you can dry.

And I wanna point out also that I have day lilies growing here, interplanted with the chives day.

Daylily flowers are edible.

So in a couple of months when they're in bloom, we can come back and harvest the daylily flowers.

So these violets are already blooming because they're next to the warm rocks and violet flowers and the leaves are both edible.

So we're gonna pick some leaves and some flowers to pretty up this salad.

So I'm just gonna take a few of the flowers.

They're so pretty and they're different colors.

We have like a magenta color and more of a lavender.

And I'm gonna take a few leaves, get some of the straw out of there.

So you can eat violet leaves all through the season, and the flowers tend to flower in the spring.

And then again, if we get a good rain again in the fall.

So you can collect violet flowers both times.

Look at how lovely that is.

(transition whooshing) And finally, for a final touch on the salad, we're gonna harvest some garlic chives.

So these are similar.

They have a growth habit similar to regular chives, but the leaves are flat and they taste like garlic.

So I'm just gonna take a few of these leaves for a little taste of garlic in the salad.

All right.

(pleasant music) - Wow, it's great to be able to make a fresh, grown salad so early and it's nice to see those plants doing so well in April no less, but Dani, what should we do if a plant isn't thriving where it's been planted?

- Well, if something isn't doing well, transplanting it to a different location is sometimes the best solution.

Recently I decided to transplant a beach plum.

Here's how I did it.

(pleasant music) There are times when it's necessary to move a plant that's already established in your garden.

This is a beach plum, and it doesn't appear to be thriving in this very wet base of this north slope.

So I'm going to move it to higher ground and hope it does better.

Sometimes you need to move something 'cause it becomes too shaded or too close to another plant or because the habitat just doesn't seem right.

So this habitat is not, in my opinion, is not right for this plant.

So first I'm just gonna move the chips away.

Our goal is to have a root ball that's big enough to hold most of the roots for the plant.

It's a judgment call, how far away to start, somewhat proportional to the size of the bush.

So I'm gonna start around here and dig straight down and make a circle around the entire plant.

So any roots that are moving out at the surface are gonna be cut by my shovel.

(gentle music) Until you see how it's starting to lift up.

So that means the roots are pretty much free on this side.

I'm gonna continue around here.

I can hear some roots breaking, and that's okay.

As long as you have enough roots that survive attached to the stem, you're good.

You'll never get 'em all.

All right, that looks pretty good.

So now I'm gonna attempt to move it onto this plastic without separating too much of the soil from the roots.

Let's see.

Sometimes it's good to have someone help you at this point, but let's see how we do.

(Dani groaning) Here.

Okay, whew.

All right, so that's step one.

Now we have to dig a hole in the new location.

I decided this may be a better spot for the beach plum.

It's higher up, better drained.

If you look at the beach plum surrounding it, they look a lot more vigorous than that one did in its low lying situation.

So I'm gonna start digging right here.

I'm gonna first again, clear away the chips and they'll go back on top when I'm done.

(gentle music) Okay, now I'm gonna need my plastic to put the dirt on top of.

That way it's easy to put it back in the hole.

If you throw dirt on top of grass or chips, it'll get all mixed up with that and it'll be harder to clean up.

So I wanna hole just a little larger than the root ball.

So I'm gonna start like this.

I'm gonna do the same thing as I did to dig it out.

I'm gonna make a circle.

(gentle music) We have heavy clay in our garden and beach plums, if you think about them, they're native to the coast of New England, and they're probably growing in pretty sandy soil, but surprisingly they're doing very well for me in my heavy clay.

I think because the drainage is good here on the slope.

(gentle music) Now, I don't know if you can see this, but there's two qualities of soil.

There's some really dark humus type soil, and then there's some lighter colored soil that's more clay as you get deeper.

(gentle music) One trick to improve drainage when you're working with soil that doesn't drain heavy clay is to plant something a little bit above the soil line, so that it drains better and build a mound up around it.

If you have very sandy soil that doesn't hold water, you might actually want to plant your plant in a concave depression, so that it's closer to the groundwater and it will collect more water when there's precipitation.

So I'm gonna try to plant this a little bit above the soil line to improve drainage.

(gentle music) (plastic rustling) Beautiful.

All right, now we're gonna straighten it up.

(gentle music) That looks pretty vertical.

Okay, now I'm gonna start filling in with some of the soil.

So I wanna get rid of the quackgrass as I go if possible.

And the clayer stuff I wanna put around the outside.

So I'm gonna form kind of a saucer with the clayer stuff to hold water when I water it, something like that, the clay packs together really well.

So it'll hold the water and then the better soil I'm putting closer to the roots.

Worms, so look at the earthworm.

