A man named John “Wrecka” Warger once owned the land we currently lease and more, and farmed it for the first half of the twentieth century. It was a time of cleared land; even a century after the peak of deforestation in the early 1800s, you could see clear across pastures in every direction. These pastures are now almost entirely reforested, as farm after farm changed hands or fell onto hard times, or the economics of so much pasture simply no longer made sense. There used to be more than a dozen dairy farms within a mile of the farm; not a single one remains. The neighborhood is still relatively agricultural compared with many towns, however, with a small vegetable farm on one side and a larger beef operation on the other.
In 1911, Wrecka built the farmhouse we rented from Al Pieropan; when I finally got around to mucking out the basement and hosing down the concrete floor, there was his name, scrawled into the cement next to the year 1939. Legend has it that Wrecka also built the biggest of the barns partly using lumber purloined from the sawmill in the nearest town. He would drive his wagon down to the mill to get sawdust for bedding down his animals and slip a couple boards under the sawdust each time, or so the story goes. Supposedly he also got drunk in town and did headstands on the seat of his wagon while his horse plodded its own way home. Whatever his personality, he is responsible for most of the physical objects we interacted with when we rented the farmhouse. It was his slate roof that I gingerly walked along when brushing out the chimneys; his 4-foot-long rusty crescent moon of a scythe blade I cleaned out of the room in the barn that used to house the horses; and his outhouse that I refloored and made into a garden shed. It was his pig shed that finally collapsed down the gully under a particularly heavy snow, on which, when I went to dismantle it, I discovered two layers of sheet metal roofing scraps over an initial layer of wood shingles. Wrecka is the one that hauled the old switching hut up from the train yards in town to serve as a milk room. Wrecka planted the apple tree in the meadow that held my daughters’ first rope swing. I have never seen a photo of him and I know next to nothing about who he was or what else he did with his life, and yet his presence can be felt across the landscape, in buildings that remain and buildings that have tumbled down to nothing, in the curve of the driveway and in the rusted slants of barbed wire resting atop frost-heaved stone walls.
In 1955, Al Pieropan and his wife, Elise (whom everyone called Mimi), bought 25 acres of Wrecka’s land, including the house and barns, for $7,500. Al was teaching agriculture at the local high school, and while the land was fenced because Wrecka had been grazing cows on it, Al wasn’t interested in keeping livestock except for the occasional flock of chickens (sixty years later, when we asked Al if we could have chickens at our house, he said yes and got great satisfaction from listening to the rooster crow and seeing our hens stalk around the meadow). It was an era of working landscapes, however, and Al wanted to do something productive with the land. He found his answer for what to grow in Linwood Lesure, who operated a Christmas tree farm on the other end of town.
Linwood was a big deal. He had started experimenting with coppicing Christmas trees on his own 700-acre farm in 1936. At that time, all Christmas trees were grown as part of natural stands of trees and were a by-product of the timber industry. Linwood realized he could keep the stumps alive if he left some live branches below the cut, and he proceeded to plant out much of his land. He won awards, was the president of the National Christmas Tree Association in two different years, and in the early 1950s he taught Al what he knew.
New buds on the balsam.
Who knows how many other people came to visit Linwood’s farm over the decades, sought out his advice for their own operation, and dreamed of one day having acres of stump-cultured trees. I would wager that none of them are still around. It is a testament to Al’s stubbornness and follow-through that he set out to do this thing and, unlike so many, kept with it. By the 1960s, Christmas tree farming had begun to switch to planting the rows of trees that we see everywhere today. The brief couple of decades where trees were deliberately grown as a crop but were not grown from seedlings every time was over. While it is certainly possible to start stump-culturing trees that are planted in rows, over several generations they spread and sprawl and make it impossible to reliably drive a tractor between the rows. For many getting into the business, it was more predictable, more profitable per square foot, and gave a neater appearance to grow trees from seedlings in straight rows. Gradually, the knowledge that you could even coppice a conifer was lost to the public in general, and if you were going to start growing Christmas trees, there was really only one obvious way to do it. Linwood retired, and his trees turned back into a proper forest, and Al was left as one of the only people practicing stump culture in the eastern United States. I’m aware of one other farm up in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont that may coppice Christmas trees, and stump-culturing is slightly more common out on the West Coast, where growers have appreciated the stumps’ greater tolerance to drought due to their extensive root system. But here in the East, our farm and the one in Vermont are it, as far as I can tell.
