Trees for Browse

I have mentioned the book of Juan Oria de la Rueda y Salgueros book on trees and their uses such as for the animals to browse, that should be on the forum browse or graze, except it fitted in with talking about a chinese farming method that includes fish farming and using mulberry trees so it ended up here. I wrote his name wrong, I wrote Ora instead of Oria. I mentioned that he works in the University of Palencia, I think it is a branch of the University of Valladolid.

what area does the book cover? I am always looking for browse trees for our wildlife here..generally if we cut down a few aspen trees..young ones..they will feed off of them for about a week..then we can cut them up for spring and fall firewood. They will browse on our hemlocks in the winter, but I am considering cutting down some trees to the ground besides the aspens..that will grow back up during the summer and provide low browse. ..and not sure which native trees would work well for that..you can look through our woods and see the "deer line" or "browse line" where they remove as much as they can reach in the winter.

Juan andres oria de la rueda y salguero's, Spaniards take their father and mothers names, book, talks about all the trees that natural to the Spanish provinces that he mentions, it has a section on each tree. Castilla y leon . That means he misses out some trees that grow in the south of Spain, such as the carob tree.
    I have seen a shepherd carrying round branches of poplars, I haven't read that bit in the book because i was really interested in Spanish trees and poplars grow in England so i just think, "oh, an English tree", how boring.
I shall have to go through his book tree by tree  to list which of the trees he mentions as used for browsing. That'll give me a bit of work. 
  I have thrown in  a fotos of a young cherry that the shepherds have protected form the live stock. It is proof that goats don't eat anything that the shepherds don't want them to eat.

  Here is a bit more on trees used to feed goats.
 

One of the ways of treating woods that allows animals to eat them is coppicing and until recently there were lots of coppices of oak trees here. The way coppicing is done here is to cut the tree down when its trunk gets to log size, which is when it has a diameter of nine centimeters. Oak logs are not very big because it is a very good wood for fires. This size of log fits into stoves as well as serving for open fireplaces.
  Cutting the trees down when they are as small as they are when they are coppiced means that the trees are always lowish and there leaf can be cut by shepherds or reached by herbivores.
  Cutting the trees as it is done in coppices means that the new trunk grows back from the bol of the tree.  Normally two three or four trunks grow out of the bol and also in the case of the tree in my photo the quercus pyrenaica, sprouts start appearing from the trees roots. The roots start to produce shoots. You get a thicket. 
    In the photo i am sending of the oak, quercus pyrenaica, that has been subjected to this system, you can see how the leaves have been pulled off one of these sprouts by a grazing animal.
   

One of the ways of treating woods that allows animals to eat them is coppicing and until recently there were lots of coppices of oak trees here. The way coppicing is done here is to cut the tree down when its trunk gets to log size, which is when it has a diameter of nine centimeters. Oak logs are not very big because it is a very good wood for fires. This size of log fits into stoves as well as serving for open fireplaces.
  Cutting the trees down when they are as small as they are when they are coppiced means that the trees are always lowish and there leaf can be cut by shepherds or reached by herbivores.
  Cutting the trees as it is done in coppices means that the new trunk grows back from the bol of the tree.  Normally two three or four trunks grow out of the bol and also in the case of the tree in my photo the quercus pyrenaica, sprouts start appearing from the trees roots. The roots start to produce shoots. You get a thicket. 
  if they are too greedy for wood and pull out the bol of the tree then they do for the tree.
  they say that if you let encinas grow from bushes of theisw type then thof more like six hundred years.
    In the photo i am sending of the oak, quercus pyrenaica, that has been subjected to this system, you can see how the leaves have been pulled off one of these sprouts by a grazing animal.
    In the next photo you can see how the ground fills with shoots, the ground covered with sprouts coming out from the roots. I had a patch of sprouts like this on my land now a patch of trees. It is goats that specially like the leaf of this tree. There are deer here as well.

    Some ecologists like the system i read in one place it allows the sun on to the floor of the wood and so the wild flower seeds have a chance to grow for a while.  rose macaskie madrid 

I have one more picture of a thicket a coppiced wood, so that the theme is properly dealt with thinking about it maybe two more. i could put in one of a tree with several trunks coming out of one bole.
    I used to imagine they cut the trees down every ten years say, but i wonder if they don't go through these woods every year cutting out the trunks that have reached the right size. rose macaskie.

here is  apicture of maples this is the maple of monpelier that have been treated as a copice or even kept as bushes untill it became illegal about twenty odd years ago.

