(warm gentle music) (bright music) - [Announcer] "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.

- [Presenter] 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.

- [Announcer] And by: Richard and Deborah Macsherry the Northern New York Community Foundation, and by these additional sponsors.

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're visiting Dani's garden in northern New York at different times of the year, we're also taking a peak in a subtropical garden in Florida.

Well, it's June and it's a great time for flowers.

- Flowers you can actually eat.

I never knew how many flowers were edible, but I've discovered that even things like peonies and daylilies are delicious and wonderful additions to a salad.

(jaunty music) This is Amara.

Amara is a friend of our family.

She's been coming to the farm since she was four years old.

How old are you now?

- 16.

- She's 16 now.

So she comes every summer now that she's older to volunteer.

And we're gonna taste some roses.

So roses, not everyone knows that roses are edible.

And you wanna pick one and taste it and see what it, tell me what it tastes like.

Just take a petal.

- Very rosy.

- Very rosy.

(laughs) Okay.

Roses are edible.

You can sprinkle them in a salad or you can put them in a summer's drink.

And the rose hips, the fruit that forms, let me see if I can find one.

Here's one.

The fruit that forms after the rose dies is also edible.

When they're ripe, you can eat them fresh or you can dry them and use them for tea.

These are sweet William, it's in the carnation family, and they're edible, as are carnations.

Do you wanna try one?

- Sure.

- I wanna try one too.

See what it tastes like.

Oh, they're so sweet.

They're great in salads or to decorate desserts, any way you wanna use them.

So these are bellflowers.

It's another perennial flower.

They're many varieties of bellflowers and they're all edible.

Do you wanna taste this?

They're beautiful cut flowers too and gorgeous for garnish for any kind of a meal.

But I don't, they're kind of nondescript in flavor, but they're gorgeous.

And while I'm here, these, as you can see, they make a great ground cover.

And the leaves are edible too.

So I'm gonna take a shovel and take a chunk of these to transplant elsewhere.

Any kind of suckering perennial, you can take a chunk with a shovel and just put it where you want it.

So let me grab a shovel.

- Okay.

- This is a nice clump of the bellflower that I'm gonna dig up to transplant elsewhere.

I'm gonna get it on that side and this side.

And then, let's see.

Okay, there.

The roots are intact and we have a nice new plant.

These are daylilies.

All daylilies are edible.

This variety is called Stella d'Oro, but they come in literally thousands of different types.

But you have to be careful.

Only daylilies are edible.

Daylilies have these pointy leaves that come out of the center.

They're the edible ones.

Anything that comes up on a stem from a bulb is not.

So starlilies, asiatic lilies, those kind of lilies are all poisonous, so be careful.

But all daylilies are edible.

So we're gonna try one.

They also make great cut flowers.

They're called daylilies 'cause each bloom blooms for about a day.

But as you can see on the stem, there are multiple buds.

So even though this one will just last a day, subsequent buds will open over the next few days.

So they're great cut flowers.

Would you like to try one of the petals?

- Yes, please.

- Crunchy.

- Mm-hmm.

Fresh.

- Sweet.

- Pretty fresh.

- And fresh tasting, right?

- Mm-hmm.

- Yeah.

Have another one.

I really like these.

These are great in salads.

And colorful.

(jaunty music) - So daylilies are edible?

I could put them in a vase or on my salad.

I love that.

- In fact, all of the flowers we just saw can be put in an edible bouquet.

- So they're both beautiful and delicious.

- That's right.

- So besides flowers, what else can you harvest in late spring?

- Well, surprisingly, honeyberries and gooseberries are ripe in late spring, and the rhubarb is ready to pick.

(jaunty music) With Amara's help, we're going to take this bird net off of this honeyberry bush and harvest some of the berries.

I have to net this.

These berries are blue and birds love blueberries.

So if I don't net it, they eat the berries before they're really ripe.

It takes about two or three weeks once the berries turn blue before they're sweet and ripe.

So if I don't do this, the birds eat.

And I can see that the birds actually got to some probably through the net 'cause their poop is purple.

Okay, so let's take the net off.

Can you get that rock?

Thank you.

And let's get these guys off.

And this.

All right.

Sometimes it's... Okay.

Can we lift it up?

It's stuck in the grass a little bit.

That's good.

Now let's see if we can find some berries.

- Okay.

- Honeyberries are really time consuming to pick because the berries are all under the branches.

See that?

So it's really, you gotta pick them one by one or two by two, and you have to search for them under the branches.

So let's get the thing.

Do you wanna pick a few?

- Sure.

- Okay.

- How should I pick it?

- Just, you haven't picked them before?

- No.

- Oh.

Well just grab, don't squish it, just grab the berries like that.

Oh, see, the juice runs magenta in these berries.

