Heath Emerson

Konstantinos Karoubas wrote:Heath,
Your reasoning is solid.

Shrubs like the ones you mentioned will allow seeds and trees underneath to emerge and become dominant in time.

Glad to hear Bakersfield has not turned into a dead landscape and that oak trees emerge from underground and survive.

What does the future for wild food forests and reforestation look like there...is there activity to plant trees.

Kostas

Well, our city is somewhat of an anamoly. Most residents here have green lawns and exotic ornamentals that are water-thirsty. It’s an illusion to live here because people want it to be an oasis but it’s so unsustainable. You can see how much water we have drained from the surrounding landscapes of Bakersfield. It looks worse and worse every year.

I think there are some people that would like a wild-style food forest in their yards as replacements to their cookie cutter landscapes. I usually receive compliments on our food forest. Mostly everyone is intrigued by it and calls the neighborhood jungle! I’ve wanted to do a bigger project for a while now but nothing has lined up yet. Land is expensive and beholden to the corporations so it’s hard to find land that will not get me in big trouble. It would be really cool to do a large-scale food forest project here because I think we could bring back the rains. It hardly rains anymore. We get less than 6 inches on average now per year. But from what I have read about the history of this place, it was forested at one point with mesquite, oak, cottonwood, willow, and sycamores especially when the river was not dammed. I’ve heard that we got over 12 inches of rain or more a year because the trees created it. Wouldn’t it be so cool to do a 100 acre or bigger food forest and see if we could change the precipitation levels over it compared to the surrounding area?

I’m always hopeful I’ll find a landowner who wants to do something like this!

Until then, I can read about your project to stay inspired!

Kostas, I have noticed since replanting drought hardy plants like rosemary that we have several trees coming up from underneath the hardy shrubs. I think you could use this strategy to initially cover soil or rock so that the succession starts to accelerate. I’ve seen oaks come up through rosemary and saltbush, the latter being a native plant that is extremely hardy. My reasoning is that it shades the soil and it allows for the late succession trees to be protected and eventually shoot through the shrubs and become the more dominant species after time.

Not sure what other shrubs might work for you. Maybe rock rose? Lavender?

Your work is awesome and inspiring!

Hi everyone,

Thank you for your responses to my initial post. It's been a very interesting year. We're shutting down our farm after 3 years. Covid-19 has done a number on our local market and we actually have seen sales dry up. Now I am going back to gardening for my family and myself. I admire folks who can keep their farms rolling through these times and I hope they can keep up all the fantastic work!

With that being said, we did see some interesting things happen with the natural farming experiment this year. I observed that many seed balls did not work and I think it is because of the time of year that I made the seedballs. We tried to use less water this year than in past years, and I noticed that the top few inches of soil, even when mulched, would dry out fairly quickly. I threw out the seedballs in April, but I think it would best to do this experiment now when it is cooler, more humid, and wetter. I say this because I am now seeing random crops popping up everywhere. For example, I threw parsnips out in August because a guide said that is when you plant parsnips here. Nothing happened. Come late October, parsnips are all of a sudden growing everywhere. Sorghum, lettuce, squash, nasturtium and many other plants are all of a sudden coming up in all sorts of places.

I think I am going to try everything I want to grow in the fall. My thinking is that warm weather crops will hang out in their clay balls until the clay gets moist enough to melt away. When the spring comes around and the weather warms, I'm assuming the plant, like tomatoes, peppers, and other warm season crops, will sprout and begin to grow. I'd like to get them at least hanging out on top of the soil as our cool season rains come through so that when the right time and temperature comes around for them, they can access the soil moisture below and take off.

I really think it's all about timing with this method. I tend to let plants grow because I can learn a lot from these observations. I have random volunteer chard everywhere right now, as well as daikon, arugula, cilantro, and dill.

And here's the thing. They look perfect and huge! And I haven't done a thing! The soil has maybe a little mulch from previous crop residue but I'm not adding anything else to it. So I really do believe that plants do have the ability to express their genetic potential and the soil has everything the plant needs. I think sometimes the problem is we literally just don't put the plant there. So I've gotten pretty good at throwing thousands of seeds everywhere. I'd rather spend my money on that than other things.

So I am getting ready to try this again, albeit in my home garden. I'll be tossing out all my cool season and warm season seeds here in the next couple of weeks to see what happens. I think if it can work here, it can work anywhere.

I'll post some photos of the next round. Thanks everyone!

Hi everyone,

I’m new to the site but not to permaculture nor to Fukuoka-san’s work and philosophy of natural farming. We have a small farm in Bakersfield, California and we have switched from organic practices to natural farming at the beginning of the year. I mainly was getting frustrated with our costs rising to grow food. I almost actually gave up on the farm. But we went to Eco Farm and got inspired and now more than ever with the virus situation, I definitely know I want to be a farmer. And we’re doing it the natural way.

I find a lot of people say they are doing natural farming but I really don’t think they are. Nature doesn’t prepare compost nor does Nature start a seed in a container filled with a medium that is environmentally exhaustive and then take that seedling and move it into the field where it wants it. I’m getting disappointed that people aren’t seeing the natural way.

With that said, we’ve been trying the last several months doing it the natural way and, well, it’s not easy to digest at first. There are many failures. But let me say what we have been doing. We don’t till the soil but we also haven’t ever so that wasn’t hard. We stopped using any fertility inputs, including prepared compost. The soil should have everything the plants need, right? We stopped weeding, too. I think this one is hard to understand. I think we might be better off using weeds as chop and drop mulch for other veggies. And we don’t used any pesticides or chemicals, but we never did in the first place anyways.

We grow mostly vegetables and we have had many veggies fail. I’m trying more heirlooms now than ever before to see if any could thrive in these conditions. I also lightly spread some mulch we have that is from our ramial wood chips. I be careful not to spread it too thick so that seed can’t push through.

I just basically wanted to jump on here and say we are a farm growing food for our community and we are trying the truly natural way of farming Masanobu Fukuoka-san wrote about. And it’s terrifying because I’m worried that Nature is so destroyed that we will keep failing. I don’t know.

One thing I did want to ask is if anyone else on here is doing the real natural farming and doing it as a production farm and not as a hobby or your own garden. I would love to hear from you!

Thanks for reading!
Heath