Leah Sattler, This is the beginning of a list of the trees that Juan Oria de la Rueda mentions as used for feeding live stock, that you asked for. I will send others later.


I have posted a Photo of maples so that you could see how coppiced trees grow, with several trunks from the bole of the tree.

  His book is very expensive, more so than it was when I brought it. As Paul Wheaton says the sort of books that you use in schools can be very expensive, they have the sort of information some people want but are not the sort of book everyone wants, so they only print a few copies and those few need to cover paying the author a bit, the authors of this sort of book don’t get rich, and the editorial expenses, which I suppose include verifying the information and I can tell you looking up information is very time consuming so verifying it must give someone a big job for a long time. The expenses of distribution is another big expense, the paper they are printed on is not the main concern here.

There are other books of trees of Spain but they usually mention all the foreign trees used in gardens in Spain as well as the ones that are found in the country and are natural to this country and don’t mention the traditional uses of the trees.

All leaves of all oaks are used as forage for the live stock.

    MAPLES. All the maples he mentions, he says have leaf that is used to feed live stock.
The maple pseudoplatanus L. leaves’ are used to wrap cheeses and for feeding goats and sheep, he adds that it is a honey making plant, the aphids get it and it drips sweet juice or it just drips sweet juice, I have noticed it.
    The leaves of the acer campestre is liked by goats and are pollarded regularly for them, they are also liked by deer.
      He says the leaves of the arce Montpellier, monspessulanum L. are used for forage.

    According to Juan Andres Oria de la Rueda, the ASPEN is used to feed live stock but he does not mention using the other types of  POPLARS. I don't know if, having mentioned this use of the tree with first tree listed by him, the aspen, he did not feel it was necessary to mention it with the other types of poplar. As i have said in some thread I think, i have seen poplar leaves being carried round by shepherds and so i believe they are used. The poplar can get a bit tall to use. Though Juan Oria says they “trasmochan”, pollard the poplar, poplus alba.


    He says that the ALDER, alnus glutinous is used when there is nothing better, it is a medium good forage because the live stock don’t like its bitter leaves.

    He waxes eloquent on the use of HOLLY for feeding livestock, principle horses and cows. When i spoke to him on the phone, he said it was used in England to, in Wales or some such. It would be the only broadleaved tree that was green in winter in England so it would be useful.
    He says that you read about the existence, maintenance, and use, of them and in antiquity. He seems to have studied latin and greek.
    He says there are more holly trees or bushes in woods that are antroppozoic, contain animals, than in others. He said they were planted for the live stock though he also says later, that their seed is dispersed by birds and that without live stock other trees, that grow quicker, take the light from them, would smother them. He says that trees if the hollies aren’t eaten by the live stock grow round the edges of the holly bush, this is something he has observed and the holly starts to lose in strength as the other trees grow taller than it. 
    He says, that, that there is and close relation between the conservation and maintenance of these trees and the live stock has been mentioned before by Castroviejo 1977.
    It is perhaps important as is the evergreen oak because it does not lose its leaves in winter; it would do for Brenda Groth who says that where she is there are five months of snow with nothing to eat for the animals. One of his photos is precisely of a big severely nibbled bush in the snow. He says they stand up to being continually nibbled very well
 
    He says, there were medieval rules that prohibited, limited the cutting down of holly, rules about cutting the bark as rope or some such, and rules for the number of heads of live stock permitted to graze where there are holly bushes.
    He talks of cutting branches of holly for the live stock as well as the live stock eating the bush.
At my boarding school, in an Elizabethan house, there was a formal arrangement of pollarded limes, they had a few short branches growing out of a short trunk. We saw these trees as a copy of a old fashioned formal garden element but maybe they were really part of your medieval garden comevplace for beehives and fruit trees, they were for feeding livestock as much as for decorating the garden. The ones we pollarded weren’t very old. I don’t know if they were there because they had had limes there in some point in the past, or  if they were just what they thought might have been there. 
    He mentions with great enthusiasm which races of cow and horses are really good at the job of keeping holly bushes in their place, they seem to be the ones that come from ancient stocks.
      He says that, the eaten bushes get wider and wider and in the end, as the cattle can't get into their prickly middles, the tree gets to send up a shoot that get above the cattles heads. My uncle said the same of pine trees, eaten by deer.
    The medieval laws only allowed the pollarding, desmochado or the descogollodo, of these species. In the 18 and 19 century the charcoal burners cut out the bole of these trees and destroyed lots of holly moors.
     