They're super ripe and they're quite delicious.

They have a very complex flavor.

There you go.

See how hard they are to pick.

You have to search for them and then... Good job.

I have a feeling that something's gotten under here, like maybe a rodent and eaten some of them, because this should have a lot more berries than it has.

That was, I think that might be it for this.

Whoa.

(chuckles) Well, at least we got a few.

These are gooseberries and I've netted them because I've noticed over the years that robins really like to eat gooseberries.

And there's a robin's nest in that cedar tree right there.

So I netted them.

But today I'm gonna do a little harvesting.

I'm gonna take the net off and I'm gonna find, so a branch.

So these gooseberries are very, very thorny.

So the way I like to harvest them is to hold them on the, ouch, (laughs) they're thorny.

Hold the tip of the branch.

And then you can see they hang like Christmas ornaments from the bottom.

So you can either pick them off by hand or this is a handy tool, a berry-picker tool that you can just run, run the tool up the branch, and it picks them for you.

(berries rattle) You can hear them fall in.

So there's, oops, it takes a little practice to get the technique.

But that's a quick way to harvest gooseberries.

These gooseberries are not quite ripe enough to eat fresh, but they're perfect for processing into a gooseberry pie.

This is rhubarb.

It's a perennial vegetable that likes moisture.

And it doesn't seem to mind the little bit of shade that it has here.

It gets the morning sun.

It's beautiful plant.

It's very decorative in a bed.

And there are different varieties.

So this variety has really dark-red leaves.

And it tends to be sweeter.

This variety has greener leaves, excuse me, greener stems.

And it tends to be a little more tart.

So we're gonna harvest a little rhubarb.

I'm gonna show you how.

So this one, the way you harvest it is you just kind of move the stem a little bit back and forth.

And gently pull it out.

You wanna try one?

- Sure.

- Gently pull it out.

(laughs) There you go.

Great.

Now I wanna tell you that the leaves are absolutely poisonous.

They're full of oxalic acid.

So we're just gonna break the leaves off and leave them on the ground to decay and go back to nature.

And the stem is the part we're gonna use.

I don't know if it's true, but I heard a story that a woman didn't know the leaves were poisonous and she made a rhubarb pie with the leaves and she killed her husband.

I don't know if it's true, but just cautionary tale.

Don't eat the leaves.

Okay, so you wanna pick a couple more pieces?

And I'm gonna pick a couple of the greener ones.

- Are those picked the same way?

- Yeah, the same way.

But this one didn't wanna pick that well.

So good.

Oh, that's beautiful, okay.

I don't like that piece.

If it looks a little over the hill, I don't use it.

If it seems to be decaying like it's older.

I like the younger stems.

So let me find a younger stem here.

Yeah, that one's good there.

Okay, so that one's nice and fresh.

Okay, we're gonna pick about a pound.

So maybe a couple more of yours and one more of this.

When you harvest rhubarb, you don't wanna harvest more than about half of the leaves.

You wanna leave the rest of the leaves to continue photosynthesizing and producing food to go back to the root so that you'll have a a flourishing plant the next year.

(jaunty music) There's a trick to cooking rhubarb that I really like.

It's super easy.

You just chop it up, add sugar, put it in a deep bowl and microwave it for five minutes and it makes a great snack or side dish.

- Oh, well, besides harvesting, what other chores need to be done at this time of year?

- The garden is a bundle of activity this time of year.

Spreading natural nutrients, pruning suckers, thinning fruit, repotting cuttings, you name it, we're doing it.

(laughs) (jaunty music) This is a Russian comfrey plant.

It's what's called a nutrient accumulator.

It has a very deep taproot and it pulls up all kinds of nutrients into its leaves and stems that other shallow-rooted plants can't reach.

So what I'm gonna do right now is I'm gonna cut and drop some of the stems in front of some grape plants.

So I'm just gonna cut a bunch of stems with a knife.

This doesn't hurt the plant.

It's gonna grow back from the center.

It's already growing back from the center as you can see.

So it'll grow back from the center three or four times a season given enough moisture.

So here's a whole bunch.

So these leaves are very nutritious.

I'm gonna drop these comfrey right in front of the stem of the grapevine where they will decay rapidly and provide all those nutrients to the roots of the grapes.

This is the black locust sucker.

So a sucker is a plant that comes up from the root of a tree.

And black locusts are considered invasive in many jurisdictions.

So check yours before you plant one.

But the tree has many benefits.

It has edible flowers, very attractive to pollinators and it makes great honey.

The wood is very high in BTUs, is great for firewood, and it's great for fence posts because it doesn't rot.

But I don't want this sucker in my garden.

So I'm going to prune it and I'm gonna cut it right down where it meets the soil.

Oh, did I mention that black locust also convert the nitrogen in the air to nitrogen that other plants can use?

