Loved this big picture update; I hope people will make time to read the great info in your written introduction to the video! I planted biofuel willows and lindens this spring with intent to pollard/coppice as they grow. I'm going to experimentally coppice an existing elderberry colony as well. Quite helpful to see your sumac growing in its various forms.
Indeed, I really enjoy that i started this channel and have my systems on tape from 1.5 years ago, so I can look back and compare how they are doing! Thats always so fun. Thanks for noticing the little chapter I wrote in the description of the video. I will also try to do more of that, almost like a blog inside the description - for those people who enjoy reading and maybe changing down some links and jumping down the rabbit hole a bit more.
Absolutely it's important to set up areas, regardless of the initial "carbon cost". In the spring when no one was using gas for the shutdown, gas prices plummeted, and it was revealed that the oil supply system has no way to shut it off! The oil suppliers were practically giving it away, since they had no way to store more and more, all their barrels, tankers were completely full, and they couldn't shut off the wells. This reveals how much of a natural disaster the fuel supply really is! It also means that regardless of what we do, the fuel juggernaut will happily churn away, so please do use whatever fuel we can to get replacement systems into place, as we will need them!
And even worse, now we are seeing the price of that. There are oil spills everywhere as aging vessels were used to store it, and they are leaking. 4000 gallon spill just today. Its sickening.
Sumacs grow like weeds all along the Wolastoq river were I live in NB. I've attempted to transplant one to my yard but the deer are taking care of the copicing. I l love this idea, think I'll bring in some more for the wild area of my yard
Wonderful to see this and learn how sumac can be integrated into your project. I love this plant and all my neighbours are scared of it. But I have always wondered how it can be used. Now I have so many ideas about it. I love this practice of having a coppice system for carbon sinking. Great!
So many uses. Tea with the leaves, flavored drink, sumac spice with the flowers, tons of free wood (vigorous grower resistant to coppicing). Even just leaving it alone, birds and bees love the flowers. This is a prime example of humans not understanding a plant, attributing one factor to it (fast growing) and saying it's a bad plant. That's just ignorant humans. We are so out of touch with the natural world. We want grass and cement, and we will destroy the planet to get it.
Hey! Since I asked you about this a week or so ago, I bought two Tiger Eye variety Staghorn Sumac, and harvested a bunch of wild Staghorn Sumac seeds to plant. Excited to try it out!
Looking forward to see the next video about initial establishment while managing weeds and compaction. As always great video on pruning for carbon management.
I'm so glad I found your channel. The information is wonderful. Just one thing: CO2 is plant food. You don't need to sequester carbon in the soil. A little research will show how we are going into an ice age. Just sayin'.
Glad you are enjoying the channel. Whether we do it to sequester carbon or just to make habitat and food for animals and reconnect forests back together. I honestly could care less about the reasons people plant trees, as long as we plant trees.
I love that idea of ha ing an area that you Don't touch. That allow some wild life to have a safe ha en and even help to reduce the risk of them turning to our gardens because we took away their habitat.
And all we can control is our land. If I leave some wild area on my land, even if all around me turns into cookie cutter suburbia, animals still have a few acres or so to play in.
Another option - corn stalk, it makes good biochar that is so soft you don't need to crush it and you also get to harvest the fruit, plus you have half a year to grow something else. Though I heard it only lasts for like 100+ years (source: David Yarrow), unlike wood which lasts 1000+ years.
I've heard the same thing about doing Jerusalem Artichoke stalks from the previous year. Same with sunflower stalks. Good char, just doesn't last as long. That being said, I don't know where that data is coming from. People have been doing this for a long time, but I'm not sure how much good data like this that we actually have that is reliable.
@@CanadianPermacultureLegacy Jerusalem Artichokes are too small a niche imho, I still can't get rid of mine and regret ever growing it, it's SUPER invasive and much worse than potatoes. The other one is grape vines - made like 6 wheelbarrows for the past month, it's great an "pea size" (thin) from the get go, crushes easily. Will make a few more when the weather is dry in a few days - people throw it away more often than corn stalk because the latter you can at least feed to your cows in the winter. Last year I did about 60 wheelbarrows of corn stalk biochar (my main source for biochar) - in rural areas a lot of people throw a lot to the landfill it's just that it's almost always contaminated with actual garbage. Anyway back to rewatching that awesome and cringey new interview of Elon Musk with the BBC reporter.
I was just debating if i was going to leave these two sumac grow in my rasberry bush. I will leave them. One of my neighbour of Croatian origins (here since the 50's) makes something out of the furry fruits... Nice down to earth videos. Hi from Quebec.
That was great to see after just recently watching your original coppice & pollard video. Thank you! I have a section of overgrown sumacs that are in need of some restructuring and cutting them back will mean we can actually reach the berry clusters once they grow back. The fullness of the regrowth is also beautiful to look at. I think the long and lean sumac branches would make great garden trellis structures and would last several years as well. I'm very much wanting to try coppicing a row of overgrown lilacs... I wonder if it would have the same results and benefits as you've demonstrated here with coppicing sumac...? Is there a time of year when it's best to coppice? (You said we're looking at 1.5 years of regrowth, so did you cut them back in spring?)
I cut them 2 winters ago (I believe) so i was considering 2019 summer 1 growing season and we are now about halfway through this growing season. For timing, I like to cut during late winter. You can do it anytime your trees are dormant (once the sap has come down). For me, my cold climate concern means that I want to make a wound in the tree as far away from the cold winters, so sometime around April is good. For someone in a warmer climate with a mild winter, their concern may be a hot summer, and they want to make that cut while the tree is dormant but as far from midsummer heat as possible, so they may want to cut in say, November. For the lilacs, I think they should do well. They grow like weeds. You could try and experimental cut on one and see how it responds. Its always best to get the immediate accurate answer from nature.
