18:01:05 Testing.
18:03:03 How
18:03:03 are you doing good how are you. Good.
18:03:08 I'm not sure about tonight's going to be joining us tonight.
18:03:13 We had a possible. Well, we're quarantining, and she is also quarantining.
18:03:24 And of course we were going to be meeting together to do this presentation together.
18:03:30 And amongst some other things. I don't think she's feeling up to it tonight.
18:03:36 So I'm not sure if she's going to be here.
18:03:40 It's probably unlikely.
18:03:42 Even though I'm pulling out a small bit of hope.
18:03:47 So, if, if she does not join we'll do the best that we can to impart the mountains way information, quite as,
18:04:05 You know, well as it could have been.
18:04:07 Yeah, I mean Well, we'll make it work. You know,
18:04:14 I'm actually while you both here. Can I confirm how you both pronounce your names.
18:04:18 Yeah I'm Jetta, okay, like the car.
18:04:37 I'm Saka Saka
18:04:26 Saka na.
18:04:30 Okay.
18:04:32 Thank you.
18:04:36 Great. Yeah, well, world the punches here.
18:04:40 Excellent work excited to be here. So, Thank you.
18:04:48 platform yeah it's a great opportunity really appreciate it. Really excited yeah I've been hearing a lot about stuff. Lately actually is even more excited to learn from you today.
18:04:57 Oh wow, This is really a thing that is happening.
18:05:00 Yeah, it really is a thing. You know, people are are trying it all over the country so it's cool, it's great.
18:05:09 A lot more work than anybody expected I think but I'm sure.
18:05:16 I have three screens is why I keep looking off to the side just. No. Yeah, no grace.
18:05:22 Hi Jim How are you, how are you doing well.
18:05:28 So this is Jenna and Zach from calabash gardens.
18:05:33 Are you guys.
18:05:36 Hi, Jim. Nice to meet you. Yeah, you too.
18:05:41 Um. Does anyone want to test their share screen ability.
18:05:47 I'm Jenna I'm happy to host the video on my side, and just do it for you guys. Okay, yeah, work. Yeah, that's perfect. Yeah, yeah. Excellent. Thank you.
18:05:56 Yeah. And my plan is to play that first after I introduce you guys, and then I'll send it back to you to to chat it all up. Excellent. That sounds great, wonderful and you can just throw it back to me when you're done.
18:06:12 Okay, no transition into the next one. Perfect.
18:06:21 Perfect. Yeah, I'd like to just the share screen real quick. I redid my presentation because I knew I wasn't going to get it done what I had before, in 10 minutes so so yeah I read it.
18:06:36 you just hit the share screen and. Yep. See,
18:32:19 Alright, welcome everyone to the fifth of six events for the soil health and community resilience stories from the northeast series. Thank you for joining us for this 2021 soil series.
18:32:32 Tonight's event is called working with the woods.
18:32:35 I'm Lauren Weston tonight's facilitator and one of the organizers of this series. I'd like to first thank the other members of the organizing team, including Grace, Grace uni, Becky pulpits Melissa Laurita Cole Avi Bauer, and cat Buxton.
18:32:50 Next, I would like to thank you all for coming tonight or for watching online later.
18:32:54 We've been reading your survey responses, collecting the resources that you're sharing with us and working to provide you with information on all of these topics at all sorts of scales, please do check out our website for the series, our website for the
18:33:07 series and scroll to the BIOS for each speaker, and then further down to the crowd sourced resource list at the bottom, there is a wealth of information in there, and much more than could ever be shared in one webinar.
18:33:21 I would like to also thank all of our incredible partners who have made this series possible.
18:33:26 The 50 plus organizations that you see on your screen.
18:33:32 have helped us fundraise for our speakers, spread the word about these events and shared countless resources with us that we are excited to share with you.
18:33:40 thank you as well to those of you who have donated during our final fundraising push, as we strive to meet our fundraising goal to pay our speakers and organizers, a fair stipend for their time and expertise.
18:33:51 And thanks to those of you who have shared our fundraising posts with your networks as well. It takes us all doing whatever we can.
18:33:58 If you are able, please consider making a tax deductible donation at the link in the chat box that obvious posting up.
18:34:06 We'd like to give a special thank you to the Cooperative Education Fund, the Vermont healthy soils coalition and Littleton food Co Op. In addition to a recent and very generous donation from Cabot.
18:34:18 To learn more about all of our partners and to take a look at all these resources, please visit our website for the series, which is also posting in the chat box.
18:34:28 We would like you to know that we are recording tonight's event. And additionally, we are keeping you muted and we ask that you keep your cameras off.
18:34:36 Our team will be doing our best to keep disruptions and distractions, to a minimum.
18:34:41 Depending on your version of zoom, you should have a button at the bottom of your screen, called Live transcript.
18:34:48 If you click the arrow next to those words, you should be able to turn on or off an auto generated a live feed of subtitles of tonight's discussions.
18:34:57 We apologize in advance if the transcription service captures any of the words incorrectly.
18:35:02 We know that it will.
18:35:05 The entire transcript will be saved and posted with the recording if people want to come back to it later and don't have access to it.
18:35:12 If we don't get a chance to answer your questions tonight during the q&a, please be sure to follow up on the Vermont healthy soils coalition listserv and check your event bright emails that will include answers shared from the speakers after the event
18:35:25 tonight.
18:35:26 If you have any questions for us at any point, please submit them to the zoom chat box and our team will help you.
18:35:35 We would like to open this evening with the land acknowledgement.
18:35:39 This land acknowledgement for what is referred to by some as the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, and the North Country of New Hampshire has been shared with us, and others by Chief Dan Stevens of the Mohegan band of the classic Anakin nation.
18:35:54 Many of us are on the land which has long served as a site of meeting and exchange among indigenous peoples for thousands of years and is home to the Western Abernathy people.
18:36:04 The team organizing this event today honors recognizes and respects these peoples, especially the Anakin as the traditional stewards of the land and waters on which we gathered today.
18:36:17 In that spirit.
18:36:18 Today we will begin by acknowledging that we are guests in this land, we need to respect and help protect the land within our use.
18:36:27 Additionally, we would like to take a few moments of silence to honor and respect the elders of the past and the present, who were and are stewards of this land.
18:36:44 Thank you.
18:36:49 making this series, we wanted to create a community for all together safely. We created a list of community guidelines and values that are being shown on your screen now in this space.
18:37:00 We agreed to respect and recognize all voices lived experiences perspectives and worldviews we seek to create a safe space for learning and sharing, and we ask that we all use inclusive and respectful language violations of these values and guidelines
18:37:14 will lead to remove them from the event this evening by our team. Thank you for understanding with those in mind, let's get to know each other as you feel comfortable please introduce yourself in the chat box with your name, where you're participating
18:37:29 from. And the response to the question, what have for us, taught you throughout your lifetime.
18:37:36 We're very excited to read your responses.
18:37:39 While you're all doing that, I will announce the winners of the raffle from event for it happened two weeks ago, and those winners are Susan Aldrich Hilary Cohen, Richard Stoneleigh, and Pamela Gilbert.
18:37:54 Congratulations.
