Trees are Fountains of Fertility

Trees are fountains of fertility!
A fountain works by water being pumped up, it sprays up, it falls, it goes back into the fountain basin to be pumped up again.

Trees reach their tap roots down deep and bring minerals up, the surface roots take any nutrients the surrounding plants haven't taken, and all get turned into leaves and flowers and fruit. All of these products get tossed into the air, and come down to improve the fertility of the soil (passing through animals along the way) and the trees uptake it and toss it up again the next year.

Trees are fountains of fertility!
I like that visual!

Trees are fountains of fertility!

I love that image too. I often think about herbacious perennials that way - exploding from the ground exuberantly in spring, and returning to sleep invisibly over winter.

I found some lovely videos from the Woodland trust on various trees (UK) over a years' growth.
Here's the elder tree:


but they have others for other trees as well. I particularly like the ones with blossom though!

Rowan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHoCsCsxExA
Hazel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUKDaZRvDS4
a rather beautiful beech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnwiPETX7Jw

The visual in this thread, of trees being a fountain, was inspired by having a song stuck in my head.
"Trees Eat Us All" which is Charlie McGee from Formidable Vegetable's tribute to Bill Mollison when Bill died.



But trees eat us all in the end
so plant one for me when I’m gone
then if you hear that I’ve died
you can tell them they’ve lied
I’m just shading-out somebody’s lawn.


Or having my nutrients fountained back up into the world! I think that is what I'd like when I die. I want to be eaten by a tree :D  

I love the areas on the farm where the fruit trees make little hidden spots to enjoy.   I try to read a book or practice ukulele, but always get distracted by how much life is in those edge spaces between trees and open areas.  Birds are especially fond of the ukulele and i found we have a new kind of rabbit that makes holes in the ground.  

Trees are awesome.

Another thing about a fountain would be that it aerates and improves the water. Trees aren’t just recirculating fertility from below but snatching it from above as well.

The idea of a fountain is interesting. In Spanish, “la fuente” is the source, the spring, and the fountain. I think of mountains as being fountains of fertility, water, diversity, and so on—they are very likely to have actual springs as well!

I am working very hard to harness the fertility of non-fussy native trees to produce food.  Woodchips, biochar, ash, tree fodder and the resulting manure all improve my soil for crops and grass.  Can’t say I have all figured out, but in our hot, humid summers, organic material oxidizes very quickly, and large additions are needed to maintain fertility.  Trees grow a heck of a lot more biomass than grass, and you can still grow grass underneath them if you get your spacing right.

Maybe hugelkultur would help? Having wood covered with soil would help to keep it cooler, and less exposed to air. Incidentally more and bigger trees help to regulate temperature and so should be helpful.

However the warmer the climate, it seems, the more fertility is held in living biomass rather than dead, so supporting a large amount of living biomass seems essential.

They also act like fountains in how their evapotranspiration (breathing out an H20 molecule along with an O2 for every sugar molecule made and CO2  consumed) cools the air and seed precipitation downwind. A large redwood evapotranspires 500gal/2000L per day. Every gram of water going through the liquid to gas phase change from leaves provides 540kcal of cooling. That is about 1billion kcal per day of cooling per big redwood. We have ten of those per acre in old growth, which we once had 2mil acres of in Northern California. 10 billion x 2million is a lot (20quadrillion kCal).

95-98% of that old growth has been logged. It takes 20yrs for a PNW conifer to become water positive, ie storing more than they use. They will then become exponentially more water positive for millennia. I wonder how much of this is calculated into climate models, but it really seems to explain a lot of heretofore novel climate phenomena.

I spent the day planting more fruit trees. Up to 20 now. Loved this series of posts and the song tribute to Bill Mollison to finish my evening. Trees are indeed a fountain, of joy and contentment and purpose. I am fulfilling God's purpose with the planting of trees.  Wonderful