It's always great to see earthworms because it means there's lots of organic matter in the soil and they aerate the soil and their poop also is very nutritious for plants.

It's great to see them.

I intentionally put the dirt on the upside of the hill.

So I would be using gravity to move it into the hole.

If I had put it down here, I'd be working against gravity.

Just a little trick.

So again, you wanna bring the soil up to where it was when this was planted.

So we need just a little more on the downside here.

And then what's left over can go back in the hole where we dug up the plant.

That's just about ready to water.

All right, so again, watering is gonna settle the soil around the roots, and we may, after we water, we may have to add a little soil.

Notice I'm not packing it down.

This soil is extremely wet.

If I push it down hard, I'm gonna squeeze out all of the oxygen.

And the roots need oxygen.

So it's better to have it a little looser.

The water will settle it a little, and I'm not gonna be compacting it.

Now, if the soil was super dry, I'd be happy to pack it down.

All right, let's do some watering.

Well, first I'm gonna put this on.

So this is a trunk of guard to keep rodents from eating the bark, mostly under the snow, but even when there isn't any snow.

So it's a piece of hardware cloth, and I'm just gonna put it around and hook it together, these tynes.

Okay, there just like that and just, I don't wanna push it into the soil, just enough to stabilize it.

And now we're gonna water.

(gentle music) Gardening will keep you young.

Okay notice how that saucer I built is kind of holding the water in.

So it just stays where I want it.

If it starts leaking out, I know that it's watered enough.

(gentle music) All right, I think that's enough.

So now I'm gonna build a donut around it with the wood chips.

I'm not gonna put them very thick near the base, but I'm gonna do a donut shape as we get further out.

So sometimes wood chips can get kind of compacted and keep oxygen from getting into the soil.

You don't want that to happen.

But if they're just around the outside, it's not a problem.

So let's see.

So not too much.

Just an inch or two close to it, and then a little thicker around the outside.

And I'm gonna add some additional chips.

I'm gonna make it nice donut out of this.

Then I'm just gonna take a few chips and sprinkle them on the dirt inside just to keep some weeds from coming up.

And that's pretty much done.

I think it looks good.

Nice and straight.

I hope it'll do better.

(pleasant music) - Well, that looked pretty easy.

I suspect the beach palm will be very happy in its new location.

- I hope so.

- So what are some of the things that we should look for to know whether a plant is doing well or not?

- The most important step is observation.

Does it have enough sun or shade if it needs shade?

Does it need more or less water?

Does the plant look healthy?

Are you getting the output of fruit you want?

It's also important to choose the right variety of plant for a particular climate.

Here in northern New York, we need to choose plants that are winter hardy.

But in tropical climates, the summer heat is more of a concern.

- We've visited Pike Food Forest in Jupiter, Florida, where we spoke with Amanda Pike to find out more.

(pleasant music) - I'm here in Jupiter, Florida where Amanda Pike has this phenomenal subtropical food forest.

And today I'd like to understand what you do to manage plants when they look like they're struggling.

- So our main approach is prevention, right?

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

So we try to prevent plants from struggling by choosing the right plant for the right place.

And there are so many options in a subtropical area, which plants, which fruit crops, which vegetables, there are so many to choose from, but here in Florida, one favorite is citrus.

And when people think of Florida, they do think of oranges or lime or key lime, right, all the citruses.

But years ago, a hurricane brought in insects that spread diseases.

So a lot of the fields are suffering.

The crop itself is diseased.

So we do choose, we love our citrus as Floridians, but we're choosing a variety that is more disease resilient.

So you can see evidence of the problem here with leaf curl.

If you look on the back of the leaf, you'll see some evidence of mining with just the lines on the leaf that show that an insect is present, yet it's pushing a ton of fruit.

And this fruit is very juicy.

So although it's half the size of a key lime, we don't miss the added size because it's as juicy, if not more juicy.

It doesn't have as much internal fiber.

And the rind has that sweet flavor that we, you can eat the rind when it turns orange.

So if you have plenty to choose from in terms of plants so that you don't have struggles, because a lot of these grow exponentially easily.

But if you have your favorites and you want to nurse a plant, choosing a variety that's more resilient is gonna be the best bet, so that you're not having to add contaminants like biocides.

(pleasant music) - Amanda is very careful to choose plants that will thrive in her tropical habitat.

That principle is true anywhere.

Choose plants appropriate for your climate.

Look for adaptability and resiliency.

- There's still so much to do in the spring.

And at our next episode, we continue our spring gardening activity.

I'm Loraine O'Donnell with Dani Baker.

Join us next time on the Home-Scale Forest Garden.

Thanks for watching.

- [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.

- 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.

Closed captioning, sponsored by Reed's Incorporated.

- [Narrator] 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 continues) (logo pings)