    He does not mention things like may, HAWTHORN being used for the live stock but the bushes near my house have definitely been eaten, you can tell from their growth habit. Trees that have not been eaten’s branches grow straight up, the branches of those that have been eaten grow at angles are twisted.
    There is a grove of hawthorn whose branches make a roof that is definitely used as a shelter for sheep and goats from the midday sun maybe from the rain too.
    The same goes for black thorn, there are hedges of it that go nowhere, it grows all around the pen for the billy goats that is near my house and all the bushes have been eaten down and i have seen the goats eating it and the shepherds don’t often let things grow that aren't useful to them but Juan Oría does not mention these trees as important for the live stock.
 
   
  WILLOW were the reason i started looking for information on this manner of feeding live stock. I asked a cousin of my husbands who is more interested in farming than my husband’s part of the family, why the willows in the river beds in the villages where so low and he said that they cut their branches for the live stock.
  Juan Oria mentions the salix caprea in this context but not the other willows.

I post a picture of black thorn sloe bushes where the goats eat theman din my garden so you can see the difference in growth habit of eaten bushes and uneaten ones. rose macaskie

The photo of the sloes in my garden that grow straight up.n rose macaskie.

I am posting this again because I left out a bit on poplars.
Leah Sattler, This is the beginning of a list of the trees that Juan Oria de la Rueda mentions as used for feeding live stock, that you asked for.
  Being able to use trees gives land owners a strong motive for having them which is good against global warming and the spread of deserts. 
  The sustainable use of trees for forage is important in countries with a dry season. In places drier than Spain in some parts of Africa bushes are the only source of food for many more months a year and understanding how to make the use of them sustainable is important. It also may mean having the live stock capable of living of these types of food which is a zoological concern the caceranian cow in Spain stocks up fat in the less bad season to help it get through the dry season and is good at digesting woody matter
    For poorer livestock owners it is much cheaper to feed live stock on what grows on the land than on bought feeds.
  One of the reasons for fires in Galicia the north west corner of Spain is villagers who would maybe have a chance to earn a bit on common lands and bits and pieces of ground other peoples stubble and so stay in the village they were born in find that the forestry commission have taken all the land so they feel a natural hate of the forest that has eaten up everything they know. In Gredos in the centre of Spain and a hotter drier part there aren’t forest fires. In Gredos the forest is openish with some clearing and grass at the foot of the trees and they pasture cows in the pine forest and its presence is acceptable to the villagers. 

    I have posted a Photo of maples so that you could see how coppiced trees grow, with several trunks from the bole of the tree.

      His book is very expense, more so than it was when I brought it. As Paul Wheaton says the sort of books that you use in schools can be very expensive, they have the sort of information some people want but are not the sort of book everyone wants, so they only print a few copies and those few need to cover paying the author a bit, the authors of this sort of book don’t get rich, and the editorial expenses, which I suppose include verifying the information and I can tell you looking up information is very time consuming so verifying it must give someone a big job for a long time. The expenses of distribution is another big expense, the paper they are printed on is not the main concern here.

There are other books of trees of Spain but they usually mention all the foreign trees used in gardens in Spain as well as the ones that are found in the country and are natural to this country and don’t mention the traditional uses of the trees.

    MAPLES. All the maples he mentions, he says have leaf that is used to feed live stock.
The maple pseudoplatanus L. leaves’ are used to wrap cheeses and for feeding goats and sheep, he adds that it is a honey making plant, the aphids get it and it drips sweet juice or it just drips sweet juice, I have noticed it.
    The leaves of the acer campestre is liked by goats and are pollarded regularly for them, they are also liked by deer.
      He says the leaves of the arce Montpellier, monspessulanum L. are used for forage.

