Grow City Food Forest Seeds & Seedlings Farms

[ogfor]

The idea is to launch a low-cost tree hybridization program using recycled fruit seeds and nuts to develop new tree selections for foresters, farmers, landscapers and gardeners. Suppose you have just eaten that rare heirloom or wild fruits and you are left with the seeds and the pulp, it would be a shame to loose that precious genetic material, so let recycle it into productive trees by sending those seeds and peelings to special city farms extracting seeds and germinating them into vigorous seedling and seeds for use in reforestation to help establish Giant Food Forests.

A way to augment biodiversity with strong fruit and nut seedlings produced in city farms to reforest the country. To feed humans and animals and provide wind sheltering trees giving habitat to a rich useful biodiversity.
Recycling fruit seeds, pips, kernels to send fruit tree seeds and grow seedlings for farms, nurseries or city people wanting a few balcony bonsais. It could be a complementary market for rare exotic or wild fruits that are now very costly. Widespread cultivation of luxury semi-wild fruits and nuts could bring their price down so everybody could afford them or just pick for themselves. These semi-wild fruit trees would then serve to make another generation of fruit trees, more adapted and vigorous than grafted and cloned trees.

Seedlings are generally very vigorous and healthy and should survive even when seasons are rough. Combined with animals, flowers, herbs, vegetables and mushrooms growing between trees the output should be large scale organic food production capacity and wind breaking hedges with a proven ability to soften climate. The trick is to sow a lot of seeds (pips, stones, nuts, seedballs) and to select the seedlings intensively but slowly. The ideal natural farmed tree is a tree that has never been pruned or transplanted. If we say we want a selection ratio of 30 to 1 in 10 years we can plant 3 closely spaced hills (the same as a melon or pumpkin gardener's "hill") with 10 seeds each that we do not thin the first year. The winter will take it's toll and the next spring they may be some restoration pruning or some thinning to do, but very little work should be needed normally. Over the next ten years you thin the small seedlings when they are overcrowded by eliminating them totally by cutting at the base or pulling them. And when the seedlings become small trees you prune the less performing trees branches that are shading or otherwise slowing the growth of your best trees branches. If you start with good genetic for your region it is possible to produce a lot of fruits and nuts plus mushrooms and herbs for a very low startup cost.
By never pruning the champion trees you maximize their health, growth speed and get fruit earlier (pruning make seedlings fruit later), it's important since these champion seedlings are the ones that ultimately insure good crops and new seedlings for the next generation forest orchards.

Growing Food Forests from seeds and planting Shelterbelts and Orchards of nut and fruit trees mixed with edible and medicinal perennial plants and mushrooms implies that some peoples will take that as a business opportunity and make small nurseries of seedlings as it takes very little land (about 20 feet square) to grow a few ten of thousand seedlings. Others will enjoy that project simply by selecting a few bonsai trees grown from seeds.

[Guest]

I once was able to grow a few thousand apple trees starting them from a couple thousand dried apple seed pips that I was keeping in the fridge in a sealed mason jar. I opened the jar and putted water in it to soak the seeds. I changed the water twice daily for two days, rinsed the seeds and put them back in the fridge to finish stratification. The seeds in the fridge where rinsed twice a week, more or less and germinated 2 months later. Germination rate was over 90% and I got over 100 vigorous apples seedlings to fit a big garden bed in one of my fields. Interesting concept.

[sylvain picker]

This seem to be a good idea since the ratio of fruit seeds needed to grow one good (well fed and not too much or not at all pruned) productive fruit tree from seed is largely exaggerated, especially if you choose your breeds carefully. You still need large amounts of seeds to grow only one tree: from 10 to 50 seedlings and sometimes more are certainly needed to select one good tasting vigorous fruit tree. For nut trees it should be much less, with the price of nuts nowadays it is better to take all these seedlings to grow a tree, no selection is needed, if it is not a good tree it will be at least used for firewood or craft wood. The idea of growing the fruit trees in bunches is a fast way to seed a lot of seeds that use only a rake and a seed-bag. You don't even need to make hills, just throw bunches of seeds on the soil and cover them with the rake. You finish by trampling the seed spot with you feet or the back of the rake (optional).

[ogfor]

Trees and landscape restoration can deliver a "Win All" by increasing yields, increasing biodiversity, improving climate resilience, creating lots of jobs, growing delicious food that needs less transportation, stopping and reversing the exodus of country peoples to the bigger and always more polluting and energy hungry cities, while lessening and storing CO2 emissions. These goals are particularly important in the developing world but we cannot forget that we may also need safety nets for our own agricultural systems too and most countries need more jobs. And there are other benefits like quality of life improvements and social benefits that creating good jobs and having a more "natural" diet brings to society.