R.D. O'Brien

I read that Eastern Cottonwood doesn't sucker when you cut it down. This is a fast growing tree that gets HUGE and grow just about anywhere. Sounds like it would be a good coppicing tree -- probably not for firewood, but for mulch, garden trellis and structures, etc.

People exasperate me. I see them mowing every other day, removing the clippings, and then dumping fertilizer on to replace the lost nutrients. It's like running on a treadmill while drinking soda and eating chocolate bars. You're making extra work for yourself and in the end, you're not going to look good, especially after the heart attack. But the desire to conform is very powerful in a suburban environment. Companies like Monsanto and Dow know this, and they're quite skilled at selling us on outrageous notions such as: pesticides are safe, flowers are weeds, GM crops are the future.

I think all-grass lawns are ugly and rude. A lawn blanketed by clover, dandelions, and creeping charlie, and alive with bees and butterflies is a beautiful site indeed. My neighbors dump herbicides and fertilizers all over their yards to steal the beauty away from their lawns and conform with the other ridiculous and ugly green deserts around them. I never pick dandelions. They accumulate nutrients from their marvelous taproots. Clover fertilizes the lawn. Creeping charlie attracts beneficial insects. I think the all-green flowerless lawn and what it takes to maintain it, goes against the very philosophy of permaculture. My lawn is an oasis on my street. It's teeming with worms (and the birds that eat them), butterflies, honeybees, rabbits, fireflies. I never have to water it, fertilize it, and since my grass has to compete with other plants, it doesn't grow too fast and I hardly ever have to cut it, meaning less fuel for the lawnmower and noise pollution.

The herbicide companies have somehow convinced most people that flowers need to be eliminated. I think herbicide companies need to be eliminated. I hope to do my part in that endeavor.

Domesticated bees are pollinating pesticide-drenched orchards, while wild bees are enjoying clean wild flowers. Isn't that interesting that colony collapse disorder doesn't seem to be afflicting wild bees much? There's gotta be a connection there. I look at these orchards, thousands of acres of just one type of fruit tree, all in neat tidy rows, and I just have to shake my head. No wonder the farmers have to dump so much pesticides on them. No wonder the bees are dying.

Leila Rich wrote:Welcome to permies R. D. O'brien
In my climate, if I girdled a willow it would just send out a million suckers. I have never seen a willow die without a great deal of help!
Not neccesarily a problem, but since the stump won't die, I think I'd coppice willow for chips etc.
Imagine all the hurdles I could weave...

I'm thinking that alder might be a good tree to plant in an orchard. I know they send up sprouts when you cut them down, but perhaps removing the occasional sprout would be easier than always bringing in municipal mulch, no? I also wonder if deer would help control sprouts. I have a lot of them here. In the wild, apple trees often grow with alders, and the alders fix nitrogen in their roots. It seems to me that a lack of roots is the problem with most soil erosion, infertility, and water runoff. If I can get roots deep into the soil, especially roots with nitrogen nodules attached to them, then I'd have a healthier orchard.

I was fascinated by Masanobu Fukouka's success with transforming a dying modern orchard into a healthy natural orchard without fertilizer, pesticides, or compost. One method he described involved planting black wattle, a nitrogen-fixing (though highly invasive) tree in the orchard, and then cutting it down after a few years and burying its branches right there in the orchard.

I recently purchased farmland, with a foot of black topsoil remaining on it, but there isn't anything living in it. Decades of plowing, chemical herbicides, fertilizers, pesticides -- you know the story. I'm thinking European Black Alder might work for my northern climate (zone 4a) and would add much of what this soil is sorely lacking: hummus. Food for fungi and microorganisms. Soil aeration. Water retention. etc. I'm thinking this would be better than importing municipal mulch that could be contaminated as Paul mentioned.

Instead of dumping a bunch of municipal wood chips, what if you simply planted fast growing trees, like willows for instance, and in a few years girdle them? Once the whole tree died (in 1-2 yrs), you'd have your own mulch material above ground, and a rotting subterranean root system full of nutrients and food for fungi and other beneficial organisms.

I've been thinking about building bird houses to attract birds that will eat caterpillars but not orchard fruit. Wrens, bluebirds, don't know of any others yet, but these wouldn't need too much attention on your part. Personally, I think chickens are a shackle, and I'm not a big egg and meat eater anyway. Anyone got any ideas what kind of wild birds would benefit an orchard?