This weekend, I shared core practices of nature connection with a PDC group of 20 – a great time of sharing and exploration! We saw one of the last active garter snakes of the season, on a fall day so warm we were down to T-shirts and sweating in the sun. We watched flocks of multiple thousands of grackles, starlings, and rusty blackbirds passing overhead, parting and breaking and rising again like waves. The sound was incredible, almost like the roaring of the ocean. It gave me a little hint of a sense of what the great passenger pigeon flocks would have been like, darkening the sky as millions of winged bodies flew overhead like one organism.
I also gave an intro talk on forest gardening, in between outdoor sessions. The slideshow I used is embedded below – enjoy!
This weekend, I’ll be guest-teaching at a PDC (Permaculture Design Course, a 72-hour certification training in basic permaculture design skills) at Camp Epworth in High Falls, New York. The lead teacher of the course is my good friend and colleague Kay Cafasso of Sowing Solutions; the course is being put on by Green Phoenix Permaculture. All great folks – I’m happy to be working with them!
I’ll be sharing a lot of nature connection this weekend – core practices of observation and reading the landscape, intro’s to tracking and bird language, and a lecture/slideshow on forest gardening. I’ll put some juicy tidbits from the weekend on the blog early next week, including my slideshow and hopefully some photos.
Tom Wessels, author of Reading the Forested Landscape, is giving a talk at Greenfield Community College’s Sloan Theater (main campus). It’s Wednesday night, November 4th, at 7pm. And it’s free.
I highly recommend this event to anyone who can make it. Reading the Forested Landscape propelled my naturalist journey forward like very few other books ever have. Wessels is like a “landscape forensics” specialist, tracking the land use and disturbance history of ecosystems, especially forests, through reading subtle clues laid out in the landscape like those left behind on an animal trail. You will never look at a forest the same way again!
We had a wonderful, wet, cold day at Eyes of the Forest on Wednesday, exploring old beaver wetlands on East Hill in Shelburne, MA. We learned – experientially! – how certain wetlands plants indicated deep and shallow water. We also found coyote and raccoon scats, beaver and deer trails through the marsh, and looked at how to track the history of a beaver wetlands system from its different stages of succession.
I was particularly interested in some of the plant communities in the marsh. In certain places, there were abundant patches of currants – Ribes spp. – growing in and among cattail stands! I’ve never seen Ribes growing in such wet soil before. We also found large stands of willow (Salix spp.) and Red-Osier Dogwood (Cornus sericea), both of which are very important basketry plants in this region. I thought about how we could consider coppicing some of these shrubs to encourage more straight, unbranching growth for baskets. I’ll write more on coppicing in a future post. In a few cases, the beavers were already doing this for us!
We found a few narrower trails through the plants growing in open water – muskrats? At one point, there was a flattened mass of wetlands grasses, with several piles of what looked like chewed (or at least mussed-up) grasses lying on top. In open water about 1 foot deep, no discernible scent (but it was raining pretty hard and our noses may have been a little numb). Muskrat lodge? Otter or beaver scent mound or other territorial marker? Some sort of small mammal feeding or nesting sign? Time for some more research!
Danny’s company Eprida manufactures charcoal-based soil fertilizers from agricultural waste products. This process, known as biochar, mimics the “terra pretta” soils of the Amazon rainforest, maintained at high fertility levels by native people for millennia through periodic burning and charcoal application. Most impressively, this soil fertility enhancing substance also removes carbon from the atmosphere and sequesters it long-term in soil – at a scale of decades or even hundreds of years.
Here’s Wikipedia’s article on biochar. This is a win-win strategy, and a way for local food systems to help address the global climate crisis at many different scales.
Danny’s company Eprida manufactures charcoal-based soil fertilizers from agricultural waste products. This process, known as biochar, mimics the “terra pretta” soils of the Amazon rainforest, maintained at high fertility levels by native people for millennia through periodic burning and charcoal application. Most impressively, this soil fertility enhancing substance also removes carbon from the atmosphere and sequesters it long-term in soil – at a scale of decades or even hundreds of years.
Here’s Wikipedia’s article on biochar. This is a win-win strategy, and a way for local food systems to help address the global climate crisis at many different scales.
I just met with a team of young teachers who have, over the past two years, created the Forest Garden Immersion Course at Camp Epworth, in High Falls, NY. High Falls is in the Rondout Valley, a beautiful region with a rich agricultural tradition sandwiched between the Catskill and Shawangunk mountains. We were meeting to plan the next evolutions of the FGIC – stay tuned as details roll out on this in the coming months!
When we think about “gardening like the forest”, as my teacher Dave Jacke often calls the creation and management of diverse, multi-function food forests, we’re often zooming out from an annual crop-centered view of agriculture, into a perennial ecosystem-centered one. Because, even a monoculture field of wheat is an ecosystem, with its own particular history and successional trajectory. An ecosystem management approach to agriculture broadens our view of what’s possible in our land relationship, and gives us access to strategies (like diverse tree crop plantings and keyline water management) that we might not consider from a annual-crop-based approach.
Like it or not – humans are “keystone species”. Because of the scale and land-alterative power of our population, technology, and economy, our activities determine the future trajectory of entire ecosystems, all around the world. Any recent research on desertification and climate change will provide a very sobering big-picture view of this reality. Here’s one inspiring example of how humans can actively regenerate highly damaged ecosystems on a large scale:
Geoff Lawton, visionary permaculture designer featured in this short film, was recently on CNN. This message of hope is beginning to gain critical momentum. Let’s welcome our role as ecosystem managers with gratitude, humility, and a willingness to experiment and do our best!
I'm a nature educator, permaculture designer, and beyond-organic orchardist based in western New England. On this site I share stories from the natural world, plus developments and experiments in regenerative community design. Enjoy!