Al is not one to toot his own horn, and he has never set out to educate people that coppicing Christmas trees is possible. Every other year or so the local papers like to run stories contrasting our farm with conventional tree farms, and maybe that holds people’s attention for all of five seconds, but that has done nothing to penetrate the larger narrative our culture has that you plant a Christmas tree as a seedling, cut it to the ground, pull the stump, and plant again. About six years ago, Dave Jacke, a permaculturist researching a book on coppice agroforestry around the world, reached out to see if he could come visit the farm. He lived in the area and someone told him that he should check us out. He was amazed to learn that you could coppice conifers, had never seen it done, and knew of nobody who had written or talked of doing it. Part of my own desire, the original kernel of the idea of this book, was that if nothing else, people on a broader scale should know that this is possible. Imagine an America where farmers aren’t growing greens and roots right through the winter in greenhouses, because Eliot Coleman hadn’t published the results of his experiments and travels. Imagine a world where farmers aren’t driving chicken tractors around pastures because Joel Salatin never wrote about it. Doing something revolutionary isn’t a revolution unless you share it.
__________
A year after buying the farm, Al started planting trees, inspired by Linwood’s example. He continued planting trees for the next twenty years or more, slowly filling in area after area. Early plantings were a mix of spruces and pines, the popular Christmas tree species back in the 1950s and 1960s. As preferences shifted to balsam fir (Abies balsamea), Al started planting balsam, which today comprises fully 90 percent of the trees. While he bought some seedlings, the majority of trees were seedlings Al pulled from the side of the road on his commute from work. Balsam requires a certain low temperature to germinate well, and although it is not quite cold enough on the farm for strong germination, by the time Al was planting balsam he was working as a shop teacher several towns to the west. His drive took him through higher, colder regions where balsam sprouted thickly along the side of the road. He would stop and fill a gunnysack on the way home, and then go out with a shovel and plant them in his fields. Over the course of decades, this dedication turned into thousands of trees spreading over 10 acres.
When I ask Al, as I have several times over the years, what was hardest about the farm, he generally waves off the notion that any of it was difficult. He is a man naturally turned to work, and prone to understatement. If I press him, though, he will allow that in those early years when the trees were young and the land was still in transition, the brambles sometimes got the better of him. There was no multiflora rose (Rosa multiflora) back then, its invasion still decades in the future, but blackberry and raspberry canes can be quite unpleasant enough when they really take hold. Al won’t say it, but I suspect he battled a lot of brambles in his day. Now the land is mostly settled. The skirts of branches on the stumps shade out much of the ground, although certainly not all, and the ground cover is a mix of mosses, ferns, huckleberry, dogwood, and willow. There are a few areas still covered with brambles, though, and every time I push through the canes, thorns dragging at my pants, I think of Al and what it must have been like to have to cut through acres and acres of them.
Anne Preston tackling a thicket of multiflora rose.
