Cold Climate Food Forest - Canadian Permaculture Legacy 

Cheers! It's a beautiful spot he's growing out there.

He's the same in real life! We're glad he's just down the road from us!

Same - we've been watching his channel for some time too, so it was great to see in person!

That's how it starts! Just plant! :)

Agreed - an overview would give really great context for the finer points.

Thanks! He's got a great project, and we learned so much just seeing everything!

Thanks! We've got an update on our own property coming soon!

So are we!

Good luck! Black raspberry grows like a weed around here, so it's a fine choice for minimal/no input food.

Good luck! We'll be uploading some new videos soon from Stefan Sobkowiak's permaculture orchard, with lots of amazing tips for getting started!

That's exactly what we hope for too! :D

Cheers! We don't post often, but we're doing our best to find regenerative farmers and permaculture practitioners in our area to learn from and share!

Thanks for this tip

I don't think he does - yet, at least. With so many peach trees, it'll happen eventually I think!

For us, while our food forest is still moving towards production, we have a lot of focus on putting up crops for winter - storage crops like garlic, onions, squash, radishes, carrots, beets, potatoes, cabbage - and supplementing with sprouts in the winter. In a few years, we hope to have a lot of nuts, storage fruit, etc. We do lots of canning & freezing as well. We're usually able to start eating from the land in April - sunchokes, dandelion, chives, sorrel - until the cycle starts again. Again, perennial crops tend to start earlier and finish later than annuals too - so things like turkish rocket, sea kale, good king henry, and the like. For annual crops, Elliott Coleman's "Four Season Harvest" is a great starting point for cold climate gardening. For perennials, Ben Falk's "Resilient Farm and Homestead" is a great resource.

Did not know that. We should get great pollination at our place then - the black flies are crazy at this time of year!

How would I have improved this video?...I would have put more of yourself in it. Your impressions of what it's like being in a garden that you have followed on RU-vid. Does it feel bigger or smaller, steeper or flatter than expected? How did you feel in a relatively crowded food forest? (Some people get really spooked out if they can't see great areas at a time as if there are dangers around every corner). I was totally shocked when my husband was totally claustrophobic walking in the forest near my parents house where the trees are around 90m tall. He couldn't even look up at them without going dizzy. A place that I love, nearly gave him a mental breakdown. Did Keith's garden smell as expected? The sun glare on the lense looks like you were walking around in a daze as if you were ready to faint. Hope that wasn't the case.

Ouch - everyone starts somewhere Ann! This is a new channel and honestly it takes a lot of bravery to start something like this. I thought it is much better than a lot of people starting out - keep up the great work!

Thanks for your feedback. We're still very new to this, so we appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts.

@@stephaniecrunchycanadianma6280 thanks! We learn a little with each one.

Some people realize, but the people who see the need for change are rarely the same ones making the decisions...

Absolutely urgent!

We're happy to - he's learned a lot over the six years he's been working on it, and we're bringing so many of his lessons learned back to our project!

Nature knows. The less we mess with stuff, the better it does.

That's about 1300km south of us.

Cheaper, healthier, better for the environment, fresher, more delicious... it's just a series of wins!

In a way, having a smaller site really forces you to focus on using every available niche. The bigger the space, the easier it is to overstretch your resources. Check out the "Scavengers Food Forest" for a tour of my brother in law's 1 acre property where he's really cramming it in there!

@arcadiapermaculture974 I appreciate your reply, I am gonna watch that now. Thank you for your great content.

Thanks for watching!

Attracting birds, rabbits and their predators is a sign you're doing something right! Our brother in law is in Quebec as well, Zone 4 - check out the "Scavenger's Food Forest" video for our visit to his place last year.

@@arcadiapermaculture974 Will do!

Most people grow one of the sterile "Bocking" varieties of comfrey, which propagates from root division instead of spreading by seed - otherwise it'll spread everywhere. Where are you located?

Awwww thanks man

Indeed. We're long time fans of the channel, and even bigger fans of him, his family, and his food forest!

Cheers! We're grateful for the same.

Keith really has done some great work so far, eh?

@@arcadiapermaculture974 i consider him to be the teacher that got me into permaculture! I deeply admire his knowledge and the way he shares it! So fun to see this type of video with a different angle!

@@SAROXBAND we all have our gateway drugs eh?

You can get a pond done for about $10-20k if it's just a hole in the ground, and almost always ends up leaking, turning anaerobic, getting out of control with algae, etc. It often creates problems and headaches and costs more money later to fix. My pond here was much much more expensive, and cost $200k Canadian. To see what that all entails, check out the pond video linked in this video description. It discusses all the various aspects to the design. Most of the cost is the rock. We paid extra for our rock because we wanted to source it local (for carbon footprint transportation reasons). I paid probably $50k extra just to do that, as I could have gotten granite much cheaper. We wanted the limestone because it's more natural for our location. All in all, a pond like this can range from about 100k to 300k depending on the pond builder, materials, and design choices/features. However, most of the cheaper options (skipping say an underground reservoir, or skipping a second waterfall, skipping a wetland filter, skipping a deep water intake)... skipping those things can save money upfront, but will make a pond harder to balance, and could end up costing just as much money down the road to fix problems that you won't have if you include those engineering design options.

@@CanadianPermacultureLegacy thanks so much. That's really helpful. A pond like this is definitely a bucket list item for me. Aquascape does really good work.

@@CanadianPermacultureLegacy yeah, we can vouch that a poorly designed pond is really, really hard to balance. We have a natural swimming pool that came with the property, but the "wild" area is way too deep to support marginal plants, and it'll take a lot of work to remediate.

Thanks. We all do what we can do to share knowledge!

@@arcadiapermaculture974 just starting to switch from tilling my soil every year and doing the whole 9 yards. Just made my lab serum and fish hydrolysate will be another month. Is it warm enough to start applying lab on 0+ days to get the microbiome going? Working with about 2 acres of planting areas in Ontario

@@khalidyusuf6979I don't know about that stuff man - we're not much into additives beyond compost tea and kelp meal. Hope you find the answers you're looking for though.

If they're native, then Natural Themes Native Plant Nursery either has them or can source them. Otherwise, you'd have to message Keith and ask - I can't tag him here for some reason.