18:37:56 And now let's get to tonight's survey and raffle.
18:37:59 We do have a post event survey that shouldn't take more than three minutes to complete. And many of you are probably familiar with it at this point.
18:38:07 The survey will be sent out with the recording of tonight's event via event right. If you fill out the survey within one week of science event, you will be entered in to win some of our prizes, the prizes tonight are the book braiding sweetgrass by Robin
18:38:22 wall camera, and I did want to know this graph this book was actually recommended by four different speakers throughout the soil series, and so we are very excited that it's a raffle prize tonight.
18:38:36 You also have the chance to win mighty mini micro coloring books from the NLCS organic revolutionary by Grace, Grace uni and compost and warm castings from black dirt farm.
18:39:00 of this series, a 35% off discount code of their books and more on their website Chelsea green calm.
18:39:07 The code is PWEB, three, five, and it is good for all participants here tonight, and watching the recording this ring. Thank you, Chelsea green
18:39:14 one goal that we have with this series is to introduce community members to the wonderful farms and projects in their area to help build the social mycelium.
18:39:23 We do that through selecting speakers from the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont and the North Country New Hampshire, but also through featuring a New Hampshire, Vermont agricultural product project that connects to other issues in our world.
18:39:37 Tonight's feature
18:39:39 is from calabash gardens in Vermont, and we have a video from them and then a short presentation from their team that we are looking forward to sharing with you before we transition into talking about the woods.
18:40:01 So with that, I'm going to share the video and
18:39:59 thank you all for coming.
18:40:13 We decided to expand our farm to into a half of an acre this year.
18:40:20 Because we have had such a high success rate in our test plot that we, we decided you know after crunching all of the numbers that it would be a lucrative business endeavor for us to expand the farm.
18:40:37 And it's something that we love doing. And we want to, we want to produce more saffron.
18:40:56 here.
18:41:00 Yes, in the land in the northeast is quite lucky. We didn't expect to be dealing with that much walk, and then that's why we are in be in our planting in our planning on presenting this weekend, but we're getting there.
18:41:17 Getting there there's been people having hands in the ground.
18:41:23 And hopefully we can get it done.
18:41:27 So here we are, day three of plan team, and we have dimpled, our whole field to give us a template for planting.
18:41:39 And based on the density that we were able to get in the first three rows. It was about 6000 corms per row, and we're trying to increase our density a little bit to make sure we're getting 10,000 bulbs per row.
18:41:53 Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.
18:41:56 The bowl. Looks like this.
18:41:59 It has a hairy end.
18:42:01 And it has a chubby end, and they look like Hershey Kisses.
18:42:07 They go, just like a Hershey Kiss. So Harry and that's important for its life cycle to go in the crush way
18:42:26 that ok.
18:43:03 with that I would love to hand it over to john Soka for a little bit more about what we've got going on.
18:43:09 Yeah Hi everybody, My name is Jetta, this is my partner's Dhaka.
18:43:15 We are going to share our screen with you.
18:43:20 Were calabash gardens, we are a regenerative agriculture saffron farm in wells river Vermont.
18:43:27 We started saffron about what did you do that. Are we sharing our screen.
18:43:34 I can't see the zoom presentation anymore so I'm a little confused here. Sorry, everybody.
18:43:40 We're not sharing your screen yet not. Okay, okay.
18:43:45 So, here we go.
18:43:51 Looks great.
18:43:52 Okay. All right, I know I can, I can see the zoom presentation to so we're good.
18:43:59 So, yeah, we're a regenerative agriculture saffron farm and wells river Vermont.
18:44:04 We started planting saffron in 2018 with a small test plot of 2000 corms, just to see if it was something that we would be able to successfully grow here in in the Upper Valley area.
18:44:22 We had an incredible return our first year, with a 96% return and 600% return our second year, so we decided to just sort of go for it.
18:44:38 And plant we were planning on planting an acre last year, coven sort of took a little bit of. You can you can do what you want.
18:44:47 coven, you know, hit us a little hard and we ended up planting a half acre instead, which actually ended up being probably a really good thing. A full acre for us last year would have been pretty overwhelming.
18:45:02 So glad that we started with the half acre.
18:45:05 We have 15, acres of pasture, and we will be eventually soon in
18:45:16 implementing a small herd of ruminants I guess to start holistically glazed grazing the the pasture land so that we don't have to truck in the newer.
18:45:26 We did track in a bunch of organic manure from a local organic dairy here in wells River. Last year to sort of supplement our incredibly sandy soil.
18:45:40 We have about well you saw those rocks in that video.
18:45:45 Our land is full of giant boulders and the rest of it is just mostly rock. So, we've been picking a lot of rocks and sort of trying to supplement some of that, you know, some of the soil with a bit of organic matter from the local dairy.
18:46:02 We.
18:46:15 If for the time being, though we're sort of doing it this way.
18:46:19 We're developing pretty interesting biodiverse cover crop.
18:46:25 That will be definitely planting in between the rows. This year, so that we can start it's saffron is a perennial so you know we don't actually have to dig this field up for about five years, which means that will this cover crop will be able to actually
18:46:44 have a perennial cover crop in between the rows, and we're developing a lagoon style cover crop to go over the saffron beds themselves. So that will be able to cut those down like mow them down while they're in flower and have them sort of mulch in the
18:47:05 beds before the saffron starts growing. So the saffron life cycle is incredibly interesting. It's a fall blooming crocus, so it sprouts in mid September, and it blooms between the middle of October to the middle of November, and then it vegetate all winter
18:47:25 long underneath the snow, and it continues to grow and, and, and it melts out of the snow in this beautiful lush grass that just looks, I mean it looks divine.
18:47:39 And it starts to produce daughter corms right around this time so late March and April and May.
18:47:46 Its daughter corms will fully developed by the end of June, at which point they will become dormant for the entire summer.
18:47:56 So it's really important for us to be able to, you know, cover this in a way that will prevent erosion. Basically, We did have a bit of erosion problems.
18:48:10 Last fall, it being so dry last year, last summer we just was such a drought last summer that we did end up losing a bit of soil once you can kind of see in the back there, some spots where when you actually did get rain.
18:48:29 In late September it was just, you know, there was, there was no moisture in the soil and it was it just was sort of a little nerve wracking.
18:48:37 But this is our saffron day actually I think in late November, after I had finished flowering and, you know, you can see that the sprouts here are still quite small.
18:48:49 You know they're about twice as long now and three times as thick, so they just continued vegetating all winter long which is really sort of spectacular, our farm is not only a regenerative agriculture farm but it's also a place where we are working on
18:49:12 radical, what we call radical love and radical hospitality and is a safe space for bypass and LGBT q so we're really trying to sort of cool, pull together the sort of like racially diverse and also very inclusive space for people, as a way to, You know,
18:49:34 provide economic stability for folks that might not otherwise have it.
18:49:40 We are also working with mountains way, sort of in their sort of our partner farm and New Hampshire.
18:49:47 Mountains way Is this really fabulous a racial justice farm.
18:49:54 It's 200 acres of woodland in Orford New Hampshire that's that's actively working on anti racism and and racial justice, so I'm going to let soccer talk a little bit more about that.