When you are young and relatively poor, land that is partway through transitioning from cleared to reforested is often what you can afford. Good farmland is usually still being farmed. Well-maintained forest is similarly unlikely to be for sale. Old people often hold on to properties they can no longer maintain, and so when these properties finally do go on the market, they are neglected and overgrown, or worse, tapped out from years of tenant farmers with little incentive to invest in the land’s fertility. Plants that thrive in such disturbed ecosystems are often thorny, poisonous, entangling, or just plain overwhelming, as evidenced by any pasture in New England allowed to return to forest. Brambles often overrun idle fields during this early successional stage, which can take decades. More recently they’ve been joined by the aforementioned multiflora rose, an ornamental species from Europe that forms huge, arching thickets of canes with aggressive thorns along every inch of stem. Multiflora rose, like brambles, possesses the devilish trait of walking; that is, whenever a cane arches down and touches the ground, it roots and starts a whole new plant. In this way, one plant can become five in the course of three years. When I asked Al how he dealt with multiflora rose (thinking there was going to be some optimal time to root them out, or some method involving machinery), he told me he just uses his clippers, cutting it into pieces until it is just a pile of chopped-up bits on the ground. He has a good point. Multiflora rose that is simply cut at the base and left in long pieces tends to take years to decay, since the canes hold themselves up off the ground and simply dry out; these long branches can make it difficult for the farmer to return to the base of the plant the next year to cut back the fresh growth as the plant regenerates. Instead, by cutting it into bits, more pieces touch the ground where they get wet and rot quickly, and it is easy to keep cutting the rebound shoots until the plant uses up its resources and truly dies, a process that usually takes three to four years. Al used hand clippers that he always carried in his pocket, but I prefer to set aside time each year specifically to tackle multiflora thickets, and I use long-handled loppers to give me a little distance from the thorns and more leverage when it comes to cutting thick stems. As much as I dread this task, I am always pleasantly surprised at how little time it takes to chew through an enormous thicket. Something that seemed insurmountable will take two hours, leaving me sheepish and resolved to do more to root out all the rose in the grove, of which there is still quite a bit, although each year there is less.
Coppice and Standards
When I cut back rose, I also cut back any deciduous species that I don’t want to keep, a necessary task to revisit every few years for any given area. This is also a form of coppicing, as these species will usually come back from the same little stump the next year, sending up multiple shoots. I’ve been using this to my advantage by keeping the best, straightest ones and trimming them up to give me an endless supply of the 8-foot (2.5 m) poles I need to store and transport wreaths. Each year I go through thirty to forty poles, a rate that the local woods along the road edge cannot sustain. After doing this selective cutting for about five years, I’m starting to get a good supply of poles from the grove itself.
I’ve also started to select the best specimens of hardwood seedlings to grow into full-sized trees, choosing ones that have never been cut before, and therefore whose trunks have clean bases so they will remain strong as they grow old. Mostly I keep sugar maple (Acer saccharum), black cherry (Prunus serotina), red oak (Quercus rubra), American beech (Fagus grandifolia), and white ash (Fraxinus americana), with the occasional red maple (Acer rubrum) and paper birch (Betula papyrifera). The idea is to establish an overstory of valuable hardwoods that will start to form a partial shade over the grove, making it more pleasant to do the summer pruning. Currently there is quite a lot of squinting into the sun and strategic timing to follow the shade at the edge of the grove. To keep these trees from interfering with the balsam, I prune all the branches as high up as I can, usually 16 feet (5 m) or so. This is fairly easy for the first few years, because the saplings are flexible enough to bend them over and snip off any side branches with clippers. As they get older this flexibility lessens, and after about three years of pruning they are usually too stiff to bend down, by which time the straight, branchless section of trunk is well established.
This process of establishing a stand of full-sized trees is a common practice in coppiced forests around the world. Called standards, these large trees create partial shade that is beneficial to the coppiced species below. In my case, the balsam don’t need the partial shade, but I do. There is another motive for creating this overstory forest, however. If I’m unable to find someone to take over the Christmas trees when I’m ready to be done (whenever that is), this forest is a backup plan. I don’t think the balsam stumps will ever run out of juice as long as they are properly managed. But I do think it possible that I might not find a replacement for myself. And if that happens, I want to be able to cut down all the balsam and have a beautiful forest of mixed valuable hardwoods already established and mature. In the meantime, they will keep me cooler in the summer.
Another species that is abundant on the farm is black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia). Although the locust seedlings all over the farm come from two separate groves of trees that are at least 150 years old, locust is considered invasive in Massachusetts and planting it is prohibited, since its native range was originally farther to the south. Locust is naturally rot resistant (better than pressure treated) and was used extensively for fence posts back in the day.
Stump-cultured Christmas trees can be a chaotic space to take in. There is a lot going on, and there is very little geometry to guide the eye. Here, a half-grown tree edges in next to a tree ready to cut. Below them, full skirts of branches are ready to be harvested.