    According to Juan Andres Oria de la Rueda, the ASPEN is used to feed live stock but he does not mention using the other types of  POPLARS. I don't know if, having mentioned this use of the tree with first tree listed by him, the aspen, he did not feel it was necessary to mention it with the other types of poplar. As i have said in some thread I think, i have seen poplar leaves being carried round by shepherds and so i believe they are used. The poplar can get a bit tall to use. Though Juan Oria says they “trasmochan”, pollard the poplar, poplus alba.
    He mentions, not only cutting the leaf of aspens in summer and autumn but also of drying the branches and putting them away in hay lofts for winter 


ALDER
    He says that the ALDER, alnus glutinous is used when there is nothing better, it is a medium good forage because the live stock don’t like its bitter leaves.

HOLLY
    He waxes eloquent on the use of HOLLY for feeding livestock, principle horses and cows. When i spoke to him on the phone, he said it was used in England to, in Wales or some such. It would be the only broadleaved tree that was green in winter in England so it would be useful.
    He says that you read about the existence, maintenance, and use, of them and in antiquity. He seems to have studied latin and greek.
    He says there are more holly trees or bushes in woods that are antroppozoic, contain animals, than in others. He said they were planted for the live stock though he also says later, that their seed is dispersed by birds and that without live stock other trees, that grow quicker, take the light from them, would smother them. He says that trees if the hollies aren’t eaten by the live stock grow round the edges of the holly bush, this is something he has observed and the holly starts to lose in strength as the other trees grow taller than it. 
    He says, that, that there is and close relation between the conservation and maintenance of these trees and the live stock has been mentioned before by Castroviejo 1977.
    It is perhaps important as is the evergreen oak because it does not lose its leaves in winter; it would do for Brenda Groth who says that where she is there are five months of snow with nothing to eat for the animals. One of his photos is precisely of a big severely nibbled bush in the snow. He says they stand up to being continually nibbled very well
 
    He says, there were medieval rules that prohibited, limited the cutting down of holly, rules about cutting the bark as rope or some such, and rules for the number of heads of live stock permitted to graze where there are holly bushes.
    He talks of cutting branches of holly for the live stock as well as the live stock eating the bush.
At my boarding school, in an Elizabethan house, there was a formal arrangement of pollarded limes; they had a few short branches growing out of a short trunk. We saw these trees as a copy of a old fashioned formal garden element but maybe they were really part of your medieval garden come place for beehives and fruit trees, they were for feeding livestock as much as for decorating the garden. The ones we pollarded weren’t very old. I don’t know if they were there because they had had limes there in some point in the past, or  if they were just what they thought might have been there. 
    He mentions with great enthusiasm which races of cow and horses are really good at the job of keeping holly bushes in their place, they seem to be the ones that come from ancient stocks.
      He says that, the eaten bushes get wider and wider and in the end, as the cattle can't get into their prickly middles, the tree gets to send up a shoot that get above the cattles heads. My uncle said the same of pine trees, eaten by deer.
    The medieval laws only allowed the pollarding, desmochado or the descogollodo, of these species. In the 18 and 19 century the charcoal burners cut out the bole of these trees and destroyed lots of holly moors.
     
HAWTHORN
    He does not mention things like may, HAWTHORN being used for the live stock but the bushes near my house have definitely been eaten, you can tell from their growth habit. Trees that have not been eaten’s branches grow straight up, the branches of those that have been eaten grow at angles are twisted.
    There is a grove of hawthorn whose branches make a roof that is definitely used as a shelter for sheep and goats from the midday sun maybe from the rain too.
    The same goes for black thorn, there are hedges of it that go nowhere, it grows all around the pen for the billy goats that is near my house and all the bushes have been eaten down and i have seen the goats eating it and the shepherds don’t often let things grow that aren't useful to them but Juan Oría does not mention these trees as important for the live stock.
 
