Michael Cox

If you have hens... isn't mixing a hand full of chicken bedding into the soil when you plant a better bet for fertilising? Or top dressing in advance so it has some time to mellow and not burn plants?

The primary reasons I have hens are fertiliser (deep litter bedding), food scraps disposal, and eggs... in that order.

We've been on our patch of land for about 20 years now as a family. It's mostly garden, but with some silvopasture adjacent, and a veggie patch. Personally I wouldn't be saving any self-seeded trees in our land, because we have lots of large established trees already and I'm continually working to cut back and clear boundaries where the woodland is trying to encroach and shade out stuff.

If I did want a new tree it would be deliberately chosen for the spot, serving a specific purpose that the hundreds of other trees don't.

I kill a few thousand tree seedlings each year in the lawn and garden beds.

My experience is that comfrey LOVES damp roots. I planted root cuttings from the same mother plant in my own garden on fast draining chalk soil, and at my in laws which is low lying flood plain with a very high water table. Their one needs to be cut multiple times per year and perfectly supresses the weeds around their apple tree. My ones limp along and get one cut. I think they would need irrigation grow vigorously.

I've had multiple trees do this. The lesson I have learned is that it is generally better to prune a tree to get a strong wood scaffold, over trying to maximise fruit harvest - especially in the early years. Also, I found that a careful summer prune before the weight of the apples became a problem was also an opportunity to thin the fruits that set to get larger individual fruit rather than huge numbers of small fruit.

Around here commercially grown apple trees which are commonly sold to homeowners are on dwarfing or very dwarfing root stocks. They seem particularly prone to this.

I've bought myself a M25 rootstock for future grafting projects. I'll be propagating new root stocks from it and then grafting different varieties. On our chalk soil less vigorous rootstocks struggle to grow strength just as you describe.

Eucalyptus brash would also be excellent material for making biochar with - you would need suitable equipment to do it safely in fire prone country

Perhaps our disagreement is about what you consider to be knowledge?

I share some of my son's obsessively inquisitive traits. I can't recall a topic in recent years where I haven't been able to go down the rabbit hole a scratch that itch to investigate and learn.

I think this graphic is helpful.



I would suggest that the vast majority of the area of that diagram is readily accessible on the internet. Of course, you might need years of study to recognise it and understand it, but it is likely there. The central core area is very well represented.

So if we are talking about what is not accessible via the internet, I'd ask more explicitly - what knowledge do you mean?

I'm going to hard disagree here...

Accessible knowledge is unfathomably vast now - bewilderingly so. Sure, accessing deep knowledge requires some skills and dedication to break through the surface noise. But once you do you can learn more, more quickly, than at any time in prior human history.

Thinking back to my own life - I learned beekeeping as a teenager back in 1995. At that point in time learning was very much dusty old tomes, or master-student relationships. There were beginning to be more accessible "backyard beekeeping" type books but you were utterly dependent on someone standing alongside you and showing you the way. The internet has transformed that utterly - every single possible facet of beekeeping, from the most basic to the most detailed and arcane is now out there. You have the full richness of conflicting opinions being discussed and evaluated, and many of the old myths that were passed down orally can be debunked. And those dusty old tomes are available on there as well... The learning process has been completely disrupted.

This is just one field that I am personally intimately familiar with - it seems to be repeated all over.

As a parent, I'm currently watching - in some position between awe and mild apprehension - my 13-year-old's progress in learning computer coding. He has been able to self-teach in the space of a handful of months enough code that he is writing his own games, messing around with the basics of AI, has a functional understanding of computer graphics, including using and applying ray tracing, made a key logger for his laptop... I'm clinging on for dear life and trying to keep up. I grew up at a time when home computers were just becoming established, and would have killed for the access to knowledge that he has now. My biggest challenge is to make sure he stays on the ethical side of life!

Anne Miller wrote:I cant help with you question other than they less particular about nesting sites.

I have always heard African bees are very aggressive so I would stay away from them as much as possible.

"African" bees (as in bees living in Africa) are very different from "Africanised" bees living in the Americas.

Africanised bees are the result of the hybridisation of two strains of bee leading to the expression of hyper-territorial behaviours beyond those seen by any of the lines they were bred from. There is no reason to believe that African bees will necessarily be more aggressive and indeed many people throughout Africa do keep bees successfully.

I'm still to come to a method of seed storing that I'm completely happy with, but this thread sparked a memory of discussions about how early peoples saved seeds from season to season.