The Foundations of Syntropic Agroforestry

kia ora everyone this week's video i'm going to be doing a series of draw that take you through the plant identification chart that we use when we gather information and observations of all the plants that we use and the vegetation that we have around us in our chart there's three core principles of synthropy which will relate a lot of those categories to there's many different categories that are relevant to those core principles and i hope these drawings will highlight and clarify these as a way of integrating their information into a synthetic design context so the

first principle strata so strider is capturing as much sun as you can before it hits the ground and we do that by understanding the different canopy layers that a plant occupies and these canopy layers aren't so much to do with the height of the plant but the degree of sunlight that they require at maturity our first layer is the emergent canopy then we have high medium and low again not only referring to height for example here we have an annual version of this where we have the classic three sister situation where we have the pumpkin

sprawling out and occupying that mid to lower strata area then we have the corn pushing upwards occupying that emergent layer and we have a bean climbing up that corn capturing the sun on that medium to high layer in this way in any consortium in any community of plants you'll find that they stratify themselves out into their different niches occupying different spaces not creating competition another category we want to go through here is frost tolerance so much like we covered with the sunlight we want to also observe the degree of frost that a plant can tolerate

when we understand this we can put it into its appropriate strata in relation to frost as well where we have the emergent canopy as the most frost tolerant offering protection to the lower canopies that have decreasing tolerance to frost keeping in mind here that we also want to make room for the amount of sun that the plant requires as well and this is where pruning comes in handy so within pruning we have a few different methods we have coppicing which means you cut that plant right down to the bottom and just reshoot from a stump

or pollarding for if you want to maintain the strata that the plant is or prevent any animals from reaching the regrowth then we have staghorning which is where we leave the main branches of the tree but remove all the green foliage and then there's plants that only can handle a minimal amount of pruning in those situations we don't want to remove any more than 30 percent of the green foliage so we have coppicing pollarding staghorning or minimal next we want to observe whether the plant is deciduous or evergreen so evergreen means that it remains with

leaves throughout the year dropping the leaves gradually and deciduous means the tree is bare at winter so it drops all its leaves within one species of plant you can have different varieties that drop the leaves at different times of a season we also look at the leaf litter that is dropped brown leaves are high in carbon and the nutrients has been absorbed back into the tree green leaves are higher in nitrogen the leaves have actually retained a lot of the nutrients from that tree these trees for example italian older than optimal trees for a civil

partial system where animals can actually graze the grasslands in amongst the trees and also eat the leaf litter as an additional fodder next we want to consider the climate zone whether the plant is naturally from a tropical zone subtropical or temperate and this is valuable information as we can then fine-tune our stratification in our food forest to create that optimal environment we then also consider the sun intensity that we have so in our tropical zone if we look at our strata within a tropical zone we find that actually quite evenly distributed throughout the different stratas

that density is very present in all the different layers because of that high intensity sun that is able to be captured in our subtropical zone we have a much higher emergent and high strata compared to our medium and low this is due to the decrease in sun intensity and we also have the slight presence of frost in the subtropical zone and in our temperate regions our stratification we have a very little emergent and high strata and a very dense medium low strider with a lot of herb forms covering the ground capturing a lot of that

sunlight mainly in the lower stratas and the increase in frost when we understand this we can fine-tune the degree of sunlight that plant needs our functional strata density as well as creating the optimal conditions for each plant to thrive be that the right amount of sun frost protection or ventilation our second principle of entropy is a life cycle this we determine as annual bi-annual short-lived perennial long-lived perennial or primary and you see the years written down there this is an example of a degree of density we can get away with when we understand both the

strata of the plants and these life cycles we can create and attain that optimal and functional density and diversity over time and space so for example all those plants that we saw in that diagram previously we can see play out like this so in the first year we would have our avocado tree in amongst our tamarillo tree in amongst our churro moya tree in amongst our eucalypt tree in amongst our inga bean also planting in our annuals that we mentioned corn beans and pumpkin fast forward to 20 years here we have our mature emergent inga

bean canopy with our mature fruiting avocado tree happily under the emergent canopy of the inga bean in the high layer and then nestled among them we have our chirimoya tree also in fruit production nestled among them quite happily in that medium to low strata layer okay our third principle of centripeta is succession so succession is looking at ground formation and vegetation so we have our establishing phase accumulation transitionary and abundant phase and this is to do with the soil utility and we'll find that the vegetation in these areas differs slightly so in our establishing phase

that's where we see more lichens and mosses as they gnaw away at their rock to start generating soil then in our accumulation phase we will have thistle course tea tree conifers all this don't produce any fruit but are there to open up the soil and accumulate nutrients this is broken up into individual little life cycles those plants in that phase will be very different to the next transitionary phase and the abundance phase again we have the same life cycles of plants however they start becoming more lush and in an abundance phase again this is where

we see most of our annuals come from or our main fruit and we see an even more of an increase in really lush lush green leaves so the accumulation phase is a place to repair transitional phase you start seeing a bit of fruit production whether it's citruses or raisin tree fruits as it progresses and transforms into more and more fertility and abundance phase is where we see or our annuals big fruit like avocados and bananas or apples if you're in the temperate zone succession refers to the amount of soil fertility that's there and we observe

this by observing the vegetation and we can work with that vegetation to generate fertility so we want to with centropee observe and utilize the vegetation in space to accelerate our regeneration of that land into a syntropic system where we're encouraging life processes as much as we can the next category we want to look into is propagation so we can either take cuttings stakes which we can push directly into the ground root suckers or runners or directly plant things by seed when we when we plant things via seed we have an increased genetic diversity and we

also increase therefore the resilience against diseases when we propagate our plants via cuttings stakes runners or suckers we are essentially propagating clones of that original tree meaning that we don't have any genetic diversity on the plus side they reach maturity sooner however they don't form true tap roots as they would by a seed the last category that we highlight in our plant profiles any unique characteristics specific to that plant because the first plant we're going to be releasing is our titania diversifolia the bolivian sunflower that is so close to our hearts i'm going to touch

on that as the unique characteristics so for example here we observed that is most suited to a situation that's smothered in savannah grasses so in northland here in new zealand that is our kikuyu autotonia is a benefit to us there in its characteristics that it grows from steak bushes out quite quickly so it's a fast growing plant and creates that dense shade but it doesn't just work with shade either specific unique characteristic it actually has an allopathic relationship with savannah grasses where it actually emits its own chemical against those grasses its other characteristics is that

it flowers beautifully in autumn attracting a lot of pollinators the environment that that tony creates becomes this nurse environment for those trees to germinate and push through up through the teutonia and become a forest again so in this sense the teutonia is a forerunner of the forest that concludes our breakdown of the plant profile template that we use on all the different plants that we utilize it is through observing and understanding and collecting all this information on each plant that we can really understand their function and within that we can stack in both fruit trees

pollinators native trees essentially creating a very dynamic and functionally dense ecosystem that we can be a part of as orchestrators we encourage you to go out and gather this information on as many plants as you can and if you haven't already jump up to our interactive tier where we will be releasing our own plant profiles to help and aid in this process as well thanks for watching forward to seeing you all next week