  WILLOWS
  WILLOWS were the reason i started looking for information on this manner of feeding live stock. I asked a cousin of my husbands who is more interested in farming than my husband’s part of the family, why the willows in the river beds in the villages where so low and he said that they cut their branches for the live stock.
  Juan Oria mentions the salix caprea in this context but not the other willows. rose macaskie

ASH, FRAXINUS EXECSIOR AND ANGUSTIFOLIA-
      I have posted here a photo of a pollarded ash from a farm in Saint Lorenzo del Escorial a Town near Madrid and a favorite tourist spot because tourists go to see Philippe II palace there.
      Juan Oria de al Rueda mentions ashes, both the excelsior and the angustifolia, as, not only being used for live stock but also having their leaf which means leafy sprigs cut and collected and stored away for the live stock to eat in winter. Talking of the "excelsior", he says that the branches are cut in September when the leaves are still green, dried and kept for the live stock. He has another quote that is the same except because it says that they are kept, for the goats, he gives Perez Gago 1997 as the author of the last comment. He says that the live stock in dehesas prefer the leaf of the ash to all other leaf  feeds and that the pastures grow well under  the ashes and their thick canopies protect the livestock in winter as well as summer.
        I am only talking about what this book says about the use of trees as forage, he talks about lots of other uses for trees, for instance, with willows, he gets much more interested in there worth for maintaining rivers than for forage and of course mentions using willow to make baskets. 
  When he talks of the ash Fraxinus Angustifolia, the other sort of ash here, he talks of how the trees benefit pasture as well as how they are used as forage.

        I talked to a man in a farm in the Escorial who said what Juan Oría says, that they cut the ashes to keep the leaf for the live stock in winter. There, the live stock is, cows, cattle and horses, not sheep and goats.
        Juan Oria de la Rueda gets excited about the ashes bringing up lots of moisture and nutrients that benefits the pastures at their feet, and that being why cattle so like to graze at their feet, which in turn means the cows fertilize the land.
        Trees in summer, when their superficial roots lose water to the dry hot soil around them in transpiration, provide their superficial roots with water. Their tap roots provide the superficial roots with water. This is called hydraulic lift or hydraulic redistribution. Try looking for "hydraulic lift trees" in google
 
        In a desert spot in North West India, the Indians feed the cranes and the result is, though the act is one of generosity and piety, that there is a lots of manure from the cranes in the desert there and this means that when it rains the desert really gets full of plants which benefits the locals. Hindus believe in being very nice to animals, they are normally vegetarian. A boy from this district took a bullet for an antelope and died,
      I once saw on the television a document that included a, pay for work program in Egypt, I think.
      They were getting the people they paid, to take manure and spread it on the desert as their job, the sterility of desert, of overgrazed places, is a problem as I understand things, so this interested me. They also had cordoned off part of the desert to stop the camels from eating it in an attempt to increase its verdure.
 
   
      Juan Oria de la Rueda  says that, curiously the bison of Poland the only place in Europe where there are bison, prefer the land covered in ashes to other parts of their territory as do the black Iberian cattle and deer in Spain.


  JUNIPERUS THURIFERA, Sabina albar.
    The leaf of the sabina albar juniperus thurifera is used for feeding sheep and goats especially certain examples whose leaves are sweet. Their fruit also feeds the live stock, their fruit can be plentiful and ripens in winter. Apart from livestock the consideration that these berries feed birds must be important. The sheep eat the berries and then spread the seed in their feces, seeding whole mountainsides at once. I never imagined before I saw it that one tree could settle a big area in a few years. It takes them a long time to grow but the whole slope gets seeded with trees of similar ages.
I would say that the seeds of the juniperus oxycedrus were also eaten by live stock to judge from their distribution.  rose macaskie.

I have put in  photo of a pollarded ash from the Escorial here is a photo of a Field full of them  below the Escorial, above it there are only pines, the Escorial is on a moutainside. You can see the ground has not yet dried at the ashes feet though it has dried in the rest of the field. In this foto it seems as if these patches of green pasture have more to do with the shade from the trees than hydraulic lift, hydraulic lift or redistribucion mean  thattap roots feed more superficial roots that are losing water to hot dry soils.

paul wheaton cuold you change the name of this thread it ended up being about different way sf keeping trees to facilitate browsing. Hedges coppiced or pollarded trees for browse maybe could be a title. agri rose macaskie.

Trees for browse it is... 

  `Paul Wheaton and team, thanks for changing th  tittle to this present one , this threaqd had a title  would not permit anyone to guess its content.
  Burra Maluca, do you know more on this theme, and how it works in Portugal? Can you ask about it? It is quite hard to get people to spit out information on the trees for browse here, they are what is called here "gremial" about it: "Gremios" are trades and the people in trades dont tell the secrets of their trade in any country.  rose macaskie