Lovely that you actively think about sequestering carbon! I will join soon :D What other trees would be a good option instead of sumac? (I think the dried berries are a spice in turkish cuisine)
For sure! Sequestering carbon is what got me into permaculture in the first place. Its one of my biggest passions in life. I just try not to talk about it too much because it caj come across as preachy. I would rather inspire people to fix climate change by showing them how awesome planting fruit trees can be. Make people want to perform the action of planting for more reasons than just carbon. Food, health, wildlife, etc. I feel that is more impactful. Alder, elderberry, black locust, willow, chestbut, Birch, sumac, oak, elm, ash all coppice well if done at the right age (for the hardwoods). Ash is interesting, because the ash borer doesn't bother the tree until it gets older. Young ash has no ash borer problems. So keeping the growth young can potentially mean saving ash trees until something comes along to eat the borer.
Great video. I'm in Maine, with a similar climate to yours. Your videos have been super helpful in planning and building my now 2 year old food forest. We have Sumac starting to come up in the food forest (planted by birds I think) and am wondering if it also fixes nitrogen?
Sumac fruits can also be used to color porcupine quills before embroidering leather (or bark) with it...it was my long project while doing my bachelor in Anthropology...
In order to solve the carbon surplus in our atmosphere we need to take carbon out of the air and lock it away in the ground. Oil was locked deep under the ground for millions of years before we dug it up and added it to our atmosphere. I appreciate your use of the carbon cycle to follow natures pattern, but ultimately we need to remove huge amounts carbon from the cycle entirely.
Thats what this does. Carbon from the air goes into the trees via photosynthesis, gets turned into extremely stable biochar, then locked into the ground. Many climate scientists claim biochar is the one of the most powerful tools we can use to reverse climate change, and get that carbon out of the air and into the earth.
@@CanadianPermacultureLegacy Yes this does put carbon into the ground. But any carbon in the soil will cycle back through the air by the carbon cycle. We need to remove the carbon from the cycle entirely that used to be locked deep underground in the form of fossil fuels. Humans pulled it up to the surface and burned it into the air. Otherwise it would be locked away never to circulate. massive carbon sequestration needs to occur. biochar is a good start. I enjoyed your video.
How long do you plan to charge the biochar in your pond and how long do you let the sumac dry before burning? I have a spring fed pond and a bunch of sumac, I plan on starting with this method in spring.
Sumac i dry for about a year. The biochat i like to charge for about 6 months to a year. The longer the better. You want that nutrient better to charge on something else as long as possible, so that it doesn't charge itself on your soil, but rather comes in fully charged.
This was great, thank you. I've got some really old, tall sumac on a south slope that is casting too much shade on my gardens, and also I've been thinking about where to source wood for biochar. Sorry if I missed it, but what time of year did you do the coppice?
I do it in the late winter, because my concern is cold temps. If you have mild winters and hot summers you may want to do it late fall early winter, this would give any wound time to heal before the critical stress time. Either way just make sure the tree is fully dormant and the sap is all down. A small pruning cut can help assess that.
Best time is when it's dormant. I like March to April. It should dry at least half a year, ideally a full year. It is a very "wet" tree, green, flexible, tons of ramial green wood.
living plant roots and associated mycos are carbon negative. everything we do on land is carbon positive. when we grow plenty of plants and do minimal deep tillage, it can also come out slightly carbon neutral. composting and woodchip etc is a very efficient way of putting most if the carbon into atmosphere. currently it is only plants that extract carbon dioxide from air, put some amount into soil and use the rest for building cells. some of the carbon they put into soil stays there but, all plant matter itself ends up back as carbon dioxide in atmosphere. it's only that when conditions are ok that overall plant growth as a sum outpaces decomposition into atmospheric carbon dioxide. biochar a.k.a. charcoal, is amost carbon neutral. not in an of itself but, overall, taking the soil improvement into account. definitely putting plant matter into or onto soil, decomposes into carbon dioxide.
I did a big video on it, definitely a great one to check out: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-0vkUevM7LzM.html I also just added a link to it in a in-video link (a card)
Thanks for the great compliment. I haven't no, I haven't heard of it before, can you give a little description of it? That way maybe others nearby could think about attending the next one?
@@CanadianPermacultureLegacy it's a fairly large fair that takes place in Maine, USA in early fall. Classes include farming, permaculture, foraging, homestead crafts, and bushcraft. Environmental protection ideas underlie most of the teaching. There's also a big farmer's market and vendors of farm tools, herbs, mushroom spawn, and the like.
Very much so. The birds and bees love the berries (they are these red clusters of hairy berries). The berries themselves can also be used to make a lemonaid-style cold water beverage that is quite tasty. Just don't ever boil the berries (to make jam and such) as they will release tannins that, while safe, will make the resulting jam/pie very bitter. Regarding the 100% sumac backyard, yeah, it can do that. Nothing should occupy 100% of an area, so ideally he can thin them out, maybe make a little pocket of them, but cut some out and then plant some more diversity in there. They will sucker and try to take the area back, but you can just cut them ground level as they do it, drop them down on the ground and use them to build soil in this way. Hopefully he can thin them out a bit, maybe put in some fruit trees or bushes that can help balance the sumac monoculture out a bit. Just make sure to try to include plants for birds and bees also, since you will be removing bird/bee food, make sure to replace it with something else. Lindens, black locust, elderberries, serviceberries, etc.
It seems the plants I have are staghorn but I also have smooth sumac. The staghorn is popping up everywhere for some odd reason. I haven’t noticed any fruit
