Phil Stevens

Willows here are often the first to go yellow and drop leaves. They happily take up lots of nutrients (see threads on willow feeders), so once it's got its legs under it I suspect it will appreciate the extra goodness from the chickens.

Kathleen, if parasites are an issue where you are (they're a massive problem here, to the point where the commercial sheep farmers are talking about Drenchageddon) you might want to try feeding biochar. Lots of studies and anecdotal stories out there saying that biochar will reduce or eliminate intestinal nematodes and also help with general health. My sheep like small pieces, like the size of whole grains, and screened to remove dust (makes them sneeze). I mix some sea salt minerals with it for some extra enticement, and they butt one another away from the trough when I give it to them.

On the browse topic, I feed lots of tree branches whenever the pasture growth slows down. I grow a lot of coppice willow for this purpose (as well as to produce feedstock to make more biochar -- stacking functions), and make tree hay in the summer with that and fruit tree prunings.

Don't despair. It's autumn where you are, right? The tree might be getting ready to drop its leaves and take a siesta. It might surprise you in the spring with a flush of new growth once it's established.

Mulch! Lots of it. Any kind, but lots of us are having success with wood chips.  And biochar! It holds 3-4 times its own weight in water.

I get rainfall through the growing season here, but it gets noticeably drier and in most years decent dumps are few and far between from about January to March (when the crops need it most). When I switched to no-dig methods and started using deep mulch and biochar, the need to water during the summer went way down and now it's only to get new plantings established, or if there's a really dry spell.

I was impressed by the way that once their water was sorted, the villages had the means to deal with other issues. Great initiative and it was a wonderful rabbit hole to go down the other evening.

To avoid the problem of leaks, how about filling with sand?

Happy Mastodon user here. No algorithms, no billionaire owners, and if you find yourself on an instance where you don't fit, you can move. Choosing a good instance seems to be the daunting step for newbies, and unfortunately the default is to pick mastodon.social, which is ginormous and easy to get lost in. I chose a geographically based one, but people also have interest-related servers and on the whole it's a little bit like the BBS scene of the '90s.

That last video is interesting but parts of it were pretty sketchy. AI-generated and riddled with all sorts of stuff that does not exist (like Joshua trees in Washington). Beavers are great at healing landscapes where there is already water and the species of trees they eat, but if you put them somewhere these things aren't in place, they will die.

That biggest beaver dam in the world is real, though. I think it has been photographed from space.

If you design it so that it can be maintained periodically by removing the top layer of gravel and cleaning the pipe, you should be able to do this without the fabric. But it will eventually clog up, so keep that in mind.

Another test is to put a chunk into a hot fire and see if the ash that forms is an unusual colour. CCA treatment will produce a bright green ash because of the copper content. Sometimes the presence of chromium will give it a yellowish cast, more chartreuse.