Hi folks, Canadian Prepper here today on the channel. We have Gardening in Canada, aka Dorothy, came all the way from Kansas to share her insight. She is a soil scientist. We’re going to be building an apocalypse orchard today. Actually, the scientific term for that is the entropic food forest. We went and we completely cleared out the local greenhouse. Boy, were they happy to see us. Now, we don’t have much time. We got to get these trees in the ground. Let’s get to it. I’ve just been told by one of my very informed contacts that we only have 72 hours left to prepare for the proverbial end of days.

I’m looting as much fruit as I can from Dutch crores before the bombs drop. I got to get going, guys. See you on the flip side. Good luck. Nate just had too much coffee. We’re literally just building a food forest. That’s it. All right, so we’re going to build an apocalypse orchard today. And I came prepared because I know my redheaded friend here is probably not going to survive the apocalypse without a lot of sunblock. There’s a term called permaculture. What does that mean to us city-slickin’ morons? The idea with permaculture is that you plant plants that benefit each other and give nutrients, bring in pollinators, ward off pests, and then while also stabilizing your soil.

Because right now you have a lot of bare soil. And so if a wind comes through, technically you lose topsoil. If a flood comes through, you lose topsoil. And topsoil is where your plants grow from. Because we’re talking about supply chain collapse. We ain’t going to have fertilizer. We ain’t going to have pesticides. We ain’t going to have all the fancy, dancey, premade-bought plants. We’re going to be, you know, whatever we have to start with, that’s it. Is there like a core set of different types of plants that we have to plant to complement one another? Okay, so you want your trees, your mids, and your lowers.

What you’re trying to do is mimic a forest. So a forest does have flowers, and obviously that brings in some pollinators, but not everything brings in pollinators. And the idea here is to have a continual source of leaf litter. So one way to speed this up is to put animals, quote unquote, or perennials that are completely herbaceous. So that would be like the alfalfa or the clover, and that’ll stabilize the soil. The rhubarb, the hostas, those don’t like sun. So in order for those to survive, you do need a food forest, especially out here.

So you need to have a tree and then a mid and then your little ones because they will need shade to be able to survive. So the idea is to have a continual planting regiment where you’re always adding new plants. Okay, so we got some big trees. We got cherries, we got crab apples, we got pears, we got kiwis, we got grapes. These are a grape that are great for cold climates. Unfortunately, they’re very beta. Beta! Beta grapes. We got raspberries, hops, because we’re going to make some beer. Post-apocalyptic brewery coming right up.

Rhubarb. You know what the joker used to say? Never rub another man’s rhubarb. I don’t know why he said it, but I thought it was funny. Are we going to put all these like in the same place or are we going to spread them out hippie style? So for management wise, I personally would not do like a classic food forest because you have this space where you don’t have to do that. I would do it in rows because if you were to go the green manure route, so the clover in alfalfa, think of how you’re going to have to chop that down.

So you’re going to walk around with a lawnmower or you want to use your tractor. It’s just easier to manage something that is in rows. We have the center already planted. So I guess we’re planting on either side. So what should we plant first or is there anything else we should know before we get started? So what we can do is plan in the sense that we can grab the plants that we intend to put and actually put them down so we can visually see what’s going on because you don’t want to start planting and then realize that it’s not going to work.

How about you just tell us where you want them and we will put them there. Hey, let’s get to work. Sorry, ma’am. Yes, ma’am. All right, guys. So now we’re going to explain this color coding system that we have here to simplify things. Can you please tell us what every color represents? Okay. Orange is tall, so over five feet and they’re four meters apart. Pink is a vine of some sort. So in this case, it’s grapes. So we put the pink right on the orange. Yeah, because the orange is going to be the trellis for the pink.

So the green is for seeds. This is just your regular annuals, something that’s meant for ground cover. Okay, so the green is ground cover. The yellows are for your asparagus. Now that’s just, again, ground cover. There’s no specifics to that. And then the whites are for like lower sized brush. So in this case, it’s raspberries, but it could be blueberries if you wanted. The reason why I’m keeping the whites and the yellows separate is because the yellows are not, like they’re not good at competing. These ones will overrun the yellows if I put them side by side.

So that’s why I’m having patches of yellows and then patches of white. The blue is for our mid-story. So that’s somewhere between the trees and then the underbrush. So around like the two, three foot mark. And those are every four meters as well? Yeah, so it works out that everything’s every four meters except for the greens, which are every meter and the whites and yellows, which are every two. Okay. So the reasoning for the rope is because now this can be reused indefinitely. So as you expand your food for us, your spacing will always be the same.

And all you’re going to do is literally move over. In this case, we’re going to do the size of the tractor, put it down, mark out your flags again, and then yeah, you just keep on reusing this. And so all we really need for this is a rope. We have some flags of multi-colors and get these online. And we have about seven different types of colors corresponding to what’s on the rope. We move the rope over, we plant what the flags are on, and then we take those flags out, move them over, and we just repeat the process.