Black locust is also incredibly thorny, so it is not an ideal species to have growing all over the grove. However, I’ve taken to pruning up any I find in the same way as the other hardwoods, with the goal of having a steady supply of fence posts or poles in a few years. I’ve even transplanted a dozen that sprang up in a pasture into an unused section of the grove to make my own locust coppice area. Locust grows faster than most trees (except willow), so in about five years I should have fence-post-sized trees that will supply me with two or three every year indefinitely, with the number increasing as the coppice stumps mature and start to throw out more rods each time they are cut.
Site Repair
Understanding the history of your land is not about preserving the past like in some museum, unless that is your thing. Rather, it serves as a jumping-off point, learning what made sense then to think about what makes sense now. It is easy to dwell on the mistakes of past landowners (if they hadn’t made any, their descendants might still be farming the land and not you), and fail to see the excellent choices that were made in siting buildings, defining pastures and woodlots, and utilizing springs. When we moved into our farmhouse, I spent the first couple of years daydreaming about all the changes I would make to the house if we ever bought it, only to realize that my first ideas were not that good, and that I had reacted to the landscape without any sense of nuance. As I observed more and lived through more seasons, my understanding of what would make the house better changed. Although we didn’t end up buying the house, it was a lesson I took to heart.
The concept of site repair offers another way to think about our propensity to make too many changes, too fast, when encountering a new landscape. It was first put forward in the groundbreaking book A Pattern Language, written in the 1970s by a group of architects who were trying to describe the common themes behind the architectural success of vernacular buildings around the world, buildings designed and built based on local needs, with local materials, reflecting local traditions, and by local builders. Understanding site repair is simple. First, picture a meadow. Most people when adding to this landscape would choose to put a new building in the nicest spot in the meadow. After all, it is such a lovely meadow. But sometimes adding to a space destroys or disrupts the very things that made it lovely and took years or even decades to develop, including plants, the way animals interact with the landscape, the way the wind blows across it, or a view. Buildings are not bad; they can vastly enrich the spaces around them if sited and built thoughtfully. But they inevitably disrupt what was there before, and so the best thing is to site them, if possible, in an area in need of repair. According to the site repair principle, the broken-down wreck of a building that is slowly moldering into the goldenrod gets removed and cleaned up to make way for building something new, and the meadow stays the lovely meadow that took so many years to evolve.
Site repair is not commonly practiced on farms, in part because there is usually more land available than there is money to clean up the old foundation, and in part because we farmers are thrifty. That jumble of old equipment on the field edge? It might provide us with a part we need someday, or we might be waiting for the price of scrap metal to go up, or we see it as some sort of crazy retirement plan to eventually sell. In the meantime, we plunk the new greenhouse or shed or barn or house, even, right in the middle of the nicest bit we’ve got. This is exactly the sort of short-term thinking that gets farms into trouble. What would you do differently if you were to create a five-year plan for your farm to be as successful as you hope and imagine it could be? What about a ten-year plan? Twenty-five? The best farmers make the big decisions using the history of their land to inform long-term future moves, while also reading the tea leaves in the present to keep things moving in that direction in the short term. This can mean new infrastructure using site repair, but it can also mean repairing and using the structures that already exist, whenever possible.
Cecilia and I did a lot of repurposing of spaces when we lived at the farm, and we continue to do it at the house we now own. When we needed a garden shed, I mucked out the old outhouse, put a new floor down, repaired the broken window, and built a door. When we needed a space to make wreaths and cure garlic, I emptied the little greenhouse shed of its junk, repaired the roof, and repainted it. We cleaned and organized several areas in the big barn to create space to store poles of wreaths during the wholesale season, and we dismantled another shed that had collapsed down a gully rather than just let it rot in place.
Bird nests and other wildlife in the grove are good indications of the rich ecosystem this way of growing trees creates. When possible I keep nests in the trees as a surprise for the customer.
