The Ruminant: Audio Candy for Farmers, Gardeners and Food Lovers - Ruminant Short: Why you should plant more trees in the nursery

Episode Date: April 1, 2015

A short excerpt I thought I'd upload since I had this extra clip. It's a piece of advice from Youssef Darwich, who was on the show last week. In it, he talks about planting trees, from seeds, for fun and profit.

this is the ruminant podcast and i'm jordan marr and you know what the way that my podcast provider online works is that i get so many megabytes of storage per month for any content that i want to upload and today is march 31st and i noticed that i have roughly 12 megabytes left in monthly storage to use if i so choose and And so I thought, you know what, why not just include a little short piece of advice from my friend Yusuf, who I met at Permaculture Voices 2 conference. I have included other piece of advice from him in two different episodes, but here is just a standalone piece that I wasn't going to include. And now I can, because why shouldn't I use that last 12 megabytes? I'm paying for it.

So here's Yusuf. He's going to tell you why you should consider starting trees in your nursery. Okay. So you want to do one more? The, the transplants? Yeah, sir. Trees. Okay. So Yusuf, what do you want to tell people about, about tree seedlings? Well, so when I have a farm one day, I want a lot of tree crops. And trees, if you're buying them catalog prices, it could be anywhere from $10 to $30, which is not very economical if you want to do any sort of acreage. But a solution for that is starting your own trees from seed or from cuttings. And it might sound intimidating at first, but to give you an anecdote, I saved apple seeds from all the apples I made in applesauce this past year, or the year before

rather, had roughly 400 seeds. And I just threw them in a bed that I would have otherwise planted into vegetables at the same density as carrots and the majority of them came up so now I have like 250 apple seeds in a small area and sure that's a lot but I can use that to plant out the orchards later on yeah and you're not worried about crossing and not being sure what you're going to get from your apples? Yeah. So apples are interesting because there's a lot of variability. Yeah. And you can use that as an asset if you understand the patterns. So if you want more consistency, you can graft. Yeah. And for those who aren't familiar, it's basically a process of putting a desired species, like a honeycrisp apple, onto another plant. So when you do that, the original plant that has its roots in the ground will grow a honeycrisp apple. So you can do that with all the trees you start from seed.

Or if you're more adventurous like I am, I'm going to plant at a very high density and see what the diversity comes up with and then you can always thin out what's not working exactly or you could graft on later because all the main varieties that we eat were started from seed yeah and then they're propagated out so you're just going to experiment yeah and and they're plums and peaches and cherries that if you start them from seed they come true to type more often than not so you don't have to risk all that variation so it seems like you're one of your overarching points though is that people get intimidated by by growing out seedlings and and and caring for them sure and there's certainly a lot that i don't know yet but really it just

comes down to starting and just trying something and see what happens and you can adapt from it but again if you want to plant an orchard or if you want fruit trees on your site i highly recommend growing them yourself right because to save money to save money and also um allows for more adapted plants to your site yeah right so would you even apply that to if not growing them from seed to get them really young so that they're cheaper and then they have more time to to adapt that's another strategy i've done too um you can get wholesale trees for like a dollar a tree if you know where to look and the conservation districts are a really good place for the folks in the in the states i'm not sure about canada but if you know where to look. And the conservation districts are a really good place for the folks in the states.

I'm not sure about Canada. But if you get your trees wholesale, you can, yeah, put them in a bed, very dense, let them grow out, and then you can transplant them when they're more ready. Right. And I would think it saves you a bundle over much older seedlings. It certainly does. Cool. Yusuf, thanks a lot.

Yeah.