Awesome. All right, guys. So now the fun part. It’s time to start digging some holes. This has gotten me into trouble in the past, but god darn it. I just can’t get enough. Is that good? All right. Okay, because we’re in Canada, the first tree we are going to plant in our apocalypse food forest is going to be a maple tree. I dedicate this to all my fellow Canadians, with the exception of King Charles, Justin Trudeau, and Bill Blair, the anti-gun guy. Everybody else, I love you guys. Let’s get this tree in the ground.

There we go. Look at that. Okay, so these are just all fibers. You’ve got a couple, like this one, for example, you want to cut it before it goes around. So yeah, so all we did was prevent against girdling. So essentially, when roots start going in a circle, it’s like a death spiral. Just keep them going in a circle. A couple of reasons for why. If it continues to go in a circle, the roots don’t go out. So it can’t capture more nutrients, more water into kind of these outer areas where Nate’s going to be putting like alfalfa or clover.

Other reason, we’re out in the bald-headed prairies. It takes one plow wind with a root ball that’s girdled. And all the trees get knocked over. So what you’re saying is it wouldn’t root out into the surrounding regions and have that foundation to stabilize it when a big windstorm came through. Yeah. All right, let’s get her in the ground. So this is mycorrhizal fungi. I think it’s a waste of money for annuals, and some people will think that that’s not the case, and that’s fine. For trees, though, that is a known fact that it works really well with these guys.

So the mycorrhizal fungi will be allowed to kind of establish, and then the hyphae will reach out. Think of like hive mind, but in plants. So it’s really cool stuff. You got to make sure you mulch, like get wood chips, or if you do a clover, just make sure that you for sure move it onto the trees. Because these will, like in Canada in particular, the root balls will heave. So they’ll heave out of the ground, and then that’s when you get a root ball that’s raised. Why is that? Just a freeze thaw cycle.

What are you laughing at? We’re just me hurling down in the white water. The driver’s wasp is completely winded. I’m incredibly impressed with this. Not bad at all. Crab apple pie. Can’t disturb the puppy. Occasionally you’ll have instructions. Oh my God, like Dorothy and Toto. Dorothy, Toto. All right, so this right here is a vine. It’s a grapevine specifically. It wouldn’t have to be a perennial if you didn’t want it to be. It could be a pumpkin, a squash, anything like that. In this case, we’re going to utilize it to climb kind of up this maple, just so that the roots don’t get too tangled up with each other.

This is offset from the root ball. So it’s slightly over from where the actual root ball is. So the root ball ends probably here. And so it’s not going to choke out this maple at all. Oh, no, no, no. That’s raspberries. Those things spread pretty good too, hey? They do, yeah. Yeah, this is raspberries. So a little bit lower understory, not quite ground story. But we can plant some dog paws. That is too bulky. Too bulky. And then this one’s blue. It’s too dry to plant just on its own. Wow, he dug it like the perfect deck.

So this is normally like a shade plant, right? So it doesn’t like really intense light, really intense heat or anything. So that’s why we’re going to plant it close to the base of a tree and between what’s going to be a relatively large shrub. If you didn’t have all the cash money for starting all this, you could put off putting the rhubarb in later. So just put your spacing in, let your tree grow, let your shrub grow, and then eventually you can put your rhubarb in between. So just leave your spaces. Take your marker, that red, you have a red or pink orange, move to the blue.

Okay, yeah, we’re good. Okay. Okay, so what have we done here now with this cord contraption? Okay, so we’ve planted the first row and we have our pattern in place. So now to make sure that your shrubbery and your lower ground plants are protected, the best way to do it is to now offset everything. So the new planting pattern starts with your tall tree in line with your blue. And then what you would do just to mimic, make sure that it goes to the end properly is you would just mimic it on the other side.

But so this will go there. And then when you go to do your third row, if you wanted, you could either pull it forward again to make those in line, or you could just offset it another one. So you would just offset it to like the white. All right. Well, I have a lot of work cut out for me. Let’s fast forward and see what it looks like when it’s finished. All right. So after hours of work, we finally completed phase one of the orchard high fives. Yeah, back to back. Okay, so we got the landscape fabric laid down.

Now we have to put some mulch over that. Then we got to irrigate a lot of these plants. Well, I ain’t no log driver. A lot of these plants are looking a little wilted. That’s because they’re trying to establish a footing in this orchard. It’s been very windy. We got to put a windbreak. We got some corn belt going around. We got potatoes coming up. We got pumpkins coming up. Man, we got a lot of food. If you guys want more content like this, watch this video here or here, wherever the guy decides to put it, because that’s going to show you exactly how you can lay out your garden to maximize yield in an urban environment.

If you don’t have this kind of space, I encourage you to go check that video out. Thanks for watching. Don’t forget to like, comment, subscribe. Canadian Pepper out. The best way to support this channel is to support yourself by gearing up at CanadianPreparedness.com, where you’ll find high-quality survival gear at the best prices, no junk, and no gimmicks. Use discount code prepping gear for 10% off. Don’t forget the strong survive, but the prepared thrive. Stay safe. [tr:trw].

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