So it's a nitrogen fixer and that's another benefit.

I'm gonna just leave this here.

cause the leaves and the stems have more nitrogen than another kind of plant.

So as it decays, it'll provide nitrogen to this plant, which is a clove currant, another native berry bush.

I'm going to replant some licorice because the rodents got the licorice I planted last year.

Here's the sign.

We planted this licorice from seed in March, and then we replant, we transplanted it into individual pots, and now we're gonna plant it in the ground.

So let's see what the roots look like.

Okay, so the roots are starting to grow around a little bit, so I'm just gonna loosen them up before I plant it.

So they'll spread out into the surrounding ground.

It doesn't hurt to break off a few of the roots if they're compacted.

So I did that.

And then I'm gonna put one plant right here.

And then this plant, let's take a look at these roots.

Oh, see now, they're going round and round, so we definitely wanna break that up.

So I'm just getting rid of the, the roots going round and round.

And I'm gonna put another one of the licorice plants right here.

So the part of the licorice that's edible are the roots.

You wait two or three years till the root gets thick and then you can harvest it and use it for flavoring or for medicinal purposes.

Yeah.

Okay.

Now we're just gonna water them in.

That's good.

I like to water them till it pools and then add a little more water.

And then I know they're thoroughly watered.

If the summer is hot, if the next few days are really hot and dry, I may have to rewater these.

If the weather stays overcast and cool, I won't have to rewater them that soon.

Put the label.

We're good.

This is a peach tree.

I planted it six years ago.

It's the cultivar Reliance, which is supposed to be hardier to Zone 4.

This is the first year it flowered and set some fruit.

And as you can see, it's not a huge tree and it's absolutely loaded with peaches.

So I don't wanna tax this young tree that's fruiting for the first time by letting it mature all of these peaches.

So I'm gonna start thinning the peaches.

And I have two strategies.

I'm gonna take the smallest ones off, and then I'm gonna try to leave maybe 10 total, maybe 10 or a dozen at the most, as close to the main trunk as I can so they don't weigh down the branches that much.

So these are really easy to pick off.

I'm just picking the smallest ones first and then and the outer ones as well.

And we'll see what's left.

And I don't have a place to put 'em.

These are not damaged, so I don't mind throwing them on the ground.

If they were pest infested, I would take them and either feed them to the chickens or destroy them.

But there's so many on these branches.

So I'm gonna take this one and this one.

Now here's a nice one, a pretty good-sized one that's very close to the trunk.

I'm gonna leave that one and I'm gonna take the rest of them, at least most of the rest of them that are on this branch.

I'm probably gonna end up coming back and taking more of them off, some of the ones I'm leaving now.

But I'm just kind of going branch by branch.

And like I said, taking the ones on the extremity and the smallest ones off.

And none of these are pest infested, which is amazing.

We're going to repot some Red Lake currant cuttings today.

These cuttings were taken in March when they were dormant and they were stuck down in dirt and just left outside in the weather.

So they got natural precipitation.

And it's now June and they're ready to repot.

So first thing I'm going to do is make sure they're well hydrated.

And the best way to do that with a pot full of cuttings is to literally submerge it in a pail of water.

And when it stops bubbling, you know that all the air is out of it and it's well saturated.

Okay, I think that's good.

Let's pick it up and drain the excess water.

(water splashing) Okay, the reason you wanna hydrate them is because the soil adheres to the roots better when the soil's really wet.

And we don't want the roots exposed to the air any longer than necessary.

So now I'm gonna remove this from the pot.

Let's see how, ooh, look at the roots.

Great.

I've had success of 100% to 0% trying to root dormant cuttings.

So this one looks pretty successful.

So now I'm gonna gently tease apart the plants and you can see the roots coming out of the stems, which is great.

Okay, this one doesn't have any roots, so that's not rooted.

That, we're gonna discard.

This one looks great.

So I'm gonna take a pot, I'm gonna suspend this in the pot, and I'm gonna fill it with dirt to the level that it was before.

Excuse me, soil.

Okay, that's pretty good.

So the roots are all covered.

And I'm gonna put it there and I'll water it in a moment.

I'm going to do a second one.

Yep.

This has nice roots.

See how the soil's adhering to the roots?

'Cause it's nice and moist.

So this one, I'm gonna suspend it in the pot and fill it with soil till the roots are covered.

I don't have to fill the pot all the way up.

These are pretty deep pots.

These are for very deep taprooted plants.

But they'll work for these.

I just, filling them halfway is sufficient.

Now I'm gonna water them.

(water splashing) Until the water starts to come out the bottom.

So it's seeping down.

This also settles the soil around the roots.

Okay, that's good.

I'm gonna put it on the ground 'cause I don't wanna dirty my table.