18:50:15 Well, snipers here. Yeah, so, well I guess mountains way is putting on a bunch of different workshops this summer.
18:50:25 So if anybody is interested, you can get in touch with us and we'll put you in touch with them. There will be a bunch of workshops one of them in June, July workshop and an August workshop.
18:50:40 And, and there will be facilitated by black facilitators and then there will be white facilitators as well so it's sort of this really nice balance, getting people to sort of just come together and and figure out how we can together move forward into
18:50:58 a more positive future, which of course calabash Gardens is doing as well. We, we need about 10 employees for harvest season, per acre and we're hoping that we don't need more.
18:51:17 So if anybody wants a job, come October.
18:51:25 We, we will be building a proton which is essentially a, a meeting house in Voodoo it's like the center meeting house in the Voodoo village, and we will be putting in a certified kitchen as well as a bunkhouse.
18:51:44 And then after that's complete we're going to be building a cabin village throughout our property.
18:51:50 We have about 35, acres of hardwood forest, mostly maples and and then you know, lots of other things. It's a beautiful biodiverse pretty old forest.
18:52:04 So we'll have cabins spread out in there as well as little sort of forest gardens going through and will be housing our workers in these little cabins, you know as a way to to really provide them with that radical hospitality, while they're here working
18:52:25 for us, so they don't have to worry about finding housing or, you know, paying for housing you know we'll, we'll be providing that for them.
18:52:35 These cabins will be retreat spaces when they're not in use. And so, they'll be open to the public. If you you know would like to come and rent them out, or if you want to host retreats here will hopefully be hosting lots of artists and, you know, just
18:52:56 developing this property into a basically essentially a giant, you know, multi acre sort of permaculture endeavor, incorporating both pasture land, And, you know, Saffron fields, and then woodland gardens and for us.
18:53:17 So, Nina.
18:53:21 Thank you so much.
18:53:23 I really loved your line about working together to build a better world.
18:53:28 Couldn't agree more. Yeah, I just love that that is kind of transferring into tonight with, you know, having you all be enjoying for the talk about the woods and really seeing how it's all connected so thank you so much for joining tonight and.
18:53:50 Thank you.
18:53:48 So, moving into the focus on working with the woods.
18:53:55 I'm very excited to introduce our three different speaker or four different speakers tonight.
18:54:02 Sam Perrin of Northwood stewardship center, Jim from the grafting county forester from UNH extension and Michael in Chicago I have sacred circle homestead and permaculture nursery.
18:54:13 We're going to start tonight with Sam. And so I'll hand it over to you. And please do continue to post questions in the chat and we will be sure to get to as many as possible.
18:54:24 Once our initial presentations are over. Thank you.
18:54:29 Thank you, Lauren.
18:54:31 Thanks everyone for attending tonight. I'm going to share a presentation with you.
18:54:46 That for a presentation.
18:54:48 Looks great.
18:54:50 Once again, my name is Sam Perrin, I am a forester at the North Woods stewardship center up in Charleston Vermont in the Northeast Kingdom, you're not familiar with Northwest, we are conservation and education nonprofit we do all sorts of programming
18:55:04 We are a conservation and education nonprofit we do all sorts of programming related to conservation work, we run a lot of summer crews we do consulting and project work with landowners.
18:55:15 We do lots of educational programs, conservation science work, and a whole lot more. So I encourage you to check out North Woods love to talk about more foods for the next many minutes, but instead I'm going to zoom out a little bit and talk about forced
18:55:24 ecology, how the forests in Vermont got to be the way they are, and maybe some considerations for management.
18:55:31 And then of course what does soil have to do with that.
18:55:36 So again to kind of zoom out topics that I'm going to try to cover our course dynamics. So that's, you know, the processes that happen in forest and the setting that makes them the way that they are going to talk a little bit about soil mapping the information
18:55:50 that you can find pretty easily online or in other sources, and then a little bit about the characteristics of forest soils that you can observe when you're out in the woods, without even really digging around in the soil too much, ironically, we're also
18:56:04 going to talk a little bit about forest management and pretty general terms I think our other presenters tonight, or panelists are going to talk about some more specific examples of things that you might do out on the landscape.
18:56:15 And then I would be remiss if I didn't talk about earthworms and invasive plants, during talk about forestry, so we'll dive right in.
18:56:28 force dynamics.
18:56:29 So thinking about how forth got to be the way they are, or what makes a forest the forest. Is it just trees. I think many of you would probably answer no it's not just trees, there's a lot more out there.
18:56:40 That's a good start.
18:56:42 And it kind of starts with the foundation which foresters often call site conditions, and that includes a lot of things that change pretty slowly over time that generally are know the fixed conditions have a site things like, of course, soils, although
18:57:03 can change pretty quickly. Things like bedrock bedrock is fairly permanent changes really really slowly.
18:57:06 It's very important for how fourth form climate, really important.
18:57:22 Say, that is changing, know that Rolla g topography aspect slope. All of these things that kind of make up the physical landscape really determine what type of trees grow on a site what type of vegetation grows there.
18:57:25 what type of for us to see.
18:57:27 So then you throw in all the processes that happen out there the things that current forest, and these are things like weather events.
18:57:35 That's really the big one that's influenced forests until humans involved, which was not that long ago, really.
18:57:43 So things like wind, you know, wind and forest creates gaps gaps in the canopy trees blow down. That's normal. They're usually pretty small gap.
18:57:59 It's not that common in the northeast to have a really large wind event knock out hundreds of acres, that's something that you no longer is can do pretty easily and nature doesn't do that often, maybe once every hundred or a few hundred years.
18:58:06 But typically we have small wind events, voltage, things like ice and snow floods along river ways, kind of disturbed these forests and create some changes over time, insects and diseases also, you know, our present and for us and cause some changes,
18:58:25 one that is kind of interesting and pretty exciting is fire and forest forest fires can have a really profound impact on certain forest types and historically might have been really important in certain areas, although throughout Vermont.
18:58:39 There are not that many forest types that naturally have are adapted to fire disturbance, so really important and other places, Vermont. Historically, or historically and naturally was not as important of a forest forming factor.
18:58:56 So, you combine all these things like conditions for us that's grown their disturbance, and you end up with a pretty complex forest, that's really what forests are they're complex.
18:59:07 They have a wide variety of structural features so structure kind of means the physical shape of things that includes different sizes of trees, you know, old forests with natural processes are going to have young trees, old trees, big trees, small trees.
18:59:23 A lot of structure is what that's called. There's going to be a lot of different species out there, and a species diversity is inherent in a landscape with natural processes.
18:59:33 Because of all this variation and how things are shaking out. So you're going to see lots of species and really in a natural forest, you're going to see kind of a focus on late 60s vegetable species, or those, you know those trees and plants that can
18:59:47 can persist in an old forest.
18:59:49 You're going to see lots of ecological features. This is a broad term that includes things like standing dead trees downs dead trees, you know, these are a couple of things that at first you might think are unhealthy and so forth, but they're actually
19:00:02 really unnatural part of the forest trees get old, they die they fall down and that really has important benefits for habitat and nutrient cycling, things like that.