Landscape Design for Site Repair
Whenever you are adding a new structure to a landscape or renovating an existing one, here are some basic principles to keep in mind:
- Whenever possible, rehabilitate the worst piece of land with any new construction. This might mean ripping down that scary old barn, or it might mean repairing and adding to it.
- Pay attention to solar orientation and prevailing winds to create warmer and cooler microclimates in the winter and summer. The particulars of this vary from climate to climate, but local vernacular architecture usually features ingenious solutions for this, so if in doubt do some research and make field trips to good examples.
- Orient new structures so that the area formed between them becomes a useful, usable space. Often this means deliberately building structures closer together, which can in turn be used to create sunny spots out of the wind or pools of shade facing the prevailing breeze.
- Be aware of the potential for any structure to be useful around its entire edge. Design an outside that creates opportunities for storage, work, or relaxation.
- If there are trees on your property, be wary of siting buildings under their potential fall path, particularly trees like white pine (Pinus strobus), cottonwood (Populus deltoides), and poplar (Populus grandidentata) that are prone to snapping and falling. If they are leaning, build on the side away from the lean or remove the trees.
- Consider the workflow of your farm. Site your buildings and structures to make your operation run as efficiently as possible, within the constraints of your land. If your operation is by necessity spread out, concentrate as many operational tasks into one spot as possible, but make sure tools and supplies are close at hand for each task. Sometimes this means separate toolsheds or walls for far-flung fields. Sometimes (as with me) it means that everything rides along in the truck from location to location.
The Soil
Understanding the history of your farm is by definition understanding the state of its soil. This includes knowing what areas are appropriate for your business (not too steep for any operation that will plow up the sod, not too wet for vehicle access, not too sparse for grazing), as well as whether or not your soil is contaminated. The most common soil contaminants where I live are lead and other chemicals that were sprayed on old orchards, which can linger long after the trees are gone. But contaminants can also come from past conventional farming, or lead paint residue from an old building. If you know or even suspect that your location had an orchard or building on it, get the soil tested for any possible contaminants before you invest resources, including buying. You might discover that the land is cheap for a reason.
Sometimes contamination can come from old dumps. In New England, it was not uncommon even as recently as fifty years ago for people to dump appliances and other larger trash in the woods or down a gully. Old refrigerators, in particular, can have some nasty chemicals in them. Do some soil testing if this is a concern.
Of course, it is also worth getting the soil tested to establish a baseline so that you know where you want to go and how to get there to improve the fertility and health of your land. While most agricultural universities offer soil-testing services, these are often designed to be useful to large conventional farms and can leave smaller operations taking their best guess at what exact course of action is needed. Thankfully, there are a growing number of options for small farmers and gardeners. Of particular note is the 2012 book The Intelligent Gardener by Erica Reinheimer and Steve Solomon, which gave me, for the first time after years of farming and gardening professionally, the ability to analyze for myself the lab results of a soil test to determine how much of each major element (not just nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus, but also calcium, magnesium, manganese, copper, iron, boron, and sulfur) the soil has, how much it can hold given its organic matter and cation exchange capacity, and then how to blend a customized amendment mix that can precisely address my soil’s needs. I used to follow the fertility regime of the farms I worked on and leased: bed prep with ¼ inch (6 mm) of compost, liming and spreading premixed fertilizer, fish emulsion fertigation for seedlings being transplanted. In many ways, this system works just fine, if a little crudely. The problem for me came during my years of gardening after I stopped vegetable farming. Until I read The Intelligent Gardener I was easily swayed by the most easily implemented ideas in the other books I read. As a result, my typical fertility regime was all over the map and not rooted in the reality of my land. I made compost only from materials scrounged from the very land I was amending, thereby compounding any imbalances that existed while not addressing any deficits. I avoided using outside fertilizers for far too long, enamored with the idea of letting the land reestablish its own fertility under my superior management, only to panic when crops failed to do as well in their second or third year, having used up some critical element that was in short supply. I crowded plants too closely together, making them subacutely water-stressed without realizing it, and I practiced a very awkward mixture of mulching and hoeing. The Intelligent Gardener snapped me out of this habit of following the advice of the latest book I read.
