By Céline Caron Recently I listened to “Dr. Mercola and Courtney White Discuss Carbon Sequestration” (YouTube, Aug. 27, 2014; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSgroKuuJFA). Both talked about incorporating wood chips into soil (with or without composting) and using them as mulch. Neither distinguished between wood chips and ramial wood chips. They obviously have not read my many articles about
By Eric Sideman, Ph.D. I always have fresh cream at home from mid-June until mid-August. Berries are good with milk or yogurt, or plain, but they are best with cream. And the best berry? The one that is in season! For people who do not farm or garden, that season can be hard to determine,
My source of water is city water, which can be expensive if watering a large garden. I have a sump pit in my basement, so I set up a rain barrel and attached a sump hose from the pit outlet pipe to the rain barrel through an opening I cut in the rain barrel cover.
Mark Fulford demonstrated how to prepare the soil for fruit tree planting at the Common Ground Fair. This area was later seeded to Geneva winter wheat, which will be harvested next July and milled into a flour, then used in a baked product for the 2000 Common Ground Fair; and Mammoth red clover, which will
Leaves from deciduous trees, once shredded, make excellent mulch for most vegetable crops, and they enrich the soil. English photo. By Will Bonsall Trees and their leaves are probably the greatest natural soil builders on earth, greater even than grasses. (I mean “on earth” literally, as I am not including the oceans.) The incredible proliferation
Toki Oshima drawing By Tom Roberts I get excited about chips. Not potato chips or silicon chips, but wood chips. I believe they are a vastly underutilized resource on the organic farm. Chips are coarser than the coarsest sawdust, shavings or shingle hair. They range in size from a quarter to a slice of bread.
by Ann Currier It has been encouraging to see the attention that Ramial Chipped Wood (RCW – chips of deciduous tree branches that are smaller than 7 cm in diameter) is getting in The Maine Organic Farmer & Gardener. I first read about RCW in this paper in an article written by Tom
There is No Soil Fertility Without a Healthy Forest Branches under 3 inches in diameter, from deciduous trees, can be chipped to make a soil-building, crop-fertilizing amendment. English photo. by Céline Caron Terms in italics are defined in the glossary at the end of this article. Have you ever wondered how a forest can grow
Paul and Sandy Arnold of Pleasant Valley Farm (118 South Valley Rd., Argyle, NY 12809; [email protected]) were the “Farmers in the Spotlight” at MOFGA and Maine Cooperative Extension’s 2010 Farmer to Farmer Conference in Northport, Maine. Both grew up in suburbia. Paul worked in the nursery business for about six years, then farmed for two years
