Occupy Substrates

There isn't much in the natural world that hasn't blown me away at one point or another; its the experiences watching brown pelicans hunting in formation in the everglades, hearing an all-night chorus of barred owls in the forests of the Adirondacks, and tasting my first wild mushroom (chicken of the woods) that keep me coming back for more.

Sulfur Shelf/Chicken of the Woods

Modern consumer culture encourages us to be routine, predictable. Nature breaks that pattern and helps remind us that each day, each season, each instance is unique.

When I start talking about mushrooms I'm often confused about whether I found them or they found me. Or at least now that we've found each other, why mycelium won't seem to stop following me around, always begging for my attention.

One of my favorite things about mushrooms is the surprises they give you - the flushes of fresh shiitake I find on logs after a rain, or the discovery of a wild mushroom that reveals itself suddenly from the base of a tree. I was recently surprised by the quiet ferociousness of some King Stropharia (Stropharia rugosa-annulata) spawn that I recently inoculated in trays of soil and woodchips during a class with the Rochester Permaculture Institute.

Stropharia occupying woodchips.

In just over a week, the mycelium has managed to colonize almost all of the substrate in this tray and on one tray in particular it has emerged from the surface, hungry for more. I was expecting to see some success, but not this rapidly. I'm observing, and thinking about what do do next. Clearly they are going to need more food soon, in the form of dead organic matter. (yum)

It's not just that mushrooms look cool and taste great. Its not only that they are some of the most nutritious foods we can eat. It's not the fact that they are pretty easy to cultivate. Its not even the potential to use mushrooms to help clean up toxins in the environment. It's the combination of an organism that thrives on eating dead organic matter, on breaking down carbon and building up soil, all while giving us dinner that gets me.

Cultivating shiitake logs has been the first time in my life where all the pieces have come together (at least in my pursuit of ecosystem design). Here I take oak, maple, and beech logs that are the surplus of managing a healthy forest. I inoculate them and stick them in a shady corner, waiting for the mycelium to colonize the wood. Over the next 4 years the mushroom breaks down the log and produces pounds of food. After the log is spent it returns to the forest to feed millions of organisms as they reclaim the log back into the soil.

My reward for stewarding this cycle is food, enjoyment, and part of my living. I've been working on this relationship for 5 years, and I feel like we are finally getting to understand each other.

The entire tray almost colonized after one week!

Stropharia is asking for more attention from me. I don't quite understand it yet. The lesson of this mushroom is that is is happy to coexist, it isn't picky about substrates, and it wants to eat as much as I'll give. But it doesn't fruit consistently, at least not for me. It doesn't yet tie directly into my forestry work. But it seems to want to get my attention. I'm listening.

New Pattern: Stewards and Propagators

I was pleased to recently see some New York Times press devoted to forestry issues and while like many articles it is thin on solutions, I appreciate the effort of bringing the complicated mix of challenges (and opportunities) out into the public eye.

In the end I don't know how much a good article (including my blog!) changes ACTIONS taken on the ground, and that is the real issue. We have a long mountain to climb in the areas of forest literacy, of moving beyond appreciation and a general "forests are good" attitude into the type of deeper understanding and intervention I believe is required to support the healthiest forests possible in the face of so many uncertainties.

The full New York Times article, published here, is well worth the read. I am going to grab a few interesting excerpts and comment on them. 

First off, we know that trees and forest are important in terms of carbon storage; they lock up carbon in their wood and soil, sometimes for hundreds of years or more. In fact, as the article notes,

"Scientists have figured out — with the precise numbers deduced only recently — that forests have been absorbing more than a quarter of the carbon dioxide that people are putting into the air by burning fossil fuels and other activities. It is an amount so large that trees are effectively absorbing the emissions from all the world’s cars and trucks." 

A devastated forest I visited a few years back; much of the carbon storage built up was quickly releasing again.

This comes as good news, but the challenges trail right behind as we look at trends where increased deforestation and mass disturbance from climate change and other sources. Forests that burn or are removed by humans, pests, and disease can rapidly release these carbon storages, adding to the overall total. Even if allowed, it will be some time before these forest can regrow and put that carbon back in the bank, so to speak:

“Forests take a century to grow to maturity,” said Werner A. Kurz, a Canadian scientist who is a leading expert on forest carbon. “It takes only a single extreme climate event, a single attack by insects, to interrupt that hundred-year uptake of carbon.”

