Chas Hathaway

I could spend hours talking about all the great uses for stick piles. Most have been mentioned here. Aside from woodstove heating, land reclamation mulching, and deadhedge, one of our favorite uses is making wikiups. They’re not only fun clubhouses for the kids, but they’re shelter for our free range animals.

After several years of making wikiups (and yes, our yard looks like some kind of ancient village), I came up with what should probably be called a wikiup fence, but just because it’s so fun to say, we officially call it a wikiwallup (as in wikiup wall, pronounced wiki-wallop). Basically, you start with a wikiup, which looks like a stick teepee (you can use string, rope, or wire at the top to hold it together if you want, but we’ve found it usually unnecessary), and then you add length to the wikiup, forming it into a fence that can stretch as long as you need. We’ve had them stretch hundreds of feet. We like to leave a gap at the base, making use of a wikiup’s natural advantage of being a shelter. Over distance, this actually provides an interesting sort of shelter belt for animals, birds, and capture-the-flag participants (I’m not even kidding. We play epic night games on our property and awikiwallup can get you from one end of the yard to the other undetected by crawling through the center—though more often we just sneak across from behind them).

Besides turning our (previously plowed by whoever lived here before us) sagebrush-steppe desert into an epic Lord-of-the-Rings-looking yard, it provides a nice privacy barrier and wind shelter, both of which were nonexistent before.

Let me know if you’d like to see photos and I’ll snap a few.

And how lasting are they? We’ll, it depends on how sturdy you make them from the start. The thrown together ones become s deadhedge in about two years, but the well built ones have lasted since the first build several years ago. We even have large arches for walking under, which can make decent trellises, too.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention the songbirds. Overnight after putting up our first serious wikiwallup, we went from all-silent-except-for-crickets-and-roosters to the sound of deep forest aviary. Birds showed up in flocks, and they’ve returned regularly ever since.

I know I’m late to the party here, but did you’re groundcherry keep coming back? I believe this is Physalis longifolia, which is basically a perennial tomatillo! If you allow it to, it’ll come back every year and give you delicious tiny little tomatillos (ground cherries).

Yes, I also suspect it to be a tomatillo. While it may have come from your water, it may have also been planted by birds. They’re very effective tomatillo planters.

Your volunteer likely just needs a friend to grow fruit. And no worries about gender mismatch, since tomatillos are hermaphrodite. If you can find it a buddy, you’ll get fruit on both!

You might want to try letting one fruit grow all the way until it dries up on the vine, just to see what color the fruit is at its latest stage. There are truly green bell peppers, but most are red, orange, or yellow when they are truly biologically ripe. Letting one fruit sit on the plant until it ripens and finally dries out is one sure way to know your pepper’s true color.

Once you know that, you can start trying the fruits at different color stages to see when it tastes the best to you. Generally speaking, the more ripe the fruit, the sweeter the taste.

I’m less confident on the second one, but the others are probably right about it being a Geum species, possibly Geum canadense, AKA white avens.

I believe that first one might be little leaf buttercup, Ranunculus abortivus. Might want to Google that botanical name and compare photos.

Not everyone is going to agree with me on this.

I'm in a shrub steppe sagebrush region where most of the sagebrush has been (tragically) stripped out. Rabbitbrush has moved in much of its place, which is fine with me, but trees are rare and hard to come by, as far as nature goes on its own. I have had some people tell me that food foresting in this area is a bad idea, partly because the region is naturally treeless, and partly because it's so dry (12 inches precipitation per year, and most of it is snow that melts before the first trees/bushes come out of dormancy), and that it would drain the water supply.

From what I have read of history, both recent and ancient, this area is mainly what it is because humans (both European and Native American) have flattened it, tearing out all trees for agriculture. I have now lived on my 5-acre land for 8 years, and I'm slowly turning it into a food forest. It's taking FAR longer than I could have possibly anticipated, but I'm determined to do it. This is agricultural land, and I'm determined to claim it. We complain that people are destroying natural habitats, that we should preserve them as they are in order to save what little there is left. For some places, this is probably true, but for places like this, I completely disagree. I believe the natural lands such as this have been utterly decimated for over 1000 years, and the native plants and lands as they are now are simply the last few survivors of the devastation. We're past the point of no return. The land can't be preserved. It can only be claimed and fixed. I think it will take more than passive ignoring to restore the earth to a truly abundant state, and that will take an incredible level of design. Obviously there are many nuances to how this needs to be done, but if I can sum it up in a simple sentence, it's this: WE HAVE TO PLANT MORE TREES.

And unlike some feel, I don't think these need to be mostly pioneer and trailblazer species. We need food trees, and we need to learn how to eat and prepare food trees. The only chance we have on making big ag into something sustainable is to develop systems for doing large, biodiverse food forests. I simply can't see another way through. It's got to be big, and it's got to be now. We need to repopulate deserts, prairies, and every other biome with trees. And again, food trees.

In desert/shrub steppe, that's hard to do, but our choices are narrowing quickly. It's not the whole solution to everything, but I think it will have to be a major part of ANY other thing we do.

We need to stop trying to only reclaim and preserve the forests and prairies. It's time to buckle down, design, and create them. Is that mankind interfering with nature? You bet it is. But instead of interfering ignorantly, as we've pretty much always done before, this time it's GOT to be with education, research, and (as much as possible) accurate information about ecosystems, the environment, and how forests work.

So I guess what I'm saying is, in answer to the question, "Should I plant a food forest here?" my response is, "Oh yes, absolutely without question you should."

The one on the left looks like salsify to me (Tragopogon dubius). Based on the shape of the one on the right, I'd guess it's a close relative to salsify (if not also salsify). Hawkweed is also a possibility.