Understanding Soil
My best advice on soil is to read The Intelligent Gardener by Reinheimer and Solomon. It is not a sexy book. There are no glossy photographs. It is dense. But it will couch your understanding of soil fertility in the reality of what is actually going on.
If you are thinking, nah, I’m unlikely to read that, then here are some of the most important takeaways:
The quality of the soil dictates the quality of the food, and the quality of the food forms the baseline of our health. A carrot is not interchangeable, nutritionally, from one to the next. Food has widely different nutrition depending on the soil on which it (or its ingredients) was produced. This is true for everything from milk to bread to lettuce to apples. Food grown on soil that has an abundance of the nutrients our bodies need transfers more of those nutrients to us, leading to greater health. This is not the same as saying that kale is more nutritious than blueberries; instead, it means that kale grown on one soil is more nutritious than kale grown on another soil. The difference is the fertility of the soils. This difference, the nutrition of food, is the next big distinction that smaller farms can make in how they bring value to their customers. As agro-industry subverts the meaning of organic, this measure will become the most important way to define your value.
Soil that provides this nutrition is a careful mix of the different elements. This mix will be slightly different depending on the qualities of your particular soil; the point is to make your soil the best it can be, given its underlying bedrock nature. To achieve this mix, you need to test your soil to see what it contains and then add a custom mix of amendments to bring the different elements into optimal balance with one another. This balance is not the result of guesswork, but rather the result of decades of research by soil scientists. Because there are limits to how much of some elements you can safely add each year, bringing your soil into balance can take several years of testing and amendments, and it is something of a moving target. As your soil becomes more balanced and fertile, it can handle more of certain elements, and you therefore can add more. This in turn translates into better crop growth and better plant nutrition. And better taste, because food grown on fertile soil actually tastes better. The key is testing, analysis, and amendment.
Don’t assume that compost is the answer to all of your soil problems. Compost varies widely in quality depending on how it was made and its components. It can have sufficient nitrogen to grow a healthy crop or it can have very little. If it was made entirely with materials from your land (this includes manure from animals that did not receive supplemental food) then it will never by itself address the fertility imbalances of your soil, since these imbalances will have been reflected in the components of the compost itself. If anything, these imbalances will become more exaggerated by the act of composting. Similarly, there is a vast difference in compost made with manures brought in (or produced yourself) depending on the feed supplements the animals received (and that thus make it into their manure), the quality of their feed overall, and whether the manure was bedded in sawdust (bad) or hay (good). Manure from the horse down the road that stands around a grazed-out paddock all day is probably not worth getting. Manure from a prized stud racehorse given select-cut hay and special supplements is invaluable, but it will usually be carefully used by the owners rather than given away or sold. Any farmer producing manure worth having is not going to give it or even sell it away. If you do not produce quality manure or compost yourself, the best bet would be to try a number of different local compost producers. My current favorite is a landscaper I used to work for who windrows grass clippings and leaves in with his beef cattle.
The quality of your land, at the time you start managing it, is the result of both your location and its underlying geology and centuries of other people’s decisions. Mostly these decisions were to extract resources, in the form of crops or grass or the bones and flesh of livestock, and so nutrient levels are commonly far below what they could be, even if your predecessors spread manure, lime, or fertilizers. Their additions were rarely enough to offset what was taken. Bringing your soil back to health is a process of paying the overdue balance from those who came before you. Even if your land has been lying fallow for years, don’t fool yourself: It would take hundreds of years for the natural breakdown of the bedrock and the biological processes that form topsoil to return your soil to optimal health. You don’t have that long. You need to take matters into your own hands.
What amendments you add to your soil will vary, both because of the results of your soil analysis, and because of what you intend to do with the land. Remineralizing pasture looks very different than remineralizing soil in a greenhouse, in both the particulars and the economics. In most cases, however, spreading amendments is something that you should budget for and prepare yourself to do on a semiregular basis. While the amounts will start to decrease as your soil approaches balance, there will always be a need to replace micronutrients and other elements removed in the form of crops, and in much of the United States rainwater leaching removes calcium and sulfur from the soil naturally.