Another interesting point the article makes is about the potential for forests to put carbon into long term storage, which could potentially be amplified by two factors; the idea that increased C02 is causing plants to grow faster, coupled with the warming temperatures which means and longer growing season:

"Today, the re-growing forests of the Eastern United States are among the most important carbon sponges in the world. In the Harvard Forest, the rate of carbon storage accelerated about a decade ago. As in much of the world, the temperature is warming there — by an average of 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit in the last 40 years — and that has led to longer growing seasons, benefiting this particular forest more than hurting it, at least so far. “We’re actually seeing that the leaves are falling off the trees later in the fall,” Mr. Werden said.

Scientists say that something similar may be happening in other forests, particularly in cold northern regions that are warming rapidly. In some places, the higher temperatures could aid tree growth or cause forests to expand into zones previously occupied by grasslands or tundra, storing more carbon."

and

"One major reason is that forests, like other types of plants, appear to be responding to the rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by growing more vigorously. The gas is, after all, the main food supply for plants. Scientists have been surprised in recent years to learn that this factor is causing a growth spurt even in mature forests, a finding that overturned decades of ecological dogma."

 

 At first this reads as good news to those of us aware of the challenges of a short growing season in the Northeast. I laugh sometimes when I hear stories of forests in the tropics that grow so fast you can almost see the trees growing. Our game here, whether it is forestry or farming, is a patient one. On some tree species a few inches of growth each season is good.


So we know that forests are good carbon sinks, so long at they are healthy, standing, and resilient to changes and disturbances. And while climate change has brought and will continue to bring more dramatic weather events, more droughts, and more floods, in the longer term picture the forests in the east MAY reap some benefit from warming temperatures (longer growing season) and more rapid growth from all the available CO2.

Maybe....let's not forget the added complications. I ran the second quote above by my friend Danica, who is doing a program in the Cornell Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology. She has been conducting some experiments to look at the effects of ozone on plant growth and health. Here is what she said:

There have been a lot of experiments looking at the effects of increased carbon dioxide on plants.  These experiments artificially elevate carbon dioxide in the atmosphere surrounding the plants and then look at how the plants respond in terms of growth, photosynthesis, respiration, and many other variables.  

 

Most of these find that plants can increase their growth and photosynthesis (i.e. carbon capture) rates up to a point, but plants do acclimate at these higher carbon dioxide concentrations over time so the rate of increase is fleeting.  

 

Often, this acclimation has to do with the plant balancing the tradeoff between capturing more carbon while limiting water loss.  

 

If plants do not have enough water, they will close their stomatal cells to minimize water loss, but this closure also means that they cannot absorb carbon dioxide.

The brown splotches are from mass die-off from pink bark beetle in the Black Hills of SD (this picture was taken there) and across the Rocky Mountains.

One of the issues that Danica's response gets at is the challenge if isolated experiments in labs where the only variable is CO2 concentration versus the "real world" scenario in the forest, where other gases, precipitation, latitude, species composition, soil, land use, etc all play a role in the unique story, and thus outcome of a forest. 

The good news, in my mind, is that the actions we need to take are largely the same: promote healthy, resilient individual trees, stands of trees, and whole forests. Also, while in the past forestry might focus on concentrating on a particular species and encouraging that species to dominate, we might look for adding species diversity more into the mix. 

This conversation gets at the first part of the title of this entry; it speaks to our practice as stewards of the forested landscape. I'll drop one more quote which hints at the next role I believe we need to play as propagators of better species, of more species, of species we may not yet find growing in our region:

"Forests are re-growing on abandoned agricultural land across vast reaches of Europe and Russia. China, trying to slow the advance of a desert, has planted nearly 100 million acres of trees, and those forests, too, are absorbing carbon. 

But, as a strategy for managing carbon emissions, these recovering forests have one big limitation: the planet simply does not have room for many more of them. To expand them significantly would require taking more farmland out of production, an unlikely prospect in a world where food demand and prices are rising."

As a permaculture designer, my logical and first response to this quote was, "why can't we have agriculture and forests, too?" This topic, and the literature I've been obsessing over lately, will be the topic of next week's entry. Thanks for reading!

There's just no substitute for sitting in the woods...

This week I thought I would digress a bit from the discussions of patterns in forestry and return to a fundamental practice that I've, well, recently returned to.

An important part of my education was spending time at a local environmental education program called EarthArts in Ithaca. From my first visit with a friend in high school I knew there was something special going on at this place. Founder Dale Bryner created what she called and "invisible school," which has no walls, but is everywhere outside as students explore nature and their own self in a number of ways. In this school everything - people, plants, rocks, the landscape - is a teacher.

One of the key tools employed at EarthArts and in many nature awareness programs is called Sit Spot. The goal of this practice is to spend time alone, outside, for 20 or more minutes, focused on taking in your surroundings with the only tools we carry with us at all times; our senses.

