One of the frequent queries we get is: “Can we simulate a forest in a plot that already has trees in it?” The reason for the query is that most plots have trees in them. So there are natural doubts as to whether Miyawaki forests will grow in them. This video is to show you a sample. This is a plot which had a few trees in it. One of them was solitary fishtail palm [Caryota urens] whose leaves are used as fodder for elephants and decorations on celebratory arches. The others were mahogany tree (which we had to cut), a non-flowering plant, a tube rose plant, an Ashoka, a curry leaf plant and a jungle geranium plant. We retained most of them. These old videos are being shown in order to show you the transformation. We put up a compound wall around this one-cent plot, filled it with potting mixture, and planted 160 samplings on 8 September this year. We recorded this video on 1 December, a week short of three months since the planting. You can see the extent of growth the plants have already achieved.
What is noteworthy about this site is that it is surrounded on three sides by trees that we had planted earlier. On the other side of the road, you will see a lot of acacia and wild jack trees. Direct sunlight is available here only for a short span of time. Yet the plants are growing really well. Two lessons can be drawn from this experiment. One, we put up walls on the sides in order to avoid tilling. As this is high ground, digging will cause the soil to collapse. So we reinforced the surrounding walls and set the plot in two levels, as this is an incline. Our belief is that this partitioning will help retain water in the higher segment for some time before it seeps into the lower one. As this forest is very close to the house, we planted the more useful plants at the periphery. All plants are useful but we planted fruit- and vegetable plants in the outer ring. A lot of birds come here.
One point to be noted is that the site is rocky, like this one, and holds only two feet of soil on top. All the saplings have been planted in it. The roots will go down the fissures of the rocks. Despite lack of sunlight, the growth is appreciable. We have not done anything special here. As we do in other places, we mixed 40 kg of goat pellets, 40 kg of coir pith, 20 kg of rice husk with the soil in one sq. m., and spread it there. Since this is a one-cent plot and has a rectangular shape, irrigation is done with the help of a single rain hose fitting along the length of the plot. But as we received good rains, we have not had to water the plants, except for the first couple of days. It rained almost daily or on every alternate day, all these months. As a result, the roots grew well and the plants shot up fast. The tallest one stands at four feet. Some have gone up to five feet too, in these three months, according to our expectations. By next year, most of them will attain a height of 10 feet or more, and we will not be able to see the other side. We will show you video shots of the forest then.
If there are trees close to the house, all you need to do is prune their branches. To those who still have doubts about that, we shall prepare another video on how to do pruning. We plan to prune the plants in the plot down below. We shall shoot the process, and tell you how to go about it.