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Post by Deleted on May 22, 2013 11:50:08 GMT -5
What is a low tech way to make weeds and wood into chippings, and how were weeds dealt with, in pre-industrial times?
In some of the orchards near me, are tumble weeds and prickly amaranths, which can get 7 ft tall and almost as wide. There is also considerable paranoia over wildfires. I can see taking extra care around open burns, etc, but we'll have nosy neighbors calling the authorities. I suggested goats but was told these might eat the trees.
I have walked in mixed meadows, in the cooler mountainsides, don't believe those are a nuisance.
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Post by richardw on May 23, 2013 0:53:23 GMT -5
Great set up there Mike,are you planing on mowing around your trees at all??
My 'Holistic Orchard' is now coming up 5 years old and the fact that it gets watered by high over head sprinklers is it grows huge amounts of green matter through the warmer months,there must have been a fair amount of new soil created during this time,so i'm thinking banging in a marker peg so i can see how much its building up
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Post by MikeH on May 23, 2013 4:09:57 GMT -5
Great set up there Mike,are you planing on mowing around your trees at all?? My 'Holistic Orchard' is now coming up 5 years old and the fact that it gets watered by high over head sprinklers is it grows huge amounts of green matter through the warmer months,there must have been a fair amount of new soil created during this time,so i'm thinking banging in a marker peg so i can see how much its building up Thinking a bit about it, no. The current circle radius is arbitrary. It could have been large enough to create overlapping circles. A commercial orchard, especially a pick-you-own would mow but we have no constraints. |
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Post by MikeH on May 23, 2013 4:39:22 GMT -5
Great to see. I am keen to do similar but was a little dismayed at Michael Phillips' insistence that the woody mulch had to be ramial woodchip. I simply don't have access to any. I do have plenty of other woodchip so I've decided to push ahead with it anyway. I figure a diversity of mulches should work. We have access to a lot of ramial wood chips from many down branches as the result of an ice storm earlier this year. It's saving us an immense amount of scrounging looking for ramial material or buying in of what appears to be chipped trees. For ongoing renewal of the wood chips, we've decided to locate a dozen plus varieties of willow that Joyce bought this year in an 80' long planting at the bottom of the hillside where the orchard is. Alder or willow chips make the best annual mulch since they rot so quickly. We'll build a small swale downhill from the will to capture whatever runoff there is for the willow roots. With the growth rate of willows, we should get a good supply of small diameter wood that can easily be chipped with an electric chipper. |
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Post by richardw on May 24, 2013 1:09:32 GMT -5
Mike the real advantage in leaving a thick layer of ground cover is wind fall fruit dont get damaged unless they hit a brunch on the way down,but ive just got to beat the ducks to it first though.
The only problem i have with my orchard is in late spring the whole area is a sea of spear grass (Nasselia leucotricha) but then it all flattens down early summer and then all the orchard plants grow though,while the spear grass is full seed and i need to work in the orchard i do so in bare feet other wise your clothes get full of seed
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Post by MikeH on Jun 10, 2013 21:02:07 GMT -5
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Post by raymondo on Jun 11, 2013 4:58:55 GMT -5
Looks good as is Mike. It will look even better as your plantings become established. I like the idea of growing your own ramial woodchip.
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Post by MikeH on Jun 11, 2013 7:15:48 GMT -5
I like the idea of growing your own ramial woodchip. Yeh, as with so many things we do, it's one of those one-thing-leads-to-another situations. Joyce and I had attended a couple of willow basket weaving workshops earlier this year and she wanted to grow a number of varieties. So here I am as the propagator with 10 pots of 5 cuttings each, +90% of which have rooted and I'm scratching my head trying to figure out where to put them where they can be easily maintained. After the mulching exercise of converting the orchard, I realized how lucky we'd been that a recent ice storm had produced lots of downed branches and trees on a neighbour's property. He spent four days with a commercial chipping machine so we had everything we needed a few hundred yards away. Musing on the problem of maintaining a ramial wood chip cover without the largess of Nature, my where-to-put-Joyce's-willows problem suddenly went away. |
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Post by MikeH on Jun 13, 2013 5:39:42 GMT -5
It looks like the material under the wood chips is already starting to have an effect: note the darker grass next to the wood chips. We were hoping for good things but not this fast.  |
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Post by raymondo on Jun 14, 2013 3:11:36 GMT -5
Extra moisture?
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Post by MikeH on Jun 14, 2013 4:25:10 GMT -5
Maybe but I don't think so. If anything, we've got excessive moisture. We've had so much rain this past four weeks that I've forgotten about last year's drought. Not all trees had the same material underneath the wood chips. The ones with mature compost show this green ring while those with semi-decomposed material or straw don't. I think it's the fertility of the mature compost. The ground in the orchard is sub-soil because the top-soil was scraped off to landscape around the house. If this is the impact on the grass, I'm quite excited about the impact that this increased fertility will have on the trees. |
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Post by richardw on Jun 14, 2013 5:05:47 GMT -5
Interesting,looking at the grass out away from the clip it certainly looks like the poor growth you would expect from only growing in a layer of subsoil ,so it wouldn't take much to show up a difference.
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Post by raymondo on Jun 14, 2013 20:43:55 GMT -5
Looking forward to seeing the developments over time Mike.
I do have a little mulch around my fruit trees, just lawn clippings, and not extensive. I did it to relieve moisture stress last season as we had a very dry spring and the fruitset was poor. Even that little mulch helped though in the end the trees aborted all their fruit. I'll be expanding the mulch ring as time permits.
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Post by steev on Jun 14, 2013 23:47:34 GMT -5
The trees (Italian Stone Pine) I planted out in the unirrigated acres and mulched heavily seem to be good, so far, but the horses I let my neighbor graze on that land seem to really like the mulch (mostly oat straw); guess I'll just continue to mulch, letting them "process" it. If they eat my trees, they're off to the knackers!
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Post by richardw on Jun 15, 2013 15:31:06 GMT -5
I think you are better steev to not graze an orchard instead work towards growing as much carbon as you can for soil production,for those with limited irrigation having higher humus levels to turn benefits the trees,i irrigate my orchard not to water the trees because there's plenty close to the surface but to grow as much mulch as i can through summer.
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