Soil Fertility in the Trees
Because our farm is a Christmas tree farm and will never be turned back into pasture, improving soil fertility with the goal of improving the nutrient density of food is not really applicable. Instead, our goals are to do what we can to improve the color of our trees (certain areas get a little too yellow as they enter winter dormancy), and to make sure our practices promote the long-term ecological health of the landscape.
The yellow color shows up in areas that are too wet; Al always attributed it to a lack of nitrogen, assuming that the extra ground moisture leached some of the nitrogen out of the soil. In these areas, tree growth is normal and color is indistinguishable from that of other trees up until the end of November, when most of the trees (but not all!) slowly begin to turn more copper in color. Interestingly, if you harvest greens or trees before they turn, the harvested greenery remains a good green color. To test if adding nitrogen would help prevent yellowing, one year I spread fishmeal in and around one section while leaving an adjacent section unamended. I chose fishmeal because, unlike seedmeal, it would be harder for birds and other animals to eat before it had a chance to wash into the soil and get assimilated by the microfauna. While I did observe an increase in growth (in some cases the main leaders were almost twice as long as in the control plot), that fall there was no noticeable difference in color change from the year before.
Several other people have suggested that iron deficiency might account for this yellowing instead, and I intend to run a similar experiment to see if they are correct. Iron sulfate is relatively inexpensive and easy to spread, and the increased ability to harvest trees and greens from these areas would pay for the amendment many times over. But when I talked to another, very experienced Christmas tree farmer about it, his opinion was that the wetness of the land was the problem, not a deficiency of some element, and that until I did something to alleviate this wetness (likely in the form of digging ditches), the soil moisture would continue to impede the tree’s ability to gain access to nutrients. So if the iron sulfate doesn’t work, I will probably see what can be done to dig some ditches. It sounds like a lot of work, but then again, I’ve got my whole life to figure it out.
The grove is home to a rich ecosystem of forest understory plants, including this swamp pink azalea.
As for ecosystem health, Al’s practice (which I continue) of piling up slash and stumps and brush and letting it all rot down in place has helped to build the soil in most areas of the farm. At times I have daydreamed about buying a chipper small enough that I could drag it around the trails and chip up the smaller branches to mulch the paths, but in the end this seems like a lot of extra work, energy use, and expense for something that will happen automatically if I am just more patient. I’ve also come to realize that making brush piles full of branches and trunks of different sizes creates a much richer environment for insects, and the birds and other creatures that feed on these insects. If the majority of these branches were chipped, it would certainly be tidier; but it would also be impoverished compared with the current, rich ecosystem of the grove.
Of course, in the big picture, farming is always a form of resource extraction, and my farm is no different. Year after year, trees and greens come down off the slopes, and eventually something will need to be given back. While the complex root systems of the mature stumps and all the other species of shrubs and trees around them create some incremental increase in soil fertility through breaking down soil particles and converting them, with the addition of sunlight and rain, into organic matter, which then accumulates in the topsoil from the brush piles, it may or may not be enough to offset what is taken. We will have to see. Right now the trees appear to be growing strong, with almost no disease, and with optimal growth each year. If this changes over the course of my lifetime, I will have to reevaluate what needs to be done to give back.
The decisions that Wrecka Warger and Al Pieropan made before me influence me to this day, shaping my experience and my surroundings, just as I am certain—though unclear on the particulars—that my own decisions will shape someone else’s experience someday. Our actions are rocks thrown in a pond, and while the ripples of some are big enough to be obvious, those of others are only distantly felt, lapping up on some far shore long after we have turned our attention elsewhere. Farming is the act of simultaneously holding short-term goals and long-term planning in your hand, of doing today what you must so that in thirty years you will be where you want to be. This is true of life, in general, but as farming is literally concerned with the growth of things, it is more obviously so. What we do now will shape what comes after us.
The right tool for the job. Large hanging scales like this are rare. This one is heavy, so it gets set up at a loading area, usually cantilevered off the truck rack, and lives in the truck cab so it is always available.