In the Sticks: Chipping, Cutting, Planting

This day on the farm started out with some good ol’ fashioned wood chipping. Since woods need to be thinned, fruit trees need to be pruned, and invasive species need to be removed, there are a lot of trimmed branches floating around the property. In addition, mulch is useful for retaining moisture in the ground and controlling weeds, and wood chips make great mulch. Thus, chipping wood becomes a valuable way to accelerate natural decomposition to turn natural waste from one area on a farm into a resource for another.

Below is a picture of how beautiful a landscape regenerative agriculture can create. Silvopasture is the practice of mixing grazing land (grass) with trees (in this case fruit and nut trees). The trees benefit from the manure, the sheep benefit from the grass, the grass controls miscellaneous weed growth; altogether, it’s a very efficient and nature-mimicking use of land, instead of having it be completely pasture or completely forest.

The silvopasture (trees mixed with grazing land) was pruned (left), which became piles of future mulch (right).

Sustainable ag doesn’t mean not using any equipment. Wood chipping would be very difficult, if not impossible, without a machine like this one.

After we chipped some previously-trimmed branches around the property, we moved to prune a couple types of tree that I cannot recall the names of for the life of me. One of the cuts needed to be angled, and the other cut needed to be flat. The top, flat cut needed to be right above growth buds, since we were going to plant these branches and those buds would form the new growth point to branch out from. We stuck the branches in buckets of water as we worked, with the angled cut (the future roots) down.

One cut was angled (left), the other was flat right above those slight protrusions that will become branches (middle). Since they were to be planted later, we kept them in water right after clipping (right).

After we had the trimmed branches, it was surprisingly simple to plant them in the ground on another property. We simply placed the angled cut on the ground, pushed in a bit, and then hammered the flat top part like a tent stake almost as deep as we could get it, leaving a portion above ground for future growth. Propagating trees like this is really simple, although not all trees can be propagated this way, and I do not know what differentiates trees that can regrow from a simple branch clipping and trees that cannot. That learning is postponed to a future day.

We hammered some of them pretty low (left), although the ground wouldn’t always cooperate. We spaced them a few paces apart to allow for lots of future growth (right).