The reason we spend at least 20 minutes sitting is because we humans tend to create a chaos of disturbance when we enter the woods. If you've ever watched a cat stalk prey or a blue heron flying across a wetland you gain a new respect for the ability to move with grace and quiet. We have lost that ability, partly because we don't spend time outside, and partly because we just don't have to. If you were constantly worried about a predator around the bend you'd walk softer and slower on the land.

While a mere experience sitting in the woods may not seem to be a profound practice, it truly is. Imagine visiting the same spot, day after day, season after season, to sit and open your eyes, ears, and nose to the events going on around you. This creates a relationship to place, and you can begin to see the subtle changes that nature takes.

While I am so thankful for all the reading and classed I've taken over the years, I feel I have learned more in sit spot, in practicing observation, than I ever could have from people or books.

An important distinction I've made here is the relationship between primary learning and secondary learning. In primary observation WE are directly receiving information and learn from interacting with the elements we are trying to learn about. An example would be learning tree identification by collecting leaf and seed samples, feeling the bark, and observing the landscape habitat where the species persist.

Another example of primary learning; walking blindfolded through the landscape.

 

In secondary or mediated learning, we get this information from a book, or from a person. In the tree identification, we'd be working with a diagnostic keys, or someone would be leading us around and telling us about the trees we are seeing. Or perhaps, the best example of secondary learning would be to not be in the woods at all, but to be inside, looking at slides or listening to a lecture about trees.

It's an obvious statement to say that most of our learning these days is secondary, or mediated by something - whether it is a person, book, or the internet. I run into this in all my educational ventures, whether short classes or longer programs. The interesting paradox I've experienced is that most students want "hands-on" or primary learning experience, but very few have any actual skills or experience learning in this way.

A good example of this would be interactions I've had with summer apprentices over the last  few summers. We run a 6 week program through the Finger Lakes Permaculture Institute and host 8 to 10 young and eager apprentices each season. They are often fresh out of college or still attending, and VERY hungry to get their hands dirty, to learn by doing.

One activity we always undertake is planting an annual vegetable garden, in no till beds that are sheet mulched in true permaculture fashion. Each year I get the same questions; "how far apart should we plant the tomatoes?" which I could easily answer. My strategy has been to ask, "Have you seen a mature tomato plant before?" or "What if you planted
them at different spacings and observed over the summer to determine the correct spacing?"

This sort of approach - giving a question to a question, rather than just the answer, is the single most challenging thing for students to grasp. We are all so used to asking a question and getting the answer, but the problem is that is shuts off our brain, and removes the opportunity to form a relationship to the things we are learning about.

The same happens with tree ID, where many students just want to know the name, and once they do, are satisfied they've "learned" the tree.

Instead of telling them the tree name, I ask, "What does the form look like? What shape are the leaves? How does the bark look and feel? What does the tree look like in different stages of life?"

One apprentice in particular was really frustrated with my tomato answer, but now when I see her she always reminds me what a powerful learning that was for her. My questions, or rather my LACK of answer, forced her to look at the plant in her hand, assess her surroundings, and take charge of the situation. It didn't matter if she was right or wrong, but that she was willing to try something, and learning by observing the results of her actions. This is primary learning.

All this touting of primary learning is not to discount or blow off the value of secondary materials - I absolutely love learning from people, and books, and movies. Instead, I want to encourage thinking around the need to tip the balance - to create a world where we each take responsibility for our learning by diving in, and not sitting back waiting for someone to tell us the facts. This is the main way conventional education has failed us.

Back to Sit Spot; I've recently begun sitting in the woods again, practicing exercises to open my senses and take in my environment. I couple this with asking myself questions about the forest as I look around, such as:

"How long has this tree been lying across the creek?"
"What evidence do I see of past humans here?"
"Why is the moss growing on that log and not the other?"  (I learned why from a book, but only after I had asked myself the question!)

I strongly encourage those who are interested in being better land stewards, farmers, foresters, and gardeners to find a quiet spot in a place you can visit daily, or several times a week. Sit there for 20 minutes or more. Make observations. Ask good questions. And don't doubt the benefits of this exercise. Imagine doing this through sunny days, rain storms, and in the snow. Imagine seeing your sit spot waking up from winter, being there when the first green shoots emerge from the ground. Who needs television?

More about sit spot from Wilderness Awareness School

Disturbance can be good (PART 2)

A shorter entry this week as I’m catching up from a vacation I took last week to Washington State, which included hikes in Olympic National Park, kayaking around the San Juan Islands, and an amazing site visit to the Bullock Brothers Homestead, one of the oldest permaculture sites in the USA.