So I'll leave these in the pots for another month or two to let the roots fill that pot out.

And then either I'll put them in the ground this year, or I can even wait till next season to to plant them out.

This is a Red Lake bush that's mature and it's full of fruit.

Earlier, we transplanted some cuttings.

So I just wanted to show you what it looks like when it's mature.

(jaunty music) - We all know that pollination is crucial for gardens.

It's what enables plants to reproduce, leading to seeds, fruits, and vegetables.

- That's right.

Pollinators such as bees and butterflies move from plant to plant taking pollen from one plant to another.

Pollination is the key to creating thriving, resilient gardens.

The trick to attracting many native pollinators is having as much native plant diversity as possible to provide habitat, and sometimes even supplying housing like a mason bee house.

- (laughs) But there are some insects that aren't helpful to a healthy garden.

- Right.

Certain insect pests can actually destroy plants.

That's where trap crops come in.

A trap crop attracts those pests away from the crop you want to protect.

(jaunty music) This is a mason bee house.

Mason bees are native pollinators and they lay their eggs in these cylinders, and they pack them with mud, and when the eggs hatch, the young bees break out of the mud and fly away.

It's nice to have this kind of thing around so you can give the mason bees a place to lay their eggs.

I wanna show you this plant.

It's a bramble.

It's a native thimbleberry.

It grows wild in the woods.

It likes some shade and moisture, has beautiful pink flowers, although I've also seen it with white flowers.

And it has a berry, somewhat like a raspberry, but it's shaped more like a thimble.

And it's edible.

It spreads by suckering so it's been moving.

I planted it along the fence, it's been moving out.

It's also a trap crop for Japanese beetles.

I have noticed Japanese beetles accumulating on this plant and leaving my raspberries alone.

So if you have Japanese beetle problems, you might consider planting some of these.

(jaunty music) There are other plants that serve as trap crops, mulberries for example, which are very attractive to birds, keeping them away from your raspberry bushes.

And rose hips, loved by chipmunks everywhere, chipmunks prefer rose hips over plums, which might be ripe at the same time.

- Handling the abundance of insects in a subtropical food forest presents special challenges.

We visited Pike Food Forest in Florida to find out how they address pollinators and pests.

(jaunty music) - I'm here in Jupiter, Florida with Amanda Pike, who, and in her wonderful forest garden.

And Amanda, I have a couple questions about pollinators.

Do you provide any housing for pollinators?

And also do you have trap crops like for pest insects?

- Sure, so we consider our whole ecosystem housing for pollinators.

- Oh, okay.

- We do have beehives on site for added pollination, but we want as many wild pollinators as possible.

- And is this a house for...?

- Yes!

A Girl Scout troop made us this, which is really sweet and it's a good talking point.

But for us having layers all over, especially this sort of like fuzziness, the pollinators like butterflies, nestle down when they're resting, the males go and collect minerals down low, and if there isn't this buildup of ground cover, they will just get eaten.

- Ah.

- So they are hidden here.

- We also have a variety of edibles that serve dual purposes.

So for example, mulberry, you can see the nibbles on the leaf here from silkworm caterpillars.

However, this does not inhibit its production of berries.

So for us, this is a good sign, not a bad sign.

Also, our chaya, my favorite leafy green, I prefer the variety that flowers prolifically, so it provides for my pollinators.

Even though the leaf mass is a little smaller, because it's pulling double duty, I prefer it.

Bidens alba, a humble weed is also the third top pollinator source of nectar in Florida.

- Wow.

- So not over-manicuring is essential to allow your pollinators a healthy ecosystem.

So Bidens alba is both an edible pot herb, a medicinal, and a nectar source.

Powderpuff tree, this is a powerhouse.

It grows up high so we don't have to worry about bees on the ground when children are running.

and it flowers all year, all day, rain or shine- - Oh, perfect.

- wind or not.

So having an abundance of adult food nectar sources in addition to host plants.

(jaunty music) - We've covered a lot of territory in this episode, and it's been a busy spring.

(Loraine chuckles) From transplanting to repotting, from pruning to planting, from thinning to harvesting, it's now full steam ahead to summer.

- Oh, and I'm looking forward to finding out what special treats summer has to offer.

I'm Loraine O'Donnell with Dani Baker.

Join us next time on "The Home-Scale Forest Garden."

Thanks for watching.

(bright music) - [Announcer] "The Home Scale-Forest Garden" is brought to you by: (bright music) 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.

- [Presenter] 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.

- [Announcer] And by: Richard and Deborah Macsherry, the Northern New York Community Foundation, and by these additional sponsors.

(bright music continues) Closed captioning sponsored by Reed's Incorporated.

(warm music) - 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.

(warm gentle music) (warm gentle music continues) (bright music)