Hey there everybody who might be reading this....
I've got all kinds of "town stuff" to do today, but I'll be back here electronically "live" between 6 and 7PM US Central time to do the ol back-and forth thing...
Before I take off I'll briefly touch on some of the topics that I saw one page back from here (wherever the heck THAT was)
... For one thing, the name "Food Forest" is wonderful... It rolls off the tongue so nicely and conjures up wonderful images about what it might be. Some distinctions do need to be made here...
Once a community of woody plants develops to the point where its
canopy creates
enough shade to exclude grasses, that can "officially" be called a forest. One of the things about a forest is that there is actually LESS photosynthesis going on in the system than what was occurring in the phase just prior to canopy closure. If we actually want to optimize the yields that we obtain from our site, it is in our best interests to NOT have a food FOREST, but a food SAVANNA. Although I manage sections of this land as a food FOREST, the majority of it will be maintained as Savanna... A good working definition is between 40 and 60% canopy closure. The easy way to tell if you're still in the savanna phase is to look at your grass... If your grass is petering out and you see lots of spaces between clumps of grass, then you're entering into the forest phase. If your grass is vigorously growing (and creating competitive effects with your woody plants) then you are strongly in the Savanna phase. This is where you will be able to capture the most sunlight and the most atmosphere of any
perennial system.
ALso... before we get started tonight, for those of you who have jumped in early I have a homework assignment for between now and then, and that is to very carefully in your own thinking, ponder what you "KNOW", and then seek to understand the difference between Observations and Concepts... An observation is something that you can see, hear, taste, touch, smell, measure with instruments or derive with tests. Concepts are intellectual constructs that are intended to describe the "why" or "how" those observations could have occurred...Most questions that I receive at workshops are questions that have been asked through the lens of concepts. We all use concepts to understand the world around us, but our concepts aren't always accurate, and since we use concepts to understand the world around us, when they are not accurate we view reality inaccurately... Here's an example.... "Invasive species". Name one organism on planet earth that has a concept called invasion.... That would be us.. human beings. Plants and animals are only being plants and animals. They are living, growing, reproducing, their populations are getting larger or smaller, they behave certain ways.... When we view their observable behavior through the lens of "Invasion" that's all that we see... The Invasion. Humanity's understanding of these species has become confined to understanding the "Invasion" and our response to them, has been to fight the invasion... SO...
Many of your/our questions will be coming through the lens of your own concepts. What I may be doing in some cases is NOT answering your question, but what I may be doing is pointing out the fact that the question was actually coming from a flawed concept... there is no offense intended whatsoever, it's just that the question AS AKSED is not the right question because it was built on an innaccurate concept...
Also, also.... ALthough my formal educational background includes both Engineering and Ecology, I am "officially" neither an engineer nor an ecologist. When I graduated from college, it was in the middle of an economic downturn and nobody was hiring restoration ecologists. I was also beginning to be bothered by what I perceived as so many "wrong questions" being asked because the concepts behind them were inaccurate. SO... I hitchiked from Maine to Alaska where I homesteaded in "the bush" with my sweetheart. We lived out there, 300 miles from "town" and 3,500ft up the side of a mountain, for 8yrs. Our contact with "the world" was minimal and our immersion within nature was about as intense as it can get these days.. While there I wrestled with and experimented on how we human beings can live on this planet while not destroying it and in fact while nurturing health back to natural systems. ANybody with cold-season questions?... you don't know cold! From there we moved to Wisconsin where we have temps that have been as hot as 116ºF and as cold as -52º. Instead of setting up fancy websites or blogs, I've focused my
energy on planting and managing plant and animal communities, harvesting their yields and selling those yields as income. For the past 17 years of my life I have been living INSIDE the process of Restoration Agriculture and earning my livelihood from it. What I bring to the discussion is not footnoted with references and is not something that I learned from a book, computer or classroom. What I've written about in Restoration Agriculture is all from direct
experience...
OH.... And PLEASE don't buy Restoration Agriculture from Amazon! Buy it either from Acres USA or Forest Ag.com.... If you buy it from ForestAg, I'll get a couple more bucks for it and I would really appreciate that!
SO.... we'll chat this evening...
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