Full transcript of “THE MINI FOREST - Rewilding using the Miyawaki Method”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:17 Forests like this used to cover nearly 60% of the world's habitable land. They now cover 38%. With half that loss coming in the last century alone. We've cut down a lot of trees to build this modern life. Now, what if we were to rethink our backyards and our urban landscapes? Places that were shaped in a different time. Harry just got his new Toro tractor. Now, some men think they have to have a lot of lawn to own a Toro tractor. On the other
1:03 [Music] hand, there's an illusion we have control, right? There's this illusion that we have some control over this planet or some control over anything that happens. The only person we have control over is oursel and that control is pretty minor. So giving up control is just accepting what [Music] is. I think we need to get past that dichotomy of humans and nature and recognize that everything we've created
1:48 is habitat. It's just not habitat that's conducive to a lot of species. and also recognizing that as land quoteunquote land owners, we have a responsibility to that land. From an evolutionary perspective, humans have grown up in generally wild spaces for most of our history and it's only a very small piece of our history where we have lived with most of our surroundings as concrete. [Music]
2:37 Uh, so we we mulched all of this. It was a foot high probably four years ago now. And then um in the back there, I put some wild This is Terra Wong. And this is her backyard. And in a few months time, she's going to be planting a mini forest of over 100 trees and shrubs back here. Yes, 100 trees in this small urban backyard in the heart of a big city. Naturally, I had a lot of questions for her. I envision want to walk back here and see. Oh, I'd love it to be so almost impossible. So, but most people think I'm crazy. Well, I think everything within even 3 years is going to be over 10t tall. That randomness allows that mixture of opportunity to happen because we don't know everything. And the more I learned, the more I
3:23 became obsessed with this idea. Maybe we all need a mini forest somewhere in our lives. Think of like the mini forest is it's kind of like the opposite of what you're thinking about when you're trying to create a lawn. When you're trying to create a lawn, normally the lawn is one species of plant, and it's probably going to be Kentucky blue grass. A lawn is is really about controlling a space and forcing it to be static in time. Whereas with a mini forest, not all of the species may thrive and survive. So maybe they're all alive and thriving in 10 years, but then some start to really take off and others might just sort of succumb. And that's okay because you're not in control of
4:08 that. You're you're there to support. You're recognizing that that that this is beyond you. There are relationships happening there that we're not privy to and that's okay. Okay. So, yeah, those are good to go. Those can go. Human planted mini forests have not been around all that long in Canada, but they are based on something that has been happening in Japan since the 1970s when botnist Akira Miaaki came up with the idea. He recognized the importance of aforestation. Something that has become a hot topic these days and he set out to restore the native forest that once covered much of this earth's surface. He developed a method that attempts to
4:54 grow a climax forest, meaning the kind of forest that occurs after years and years and years of natural succession and soil building. And he attempted to do so in 10 to 30 years. The growth in even just the first 2 to 3 years can be remarkable. The Miaki method is basically engineering a natural forest and stepping back to let it happen. Nick referred to it as a form of decolonizing the land in Canada. You're reestablishing the type of forest that naturally grew in an area before contact. There are a number of key steps along the way like preparing the soil conditions to support the forest community. The ideal mini forest uh method or the Miwoki forest method is uh is that you're tilling the soil uh to decompact it and then you're working in even more compost like 12 in would be
5:41 good too. In this case, again, because of the existing trees, uh, we didn't want to do any killing. And then planting a lot of native trees way closer together than we're used to. It all seems simple enough at first, but the more I learned, the more complex the story got. There's an entire world beneath our feet that most of us know very little about. Choke cherry's in the middle and honeysuckle is in the closest one. Downey service berry. Downey service berry is in the middle. That's a hickory. So that should go in the far
6:27 one. And then there's one leaf for that one. Good luck, Charlie Brown. The middle section is a little bit more shrubby. It doesn't grow as high. And then smaller stuff on the right. So, we have about a hundred tree species here from shrub to tree. Uh, small low ones interspersed with medium height ones and then full grown trees, but they're planted so close together that rather than growing wider, the bigger trees, they're going to grow taller looking for the sun. So, it's a way of creating a thick native ecosystem in a shorter period of time. The idea being that you take care of it and water it for three years and weed it and then after that point you probably can't even walk inside of it.