19:00:14 And all of this contributes to working from top to bottom just like gravity might think, bring things to the ground.
19:00:21 This all contributes to soil health. So this is a piece of forest forest rely on the soils underneath them grow the way that they do for us also really give back to the soils underneath them and have a lot of influence on the soils.
19:00:37 So, you know, you'll end up in a natural for us having things like pit and mount topography countries blowing over and upgrading often a deep layer of Duff, the layer of leaves leaves the end up on the ground and kind of a thick Matt of organic matter
19:00:50 that's partially decomposed and, in the process of decomposing, you're gonna have pretty fluffy area of soils, lots of them there and moisture content off storage for soils.
19:01:07 And all of this leads to what I like to call the right kind of messy.
19:01:13 A lot of foreigners and ecologists talk about messy forest as being a good thing for ecology, because we need to kind of retrain the human eye. And I like to make the distinction that we're looking for the right kind of messy.
19:01:23 We're not looking for piles of garbage and, you know, rabbit trails out there we're looking for this ecological kind of messy.
19:01:34 And I should have mentioned actually before I get to the next slide.
19:01:37 I'm talking a lot about natural forests and how they form, and I am not ignoring the profound impact that humans have had in forests, it's really important and we're going to talk about that.
19:01:47 And I'm really giving you this, this background, so that we can start to have an understanding of how forests function for, you know, thousands, and really millions of years as a species before us really started to metal metal of things.
19:02:13 And we can learn a lot from this and we can certainly play on our own activities, kind of imitate it.
19:02:12 So I'm going to shift gears a little bit how this is one of the tools that you might use if you're thinking about managing forest or doing something out in the forest.
19:02:19 And if you're thinking about soils, those two go hand in hand. This is a soil map and I apologize, you're looking at the screenshot of a screen on your screen and the fence a bit dizzying in the age of, zoom meetings, I'm sorry for that.
19:02:32 This was a really cool resource it's the Vermont Natural Resources Atlas, it's free it's online. It's a program where you can find tons of information and mapping relevant to your property, and the quick one that I pulled up this is soils map, and all
19:02:48 that I clicked on is one of the soil types found at north woods near our campus. It's a soil type called Cabot silt loam, it's pretty common up here in the Northeast Kingdom.
19:02:59 And if you start getting into this and reading about tablets silt loam, you'll find things about it, for instance, it is pretty silty it's finally textured.
19:03:07 There is a pretty shallow layer of hard pan or dumped Faisal till that tends to purchase the water table so the soils are often pretty wet. They are prone to erosion, so they're not really the best places for building in terms of forest management, you
19:03:22 know, they tend to support to spruce for for us, rather than hardwoods around here. So all of that information with a click on my screen became somewhat evidence, pretty cool resource, encourage you to check it out.
19:03:36 And then if you get out into the woods and start having a little bit more fun. There are a bunch of things that you can observe related to soils, when you're thinking about what you do in your forest, without even digging a soil did.
19:03:47 You can also totally dig a soil pit and that is super fun. There's not something often do as a forester. It's a really cool thing to do.
19:03:54 So some of the features you might observe out in your woods, as you're thinking about you know project or how you might manage it. You should definitely be looking for water hydrology is really important, whether that's water that's creating a wetland
19:04:08 if it's a stream Lake, anything like that. It's going to have a really important impact on the, on the soils and on the forests there.
19:04:16 You can look for things like indicator species, those are going to tell you a lot about, well, they might relate to hydrology some plants that like having their feet wet, you might see some rich site.
19:04:28 That's something I get pretty excited about and I see indicator plants that told me that there's a lot of soil enrichment also helps me think about what type of forests and natural communities will grow well there you can definitely scuffed your foot
19:04:46 and see the tough layer again that layer of leaves can see in the photo and look into the horizon that organic layer at the surface of the soil.
19:04:51 You can look for seedlings plants. This is going to tell you a whole lot about this surface soil conditions. It's going to tell you a lot about the forest type there.
19:05:01 And then you definitely want to take a look for any disturbance and impacts that have occurred in your forest over time, because again, humans, you know, humans are kind of the top dogs for better or worse, and you're going to see a lot of evidence of
19:05:13 humans and most forests and Vermont.
19:05:27 Thinking about management.
19:05:32 Some people say well I don't manage my forests, but even if you own forest land or, you know, participate in decisions made out on how forest is used, you are managing it even if you choose to do nothing so difference, think about it and think about how
19:05:47 you might do it well. This starts with doing your homework, but it's not bad kind of homework, it's the fun kind of homework, that's what we just talked about, you know, learning about your property learning about soils site conditions, natural communities.
19:05:59 Not sure I brought this term up yet but natural communities, kind of, that's the description of the assemblage of plants vegetation and a biotic factors and other biological factors that collectively make different forest types.
19:06:14 So it's not just a pine forest it's a forest that has pine trees as well as all sorts of other stuff out there.
19:06:21 And these are described in a really great natural communities guide which I highly recommend it might even be published by Chelsea green publishing fact check that.
19:06:32 But either way, wetland woodland wildland, an awesome book about the natural communities of Vermont. So if you're worried about that on your property you're going to understand your forest pretty well.
19:06:41 and then you can use this to guide what type of projects you do out there.
19:06:45 And again, I won't go into detail about this because I know you'll hear about some, some pretty cool examples of that later tonight.
19:06:53 And if you do all this well if you think about, you know, what type of project is appropriate for certain spots in your forest if you understand what is going on in your forest in terms of the species diversity, the natural processes.
19:07:07 You can definitely achieve your objectives, right, the things that you want out of your forest. And you can also let the forest, the forest, you can let those natural communities thrive.
19:07:16 You can have all the habitats and species diversity that would be out there, and then old natural forest or very close to all of them.
19:07:24 And of course, remembering the right kind of messy.
19:07:36 Now we're mostly going to keep things uplifting but of course I have to mention two, two things that are really important in forest management.
19:07:44 These are a topic for their own presentation but I'm going to mention them briefly, and those are invasive plants invasive insects are also really important and earthworms to pretty separate things.
19:07:55 invasive plants and invasive insects.
19:08:00 Essentially, these are, you know, plants in past store insects that showed up from other parts of the world and it's not that they came from other parts of the world that's a problem at all it's the fact that they didn't evolve in these natural communities,
19:08:12 and ultimately they lead to competition in these communities, and the loss of biodiversity.
19:08:19 So that's what we've seen with a lot of a lot of invasive plants, especially in southern New England and they're definitely moving north in Vermont, Southern Vermont and actually areas of Northern Vermont to have lots of invasive plants.
19:08:32 And I definitely encourage you to take into consideration impacts these might be having an A forest, as you're working out there.
19:08:40 And the other is strangely enough, earthworms.
19:08:44 And this might raise some eyebrows out there, earthworms for all their benefits that they can have in gardens and farms are actually kind of destructive and forests.
19:08:53 They were not in Vermont forest, after the last ice age, they showed up with people, mostly, and some of the things that they do in forest are often counterproductive to the natural processes of regeneration.