To pick up where the last post left off – disturbance – I mentioned wanting to expand more on the idea that we humans can design and induce disturbance in ecological design to propel a system to new levels of biodiversity, interconnection, etc.

A key element to this notion is that human created disturbance is NOT being proposed on the same scale or intensity we see in natural events. In fact since we are looking at disturbances in the context of systems we are managing for yields, we wouldn’t want to see change happen so drastically. The hundreds and thousands of downed trees up in the Adirondacks from the aftermath of hurricane Irene are going to be felt in the system for a long time to come. I’m not talking about this with our own interventions. 

So what do human-scale disturbances look like? A simple one is the creation of gaps or clearings in small forest stands, which stimulates understory growth, allows for the regeneration of sun loving species, and supports habit for a wide range of birds you won’t find in more mature stands.

A meaningful gap needs to be large enough to get sunlight to the floor – often a few trees won’t be worth the effort. I’ve read and seen the most effective gaps to be two to four times the height of the forest canopy. In other words, if you have an overstory that is 80 feet tall, a good gap would be somewhere between 160 and 320 feet wide.

Gaps could be circular, with a radius of the above figures, but it could also be a linear gap as well. I visited a forest in Delaware County, NY that demonstrated some interesting potential for small strip gaps in forests. The forest had been thinned in 1996 and all along the old logging roads now serving as trails were an amazing abundance of species that were shade tolerant but liked some light, including elderberries, currants, and many ribes species. I noted that the best growth was on the gaps that extended from East to West, giving the longest solar exposure during the warm summer months.

Nature plays out natural selection....slowly.

The size, shape, and location of a cleared gap depends on a lot of factors, including the size of the stand, the slope, soils, etc. One wouldn’t want to clear large areas around streams and in riparian corridors. Clearing nearby to genetically superior species that one wants to see seed regeneration from would increase the likelihood of success.

 Many folks might assume much of holistic forestry would be planting trees. While in some cases this may be the case, but a more effective (and realistic) approach is to create the conditions for regeneration, letting the forest determine the appropriate species composition based on good old natural selection. When I find a White Oak or a Tulip Popular around these parts I often see if a gap is feasible on the South side of the seed tree, to enhance to possibility for regeneration.

It IS appropriate to plant trees in cases where viable healthy specimens are scarce – such as large tracts of old farmland that don’t have excellent seed sources nearby. In this case we can employ another example of disturbance that mimics what nature does – overseeding.

Often when I come across tree planting guides, they emphasize that tress should be spaced to allow for maximum canopy development. So for example, Black Walnuts or Oaks should be give 50 to 60 feet of spacing, which they will eventually fill in.

The problem with this strategy is two fold. First is that likely a decent percentage will die off before maturity; especially when stock is grown from seed and the resulting genetics rather random in their growth characteristics. The other major problem is that a tree in an open field grows OUT as much as UP. I’ve seen several planted fields that, at a certain spacing, produce trees that are attractive but have little timber or wood value. Trees don’t grow without competition in the forest, and that struggle for sunlight is what makes the healthiest, strongest trees.

An important task we need to undertake as stewards of forests is collecting seed from local trees and growing it out, selecting out the inferior trees along the way. We could then re-grow a forest much like it would occur naturally – with thousands of trees per acre winnowing down over time to hundreds of mature specimens. Unless you are paying top dollar for high quality stock that someone else took the time to select out, the only way to do this is to get planting, observe, and make choices.

Close spacing makes these trees nice and straight.

During my trip to St Lawrence nursery Bill McKently showed me a Black Walnut plot he has started from seed he’d collected from some of the best trees he’d found on his property. Because of genetic diversity, he had not idea which of the seed trees would express the superior qualities of the parent and so planted them very close, at a ONE FOOT spacing. The stand was probably 20 years old when I saw it and the trees had gotten to be around 6 feet apart. This method not only allowed Bill to plant a lot of seed in a small space and do good genetic selection over decades, but the remaining trees were absolutely straight and gorgeous.

The only guaranteed way to get 100% superior trees growing is to graft species known to perform well onto rootstock. This method is one used by orchardists who want fruits that are true to the parent. While this method may work for those who have a direct commercial interest in a species, it becomes less practical on a large scale when our main goal is reforestation. In this case we might look for ways to set the system in motion, let nature play it out, and intervene as an agent of disturbance over a longer time scale.

So far we’ve discussed overall thinning, the creation of gaps, and overseeding as methods of human-induced disturbance.What are some examples you can think of?