AWKWARD STAGES (recovering a damaged agroforestry system)

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:01]What's happening YouTube? Matthew Reese coming at you from Peace River Organics here in Southwest Florida. And I want to do a little update today on this agroforestry system.

[00:00:14]It was featured in videos probably 2 months ago when I kind of came back to YouTube, so if you want to go back, you can see what those look like.

[00:00:23]What I'm doing right now, this is mid-May-ish, and we've had a little bit of rain, not that much. We had rain a month ago, but it dried out.

[00:00:33]There's rain in the forecast. We're coming into kind of a quasi rainy season.

[00:00:39]I feel comfortable doing some pruning. So, I'm pruning a lot of these Caribbeans.

[00:00:46]And I'm also managing this Napier grass.

[00:00:50]Now, the Napier grass and the Caribbeans actually have been through hell on this particular block.

[00:00:58]Um when I first planted this out, it was like, I don't know, a couple few years ago, we had a category five hurricane, knocked over every single tree, wiped out all my big it just ruined everything.

[00:01:12]A lot of the trees came back.

[00:01:15]I replaced the ones that didn't.

[00:01:17]The uh the maintenance got kind of out of hand because I had way too many other projects that I was working on.

[00:01:26]And so, I've had to kind of rein it back in, replant it, readjust.

[00:01:32]And so, you'll see that it's not a perfect pattern. And it's something that I've had to come to accept that perfect patterns don't exist, and it's okay. Doesn't really doesn't actually really matter.

[00:01:48]What matters is how you deal with deal with things, how you respond to challenges and problems.

[00:01:55]One of the challenges I'm having here, you can see behind me, a lot of these new Napier grass plugs are pretty weak. They're pretty small.

[00:02:05]And then there's areas where the Napier grass did not get wiped out when we had our flood a couple years ago.

[00:02:12]I'll show you that.

[00:02:14]These did not get wiped out.

[00:02:17]And then some of them did, and then some of them didn't, and then some of them did. You'll see there's like this It's really It's really mixed up.

[00:02:25]Now there's from a maintenance standpoint, I want to be able to mechanize and I want to systematize so I can get through it quickly because I have, like I said, a lot of other things happening on the farm.

[00:02:38]This is This is just one one block out of 1 2 3 4 5 I don't know, half a dozen blocks. Maybe Yeah, I don't know. A lot.

[00:02:50]I have some grass that's young and if I cut it down it's going to set it back.

[00:02:54]It's going to stunt it. It's It'll be pruning too early.

[00:02:58]And I have some grass that's growing very vigorously and it needs to be cut back because if I don't cut it, it'll start to cane and then when I do eventually cut it, those canes will end up wherever they land they'll root and I'll have a maintenance issue on the back end.

[00:03:14]So I've already done one pass through here.

[00:03:16]I went through and I just topped all the the vigorous ones and I left the little ones. And then I replaced a few cuz it's not every Not every cutting will take.

[00:03:27]Eventually, I want to run my brush cutter down that whole thing.

[00:03:32]But I have to get my cuttings up and going. So what I'm going to end up having to do, the areas where the grass is growing really well, is I'm just going to cut them down and let them resprout.

[00:03:45]Like here's one that I I had topped in my last pass. I'm going to end up That's not a very good example, but these ones that are like really going like this, like this over here.

[00:03:56]I'm going to end up just having to cut, like pick and choose with my blade, cut and lay this stuff cuz if I let it get any bigger, it's going to start to cane. And then when it lands out here, that's what this is. It lands out here, it'll root out here, and it'll be out of my line, and it'll affect my maintenance cuz I'm still planning to plant another crop down this midline. So, I need my paths and my spacings to kind of coincide.

[00:04:22]So, [clears throat] sometimes you have to do things that are a little bit awkward to get to where you're trying to go.

[00:04:28]And that's part of us, you know, in my opinion, part of a maintenance succession understanding that everything doesn't go exactly right all the time. The same thing happened with my karimbias. So, I lost some.

[00:04:43]Some of them recovered. Some of them I replanted. Some of the ones I replanted were duds. So, like Look Look right here.

[00:04:51]These all look fine, then there's a gap, and then these look okay, these are kind of weak, that one's tiny.

[00:04:57]You know, these are small, and then over here they're they're enormous. Like look at the caliper.

[00:05:02]This is a karimbia.

[00:05:04]You know, if it's thick as my thumb, and then look at the difference here.

[00:05:10]It's a lit- It's a little different.

[00:05:13]So, they're growing at different rates cuz they're different ages. They produce different amounts of biomass, different amounts of shade, and um that's just how it goes.

[00:05:26]So, anyway, I wanted to give the update. We're in the middle of pruning here.

[00:05:31]I've done two and a half I'm on my third row. That's me up or that's where my ladder is. I'm pruning them up like this. This is all the biomass that gets processed and placed onto my tree lines like so.

[00:05:46]As you can see, these are already starting to oxidize cuz they've been out in the sun for a couple days, but getting a lot of material to mulch around my young mango trees.

[00:05:56]And um that's where we're at, though.

[00:06:01]Little update. Hope you enjoyed that.

[00:06:03]See you next time.