19:09:10 Some of the soil characteristics that we've talked about things like having a deep dark layer that gets decomposed pretty quickly.
19:09:17 And almost like leave it at that. But I do encourage you to read up on firms in forest a little bit more because there's a lot of research showing how there something you might want to be cautious about you know if you have worms in your garden and farm.
19:09:34 Think carefully about you know how you use them in a forest setting for sure.
19:09:41 Mostly leave it at that.
19:09:42 Here are a couple of resources, these are also I believe listed on the Vermont, healthy soils coalition website where you saw this, this advertised. So you can check those out and of course, visit Northwood center.org to learn about North Woods and hope
19:09:56 that I'll hear from you after the presentation or in the question section about some of these topics.
19:10:04 And with that, I will attempt to stop sharing my screen.
19:10:09 And I will turn this over to Jim throne.
19:10:17 Okay.
19:10:18 Thanks, Sam.
19:10:20 I'm going to share my screen and then I'll just kind of give an intro and go from there.
19:10:39 Okay, so my name is Jim from the grafting county forester with University of New Hampshire, Cooperative Extension.
19:10:50 And I'll just talk a little bit about, about what we do as county foresters.
19:10:57 A big part of what we do is Woodlawn visits with landowners, whether their family forest owners or municipalities town lands, things like that.
19:11:11 And a big part of that is is listening to people's goals for the land what they want to do what they want to accomplish with that land and make suggestions and connect them to resources.
19:11:26 So Sam talked about planning and kind of researching, what's there on your forest and so we help folks, kind of get started with that get the get the sort of the starter Forester, if you will.
19:11:42 So we cover a whole range of topics with folks for stewardship planning.
19:11:50 Timber management wildlife habitat management, best management practices, which I'm going to talk about more detail in a minute.
19:12:02 We educate folks on the rules and regulations regarding forestry if they're planning to have a timber harvest on their land.
19:12:12 We talked to folks about Natural Resource Conservation Service, programs, there's a number of different programs that they have to incentivize land doors to implement certain conservation practices.
19:12:29 They do a lot with agriculture and they do a lot with forestry as well. So that's a big part of what we do.
19:12:37 And then another thing we do a lot of workshops and webinars, kind of like this a lot more webinars these days.
19:12:45 I'm looking forward to getting back to doing more in person workshops but wide variety of topics for land owners foresters loggers conservation Commission's conservationists districts and really just people who are interested in forest so topics from
19:13:08 tree and shrub ID to wildlife habitat.
19:13:15 Forest and improvement, you name it, you know and do with the forest in wildlife that's out there so.
19:13:25 And we work with, New Hampshire Timberland Owners Association and a whole lot of other partners, but since this is going to be on BMP and has to do with timber harvest, you know, I'll mention them, and we do.
19:13:39 We work with them on the professional bloggers program. You help develop educational materials and workshops in our really our ultimate goal is to help people make informed decisions, so they can be better for Stewart's.
19:14:00 So as part of that husband is probably most folks on this understand is that you know soils are the basis of all this, productive forests, productive farms, productive wildlife habitat.
19:14:19 It all starts with the soil. If you don't have. If you don't have good soil if you don't protect your soil from, from damage from erosion and all those different things and you're not going to have productive for us that you could have so.
19:14:37 So that's what best management practices are all about. So, we call them VMPS for short.
19:14:44 In Vermont their MPs acceptable and practices, but basically the same, same thing.
19:14:55 You might want to interrupt.
19:14:56 Are you trying to advance your slides.
19:14:58 No, not yet. Okay.
19:15:03 No, I just started. Okay. I thought you're gonna tell me I was on mute.
19:15:09 Yeah so BMP.
19:15:18 So let's talk about,
19:15:22 you know, so we're going to be talking about timber harvest do and we do a plan.
19:15:39 And if somebody is planning to manager for us like Sam was talking about a bunch of different ways to do that. It's a very broad topic. We don't have time for so I'm just going to focus in on the actual harvesting and how we go about protecting the soil
19:15:47 during that process.
19:15:50 So, so the biggest at risk areas when we're, when we're harvesting timber. Are your roads, your trails and landing so that's, that's where that exposed soil is happening.
19:16:07 So we really want to try to minimize that.
19:16:12 We want to pay attention to those factors so that we are minimizing or avoiding the erosion.
19:16:21 That happened, that might happen there or not just erosion but running compaction, things like that that are going to compromise the future productivity.
19:16:34 So, so our keys to doing that kind of got these three categories. So we want to plan, prevent and put to bed so I'll talk about those a little more detail.
19:16:50 So planning goes back to what Sam was talking about, you know, we're going to get understand our resources, what do we have there What do we have for soils.
19:16:58 We have a lot of Cabot silt loam we're going to want to think about that. We know that it's poorly drained or moderate moderately poorly drained.
19:17:09 We want to maybe work on that when it's frozen, things like that. So, but, as we all know.
19:17:20 Temperatures are warming or winters are getting shorter things are getting more unpredictable as far as having frozen snow covered conditions all winter long that's not reliable anymore.
19:17:31 So, so part of planning we want to be thinking about that as well.
19:17:37 So we want to do all these different things we want to, we want to minimize so we want to minimize the amount of roads that we have, we want to minimize our trail system.
19:17:44 We don't want to have trails everywhere. Because we're just increasing the impacts the soil.
19:17:51 We want to keep our landing small so a landing is that area where we're going to bring the logs bring the wood to that we then bring a truck in and to truck it to the various Mills.
19:18:06 So that's what that's what the landing is we want to minimize or avoid if we can stream crossings because every time we cross the stream we increase the risk of erosion and water quality issues.
19:18:21 We want to properly locate our rows and trails and landings we want to put them on drier soil that's where those soil maps come in really, really handy very, very useful to look at, you know, along with TOEFL maps and, and, of course, there's no substitute
19:18:37 for walking on the ground, being out there and looking and finding where things are so we want to put those trails and landings road systems in places where it's not, or it's less detrimental to our soils.
19:18:56 During a during harvest operation we want to make sure we're prepared for planned events you know we might have a really dry summer and, oh you know there's no water in that stream bed, we're just going to go through it but well it's going to rain eventually.
19:19:11 We want to be prepared for that we want to have a crossing over that.
19:19:15 If things get muddy we want to have extra brush around, we might want to have some bridge panels or timber mats, we might want to have some mulch on hand, you know, there's there's issues.
19:19:29 And we want to use appropriate equipment to use different equipment now that's, you know, very different from what it used to be.
19:19:37 Some of these machines, look big and intimidating, but really they're designed for lower impact, we've got
19:19:47 high flotation.
19:19:49 The tracks they've got, they've got these, these arms on that can reach far out so that machine and kind of stay on a trail and reach rather than having to travel everywhere.
19:20:02 So that's all part of that planning process.
19:20:07 We want to prevent. So we want to prevent erosion, writing and compaction if we can we can do that in different ways I'm going to.
19:20:16 We don't want to divert water, that's a big thing so if we got a trail, we want to, we don't want water running down that trail for any length.