7:13 So just bringing a little nature back to Toronto. No, it looks amazing. It's got uh they're standing up. They need a little water. It happens so fast. It's lovely. And it's the perfect temperature. I think the fact that they go dormant in the fall is going to be really quite good for them. Um, this is this this looks like a butternut right here actually. Endangered. No. Yeah, endangered species. This is a um elderberry. This is a choke cherry right here. This looks
8:00 like a burr oak, I would guess, over here. So, this is a mini forest that I planted in my backyard. And when we first moved in here, there was a private hedge uh taking up about 10% of the backyard on this side with a bunch of invasive plants like Manitoba maples and buckthornne and that kind of stuff growing in it. and we took that out and uh put down a bunch of cardboard. We had a mountain of mulch uh in the driveway and hauled that all back here. Then we planted about 280 trees initially and it's been growing for the last uh 2 years. Yeah, it's just kind of fun to to like look back here and and see all the
8:47 they're kind of like friends when you get to know them. So, it's like having a bunch of friends in the backyard all the time. Um, and uh, it's kind of unexpected because normally I have to go out to like a natural area if I want to see there's basswood right there. I want to go out and see basswood, I have to go somewhere else usually, but now it's right here. So, I don't love emphasizing the competition part of it because a really big part of the main forest, of course, is that there's there's also the cooperation of the the trees as they're connected underground um with their root networks and their fungal networks.
9:35 I keep hearing about fungal networks and mycelium and I learned that fungus is really key to the story that you can stick a bunch of trees in the ground but they won't grow at the initial rapid rate we're looking for unless you take care of the soil conditions first. They need fungus to help them and most of our grass-filled and agricultural soil features more bacteria than fungus. I asked Nick and Heather to meet me in a healthy local forest to talk about this relationship between trees and fungus and what is happening in the soil.
10:27 I think certainly introducing species diversity is is one of the key goals of of a mini forest. And the way that you're um skipping all that early successional grassland and meadow stages, the way that you're able to get away with doing that is by bringing in organic matter from somewhere else. Yeah. cuz all those decades or even hundreds of years that you have all that organic matter that's growing annually year after year and dying off and leaving a little bit more organic matter in the soil for the next year and that builds up over a really long period of time. So to be able to go right from that to a a woodland system, you need to bring in all that organic matter that would have otherwise accumulated and put it down so that it can do its job of basically giving a place for fungus to
11:12 live. soil is living. I mean, it's it's packed with life. I mean, mushrooms when you see them come up, that's just the fruing body. The the most of the mushroom is underground in this in this network with these really fine filaments. And mushrooms can can grow a lot faster than trees. So, they will tap onto the like the tips of tree roots and then extend that kind of root system way further than the tree could on its own. Okay. Okay. So then when the mcelium have spread their network throughout the forest soil, they then go about using enzymes just like our our digestive systems in our stomachs, they spit out these enzymes and and break down minerals and then take it inside their systems and transfer that over to the tree roots. And the tree roots take that
11:58 in and then when the tree is growing produces sugars from photosynthesis and then sends those down its vascular system and into the roots. the uh mycelium takes that and it says, "Oh, I think I'll grow a little more." And it extends its self outward even further. And some of those sugars it would also take and send them over to another species of tree or another uh shrub that needs sugar. And then when it's doing a little bit better and the and the tree that gave it sugar last time needs the sugar, it'll it'll donate it. So, so this is kind of what has been discovered recently that the forest is again it's not like thinking about individual species. It's all connected together and it relies on that diversity to be
12:48 [Music] healthy. This year has just felt so much more abundant than last year did. And last year felt so much more abundant than than the year before that. And I've only had three years. So, I I I'm very excited to even think about what it looks like even in just a few years. Right now, a lot of my trees aren't even producing their fruits and nuts yet. But as soon as that happens, I can only imagine like how much is going to be coming through this garden. So, it's it's very exciting. This is my edible forest garden. So, so thinking about things in a in a vertical plane as well as a horizontal plane actually allows you to grow a lot more food in a smaller amount of area. And so that's what led me to this understanding of forest gardens and
