While we wait for our field to be ready for bed making and planting, we are preparing to plant our perennial systems. As we have mentioned several times in the past, our new market garden “Orto Foresta” will have a backbone made of agroforestry rows, containing trees, shrubs and herbaceous plants for fruit, perennial vegetable, biomass, biodiversity and much more. If you scroll back to our previous posts (or go to our blog at ortoforesta.it/blog), you will find the specific design with all the species we are planning to plant. Some of these species are hard or expensive to find as young plants, and so we have decided to propagate them ourselves, either from seeds or from cuttings. The idea is that we can first supply ourselves with cheap plants to fill our system, and then also propagate and share the surplus to people who struggle to find these same plants around here. This might be the beginning of an agroforestry nursery!
Here you can see Flavia (at night!) planting cuttings of Russian Comfrey, Madder root, Horseradish, Willow and perennial Kale.
We have also bought (from Puy Semences in France) seeds of Eucalyptus (6 varieties!), Amorpha, Medicago, Melia, and many other useful agroforestry plants (see photos for complete list). Some of these seeds will need either cold or hot stratification, so Flavia is off to learn how to propagate yet more interesting species!
Here are a few reliable sources of tree and perennial seeds:
Puy semences (France)
Agroforestry Research Trust (UK)
And information on how to propagate each species from seeds, including what treatment the seeds need in order to germinate:
Propagating Plants (RHS, Alan TooGood)
Tom Clothier’s archive: https://tomclothier.hort.net/page02.html
How are you all settling in and of course, not forgetting Roger? Lovely to see you have already made a start with the land. Steve and Annette.