19:20:25 And a lot of this stuff I'm talking about, I'm talking in the context of logging trails, but it can also apply to hiking trails biking trails, all those different things anywhere we've got exposed soil that water can or road.
19:20:43 So we want to divert that water we're going to use water bars, which is basically a burn.
19:21:01 At about 30 degrees to a trail and the idea is for that water to go down and hit that and divert off into the forest where we've got litter and buff and things to filter that water out so we want to get that off the trails as soon as possible.
19:21:07 Or we might slow, a road or a landing kind of crown it, so the water greens off.
19:21:14 We want to have ditches in the right places on our roads to drain the water.
19:21:21 Again, we're going to avoid those wet soils, who can.
19:21:25 If we have to cross the street, we're going to put in different the appropriate stream crossings.
19:21:32 And we might reinforce our trails with with brush, or it might put log down you know we put logs, next to each other is called quarterly or use those timber Matt so this top picture here is, is a cut the length harvester when they when they fell the trees
19:21:50 and cut them into logs they put all the branches and tops in front of them. So, it's already a high flotation machine but then it lays his mat in front of it to kind of travel on for tech debt so now it looks, it can look pretty unsightly to us but you
19:22:07 Now it looks, it can look pretty unsightly to us but you know it's it's protecting that that soil where.
19:22:12 Well, well, things are going on.
19:22:14 Again, as I mentioned earlier, operate on frozen snow cover ground if we can get that's not always reliable.
19:22:22 And then sometimes be MPs are things that we decide not to do is bottom picture here is a is an old skid trail it was used, you know maybe 2030 years ago on this particular piece, and it was just, you know, really wet on both sides, there's a stream down
19:22:53 in the down in the bottom here but the approaches were really really wet, rather than do more damage there and have to fight with that contractor and the forest or decided no downstream there was a better crossing, lengthen the distance they had to bring
19:23:00 the word out but just avoided a lot of headaches issues so you know another thing you might do is just say hey you know what we got two inches of rain Let's stay out of the woods for a few days.
19:23:13 No, let things drain off and,
19:23:17 you know, avoid that damage but hopefully we're preparing ahead by, by doing things like putting brush on the trails and using the mats and and doing all that so there's less downtime.
19:23:31 And then lastly, we want to put things to bed when we're all done.
19:23:36 We want to pull out all those temporary bridges and other crossings.
19:23:41 I want to stabilize that expose soil we might have on that might involve just leaving that some of that brush right on the trail.
19:23:51 Keep from exposing that mineral soil, this upper right upper right hand picture is a log landing we had on the grafting county forest.
19:24:03 And instead of pushing all the, all the debris on the bottom and scraping that off and exposing the soil and then seeing it down we just decided well let's just leave that there.
19:24:13 There was a there was quite a matter of it.
19:24:16 In over the few years you can see it's printing up here.
19:24:20 And that's on the edge of a, of a hay field so a lot of times that can be really good mix of habitat there you've got that you've got the grassland and the Hayfield and then you've got from land and then further back you get into the actual forest so
19:24:37 it can be a really good mix of habitats there.
19:24:42 And then we want to see it in March, if necessary.
19:24:47 If we do use malts we really want to try to use straw, instead of Hey, there's a lot less seed in that lot less risk of introducing maybe some invasive.
19:24:59 So I want to try to avoid that. So, and then yeah and then this is a picture of a different, different spot where there was a winter bridge crossing here and then a few years later after this removed and.
19:25:17 Now that's all groan back in with grass and stabilized.
19:25:22 So yeah, very important protect that soil for long term growth.
19:25:29 Minimize where you're traveling minimize minimize that impact.
19:25:34 And that's also going to keep the water clean too, so we put out a publication A few years ago, on, on, we call them emergency erosion control technique is really dealing with that.
19:25:51 You know those heavy rains and those midwinter frequent thoughts and things like that.
19:25:55 And then in general this NH woods.org, that's our website, all sorts of information there on four three topics wildlife topics.
19:26:08 Christmas trees, maple, you name it, so great resource there.
19:26:14 And that's all I have. Thank you.
19:26:20 Thank you, Dan. Oh, I need to introduce the next speakers, Michael and Sequoia sacred circle homestead.
19:26:29 Thanks so much, Jim, thank you.
19:26:33 I was, that was awesome.
19:26:35 So, we are sacred circle homestead. And we are a small scale diversified farmstead.
19:26:45 Our main, sort of, you know, cash crop, if you will, is we are permaculture nursery so we focus on mostly medicinal and edible species, speed, you know, trees nut trees berry bushes stuff like that.
19:27:00 We focus a lot of importance on food resilience, for people.
19:27:05 We offer planted really reasonable prices. And we also use different techniques of growing our plants, right in the soil.
19:27:16 Some nurseries are really extractive with the material and the way they grow their plants, especially in pots, using peat moss and chemicals. So, um, so we're going to share our screen and show a couple of slides and the first one talks a bit about
19:27:35 sort of how these these roots from these, these plants are growing so these are plants that were growing in the in the woods, basically, but we're growing these in raised beds, as opposed to in pots so we we noticed when we first went on our journey of
19:27:51 wanting to plant a food forest, and stuff like this that a lot of these nurseries conventional nurseries weren't using very ethical practices.
19:28:00 Lots of plastic waste, lots of training materials, such as peat moss, things that are actually really extractive.
19:28:08 So we wanted to really kind of strive not to do that. So our plants are all grown in in beds with built up soil that we've built over the years with things like wood chips, organic matter.
19:28:22 compost that our chickens make and stuff like that.
19:28:29 So, and also will give a little background on our on the the land that we're on. So we just moved were in Woodbury Vermont. We've been here for a year now.
19:28:42 Our land is 12 and a quarter, quarter acres. And a lot of it is logged using the exact opposite of what Sam and Jim are just talking about. So these are things.
19:28:56 They're not the best management practices whatsoever.
19:29:00 A lot of the material that we use to build beds and he will culture that we will talk about a little later. Um, was all left by the loggers, and we're utilizing it we're not going into our forest and just taking trees and saying, Oh, this would be great
19:29:15 for soil building, there's there's very deep breaths.
19:29:19 They went through a lot of wet areas. They left a lot of big trees that were felled for no apparent reason there they may, there may be a forestry reason that I don't, I don't know.
19:29:32 Sam and Jim will have to come over sometime and check that out. But, but to us it's it's not. It's just, it doesn't look like the the people who did this, were very mindful about the the the ethics of what was happening.
19:29:43 So with that said, we were using a lot of that material to create beds that are that are inspired by the forest and and by techniques that people have practiced for thousands of years really.
19:30:01 So we're trying to regenerate parts of the land this this picture right here is basically just next to the house that we built, we built on an on an old blog landing.
19:30:11 This land has been logged several times throughout 30 years or so, since the 90s, and each session, each session of logging has been.
19:30:21 I'm not sure how how the ones from 30 years ago where but the most recent ones were pretty disruptive so we're really focusing on trying to regenerate the landscape.
19:30:34 So this picture is one of the Google events that we've created. It's right near I go yard.