13:33 why it was so exciting to have a forest garden that also has a lot of edible parts to it. So here we have my strawberry patch. You can already probably see that some of the strawberries are coming out. This is the fragrant sumac and you can make kind of like a lemonade from its fruits speckled alder. A New Jersey tea. So this is a native plant that makes a nice tea. I think that the culture of humans dominating the world is a major part of the problem that we're in. The only reason that we can have that idea is because we can understand how we think and we haven't paid attention to the other intelligence that's out there in the more than human world. So I think that the there is a balance between letting things go entirely wild and being a interactive
14:19 ecosystem. Certainly there is an intelligence to the more than human world that can let it do its own thing. But we've also taken away so much from it and we've mixed it around so much that it would struggle to return to a healthy ecosystem very [Music] quickly. This is fantastic, you know, and I can't wait. This one is This is a red maple. And so as it gets older, it's going to have those spectac those brilliant reds in the fall are amazing. I can see from this one, this is going to be have amazing color when it's got more leaves on it as it grows. We don't tread lightly on our land and the more we pick it up and mix it and and stuff like that, we break up those mcelium.
15:06 So, I'm hoping that that sort of mycelium network underground gets really taken care of by mulching and by connecting with different native species and maybe even bringing some mycelium from a more native area that's established and done well. We're sort of transplanting those natural funguses into the ground and letting them letting them repopulate this area. Everyone keeps mentioning native species to me and I really wasn't 100% sure why it's so important that all the trees and shrubs and even the introduced mycelium be native to this area. And by native I mean they were here before settlers
15:51 arrived to colonize the continent and subsequently introduce new species all over the place. Our urban landscapes are especially filled with introduced species. You going to flick it? Flip it. Flip it. This is not moist enough. Oh, there's one right there. Back. Oh, look. There's a n here, too. Oh, he's so tiny. So cute. Or or is it important to plant native species, you know, walking for us? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's really important and it's kind of going back to what Douglas Talamy's research and he's written some books and he's really pushed where he he studies mostly lepodoptera so moths and butterflies and they're all a lot of them are really host specific. They've co-evolved with certain species of trees here or shrubs or other plants. Um so like the poster
16:40 child would be the monarch, right? Everybody knows like, oh, the monarch will only feed on milkweed. But there are so many other species that also have that similar relationship with their host plant. It's really important from that perspective to plant native species cuz they're kind of like the foundation of everything else that thrives in the system. Um, but that's a really easy way to to kind of grapple with it, right? Like they're food. some species that have been here now for over a hundred years and they still don't support anything. No, nothing feeds on them or they're like pestfree, which is like super advertised in stores. But you want you want your plants to be fed upon cuz you want them to be contributing and having those relationships with other species.
17:32 Up there. Yeah, I said bird. We know that from an evolutionary perspective, humans have grown up in generally wild spaces for most of our history. And it's only a very small piece of our history where we have lived with most of our surroundings as concrete. And so your brain naturally needs the ability to just sort of wander sometimes. And so people often talk about their challenges in their concentration, but a lot of the time it's that our human mind is being asked to do things that our human minds are not designed to be doing.
18:23 We are designed to listen to the birds. We are designed to pay attention to the different kinds of plants around us. We've historically required the ability to do these things to survive. And only through connecting with this once again can our brains feel more at ease because there is a certain sense that something's not right. But it's difficult for us to put our finger on it because in our own lives we don't know anything different. Heat. Heat. [Music]