19:30:59 soil building material, the hay is near our goat yard so we use their waste material, and we top our beds, but you can see a stump sort of right here in the, in the foreground of the picture and that was behind the stump is a log that was felled, and
19:31:10 it was pretty old and nice and spongy so that was a pretty good base to hold water, so we don't have to irrigate the plants I'll be planted in that bed.
19:31:20 So, when we made the goat yard we had to clear that area because again they left a lot of just slush which is tops of trees. So we utilize those tree tops, and we piled them into this mound that you see.
19:31:34 And by using the tops the soil will eventually right down we're mimicking nature but using human interaction, so that we can speed it up, and we can use the trees, the tree material to suck up the water, we can keep habitat for animals I've seen so many
19:31:52 toads within these beds and they're just part of the whole system that we're creating. And then, as we clean up the goat yard we top it with hay, and then eventually wood chips and we can plant in that seasonally.
19:32:04 So some of these practices.
19:32:06 Another thing that we strive to do on our land is Chicago is of Eastern Woodlands descent. So, something that she's really passionate about which I'm sure she'll talk about is traditional agro forestry, you know agro forestry and permaculture and human
19:32:26 culture, these are all terms that have been coined in the past. Maybe 3040 years, but really they're all techniques that have been used by indigenous people all around the world for millennia.
19:32:34 So in this next slide is, you can kind of see this this this path right here this is right behind our house site before we had built the house.
19:32:44 So we're we were using goats to help clear the brush because we couldn't really see the land underneath, we can see what we're working with.
19:32:52 So, part of this is working on a slope we have a slope, and we want to prevent erosion from that slope by clearing the brush we're exposing some of the soil.
19:33:04 So we wanted to really make sure that we covered that as soon as we could afterwards.
19:33:10 So, people indigenous people all around the world have been working and farming and living on slopes on mountains for thousands of years without, without a lot of erosion.
19:33:20 So this slope, this this picture is just the other day actually after we finished, not finished building the house but sort of finished building the house.
19:33:28 And some of these all these logs. We didn't want to take anything out from that was buried in the soil so there's logs that have been run over by this kid or things like that that are embedded in the soil so we're going to keep those so we don't promote
19:33:40 any more erosion, but as you can see there's a little bit of contour to these, these human mounds So Google culture, roughly translates amount culture in German.
19:33:52 So that's kind of more practicing, and a lot of the openings that we have on our property, there was a lot of small clear cuts that were opening so we want to keep those open if we can because we need to grow food, we need to we need to make plans for
19:34:07 ourselves, and we can utilize the openings by, you know, feeding our goats, in one season and then eventually incorporating the edible species we want, as well as our forest.
19:34:21 We don't have any pictures of them but we do food forest and we have closed canopy nut trees where we really introduced chestnuts, and butter nuts, walnuts, even mulberries and we have understory herbaceous plants that will climb up the trees and we have
19:34:37 very pushes that will provide food so we have very intensive food forest and small errors that create food resilience for ourselves so we're not completely reliant on just annual agriculture, and we're trying to we're trying to sort of in our own way
19:34:55 use traditional techniques with a modern context. So what are you know what are the techniques that that people all around the world have employed to feed themselves for thousands of years, people have been fed from the forest for a lot longer than they've
19:35:08 been fed from farm fields.
19:35:10 So, what we're trying to do is, you know, for example when European settlers came here they saw this, this vast pristine untouched wilderness, but really, that was the result of human interaction, whether it was subtle interaction or very intensive interaction
19:35:29 over hundreds of thousands of years so.
19:35:33 So we're trying to use these, these sort of techniques in a modern context so we don't use completely native plants for us some plants that are that are going to help us with the changing climate.
19:35:47 So we have plants that are good from zone to all the way to 09. So whether the climate swings colder weather swings warmer, we can be. We can be okay as far as food and medicine goes, especially in such a changing time in general with all of our cultures
19:36:02 coming together, it's the same way with all these plants these invasive plants, to a certain extent are here for us to utilize and invasive really, if we're not harvesting them and we're not using them for the purposes they should be used for say Japanese
19:36:16 knotweed for instance, and we can harvest them for medicine. We can also harvest plant pain we can harvest so many invasive species for medicine food, fiber Tinder, tons of things but if we're not harvesting them then that's when they do become very invasive
19:36:33 right so basically what we're trying to do is utilize the resources that are around us to create a regenerative way of living, if you will, a way of living that that we can you know anybody can do anybody's got yard waste, I'm sure.
19:36:49 So instead of trucking that yard waste off to to wherever it's trucking wherever it's being trucks to in a home depot bag and you're paying to get rid of that use that as a source of wealth, use that as a source of fertility use that as a source of building
19:37:02 soil, because, you know, we do we just need to have a different lens at our waste, looking at it through a different lens because a lot of it.
19:37:10 You know waste hasn't existed for very long. People lived, hundreds of thousands of years without waste every every product or byproduct of our lives, should have a function.
19:37:21 Absolutely. And a lot of the ways that we can glean from a lot of folks I'm even bags of acorns that we use and we eat throughout the winter and into the summer as we drive them.
19:37:32 We use cardboard we use wood chips from people chipping up their trees we also utilize just utilize so much waste that most people would toss away.
19:37:45 So those are some of the practices that we're employing here, and we talked a little bit about the nursery to. You can find us online we we have folks, folks who are local can can contact us throughout the season and we'll, we'll have plants but the bulk
19:38:08 of our sales are online, and we ship. We grow we like to grow our plants bear not potted so we like to ship the plants bear written upon it so in the spring and in the fall, is when you can find us actively online, taking orders and those will be packaged
19:38:13 up nice while there while they're dormant, and they'll be shipped out to you and they can, they arrive on your doorstep. 99% of the time they're they're healthy, but sometimes they're not.
19:38:24 Yeah, and you can find us online at Secret Circle homestead.org.
19:38:29 Um, yeah and we're happy to be part of this. You can also contact us directly on our website for any more questions or.
19:38:38 We have some articles on in more detail.
19:38:41 And we've also got a small YouTube channel that we have kind of fallen off but I think we're going to pick up, pick back up on that as the as the growing season, a purchase.
19:38:49 Now that we're not building a house. Yeah. So with that, we'll send it back to Lauren, and thank you guys so much.
19:38:57 Thank you.
19:38:59 That was amazing. I really loved. Just hearing the flow from Sam two gentlemen So Mike Lynch record of, Of all the things we considering and how to really apply it to the land so thank you all for being a wonderful presenters.
19:39:14 I am going to transition now to some questions that have come up.
19:39:19 I do it does look like a lot of the questions to calabash gardens have been answered in the chat but if you have any more questions for them please do ask those as well.
19:39:29 Please continue.
19:39:32 Please do continue adding questions for Sam and Michael in Chicago and Jim.
19:39:38 Sam I'm going to start with you. We got a question. Can you name some indicator plants, and what they might indicate and an ecosystem.
19:39:46 For example plans that indicate water.
19:39:51 Great question, will toss out a couple of common ones and you can also find pretty full lists online at the Vermont wetlands program or some other sources but yeah someone plants that I often see out in the woods include sensitive Fern, and it goes quicker
19:40:06 And if I was quicker I would pull up some pictures of these but sensitive Fern is really easy to identify, you'll even see the spore heads in the winter time so that's a pretty good indicator of seats even when there's snow on the ground.
19:40:18 You'll see shrubs, like alders willows red ocean or dogwood, those are some pretty common ones that I see that again indicate wet soils.
19:40:28 And then if you get so the other indicators that I mentioned earlier, our rich soils, so in rich sites basically where there's a lot of calcium a lot of soil nutrients and some indicators, you might see there are a whole lot of understory plants, so things
19:40:44 like blue cohosh is one that's really fun to look for.
19:40:48 Gosh, there's a whole suite of the species.
19:40:51 And if you check out the natural Community Guide that actually tells you a whole list of vegetation associated with each natural community.
19:41:01 So, yeah.
19:41:03 Wonderful. Thank you.
19:41:05 Yeah, there's there's so many resources out there and cat did put the wetlands wild limbs islands Woodlands wild lens into the chat, I actually did buy it from Chelsea green earlier this year.
19:41:16 So they do have, and use that discount code.
19:41:21 Jim coming to you next. What would you recommend to landowner who is just starting out, where should they start in terms of technical technical assistance and resources that considered localized ecosystems.
19:41:36 I would say, contact your county Forester, first
19:41:42 in New Hampshire in Vermont.
19:41:45 Yeah, so the county forester is like I said I'm kind of a starter Forrester just objective, advice, depending on what your goals are. So,
19:41:59 thanks, how was I was hoping you'd say that. Um, and maybe cat or Avi could toss in the county foresters links into the chat as well for both New Hampshire and Vermont.
19:42:14 Michael and Sequoia. Is there an agro forestry network in Vermont, or local resources to help people understand how to work with for us and how to integrate trees and shrubs into our landscapes.
19:42:32 So, we don't I'm not aware of any agro forestry groups, per se, But we do plan on holding classes and more educational hands on workshops for folks if they want to learn more about it and possibly take home a plant to plant into the yard, and I know there
19:42:53 are a couple of agro forestry, sort of companies around there.
19:42:59 Who, who specialize in consulting one name is slipping my mind right now, we'll put it in the chat. I'll put it in the chat when I find it, but also for us a lot of our, a lot of our work is deeply intuitive so we're trying to listen to what the land
19:43:16 wants what it means and what, what, what sort of some of the ecological communities are turning out to be So a lot of the, for example, and a farmer's field you see a lot of repairing buffers now, and that's that's a, you know, an agro forestry technique
19:43:32 that has been used in the last few years, but if you just let the let, let the field grow up a little bit, especially around the wetlands, or the or the water course that is sort of interlaced until these Commons yes I see it right there, that's, that's
19:43:47 exactly the, the, the company that we were just thinking of.
19:43:50 So yeah, and a lot of it is deeply intuitive and and taking taking cues and clues from the land.
19:43:57 Wonderful, fully support taking those cues from the land.
19:44:11 Jenna Will you answer some other questions that have been posted here they've already answered.
19:44:18 I just want to jump in real quick, with agro forestry resources I know Cornell has a whole bunch of good stuff on agro forestry So, yes, Cornell extension.
19:44:39 Cornell extension is great by the way.
19:44:43 So we got that question, the saffron stay in the Rose where you plant them, and how do you manage weeds so saffron does stay in the Rose, the daughter corms grow off of the mother forms and spirals so they essentially kind of grow up to the surface of
19:44:59 the soil like this, which is part of the reason I didn't explain in it before that we actually do have to really disturb the land.
19:45:10 When we're planting saffron, we have to we have to plow extensively discard extensively and really fluff up the soil, so that we can plant the corn was about eight inches deep, which allows them about three to seven years depending on your actual planting
19:45:32 density of perennial crop growth. So, in order to really make sure that you provide them with the appropriate habitat they have to be really deep in really fluffy soil, which then leads us to the cover crop which is how we're hoping to be able to manage
19:45:50 weeds. And we're going to be cover cropping in between the rows so like the walking paths with a bio diverse mix that won't inhibit like prop hopefully won't encroach on to the rose themselves and then won't inhibit the growth of the saffron.
19:46:08 And then over the saffron beds themselves we're hoping to be able to plant a lagoon, a mixed lagoon cover crops so that we can mow that down, actually, as, as an annual it will be able to be mowed down, which will then become a mulch.
19:46:27 And in. In September, what's up.
19:46:37 Well, maybe we have to mold them though during flower.
19:46:36 So, so this will become mulch and then also, you know, take care of the problem.
19:46:44 So, yeah, that's that.
19:46:47 And then the next question.
19:46:49 Oh, the plants that will be planting. So, our forest is a really beautiful hardwood forest.
19:46:58 It's, it is not an old growth for us but it's probably a second growth for us so it's really open underneath the you know it's really beautiful and open, and we have a lot of incredible medicinal plants that are already growing in our Woods already, so
19:47:15 we're really just going to be kind of guiding the forest and enhancing it where we can by adding more of the plants that we already grow.
19:47:29 We have this beautiful sort of North Eastern facing slope that we hope to be planting in syncing.
19:47:39 So that will be also you know another crop cultivation here that we, we can potentially sell. Eventually, but also just sort of, you know, really trying to enhance the forest so we already have, that's so beautiful.
19:47:57 So, you know, we've got cohosh, we have lots of ferns we have.
19:48:02 While bleeding hearts and Dutchman's breeches and things like that so we'll just sort of be, You know, like I said, enhancing the forest.
19:48:25 Well thank you and thank you for saving me turn that
19:48:18 much appreciated.
19:48:21 As a couple more questions go into each other in the chat too so we'll hopefully get to those as well.
19:48:26 Um, this question is for whoever would like it. Um, any thoughts on cedar swamps and how those fit into everything all right Mike Lynch to co I go to you first.
19:48:57 Alright so I'm about five acres of our property cedar swamp, and it's absolutely beautiful. It's its own being. I think that a lot of it should be left to be what it is, um, the loggers went into maybe two of our five acres of the cedar swamp, before
19:49:03 we were even here, and totally destroyed it in a very harmful way. So we have been working to heal that by letting it be and right now we have the frog singing in the background in our, in our swamps, which is beautiful.
19:49:20 So I think it's something to be left and let be yeah they put a bunch of quarter I roads like like Jim was saying so that's that's a bunch of you know a bunch of logs like this, but they put them this way which is kind of weird quarter right road so I
19:49:34 didn't even know what they're doing, Jim. Jim was saying that, that those are supposed to be sort of removed afterwards and they haven't been removed and cedar never not never but cedar takes a long time to rot.
19:49:45 So I'm not sure what the long term effects of that are going to be.
19:49:50 I'm sort of hesitant to take up those roads, because I don't want to disrupt the hydrology and that's why even further. So, so perhaps I don't know but those are our thoughts and cedar swamps, I guess.
19:50:02 Yeah.
19:50:04 Yes cedar swamps are, you know, very wet going to be really, really careful harvesting and those.
19:50:14 And you know there's some of them that you just shouldn't be in just super saturated soils and you just stay out of them. Other. Yeah, we do have actually upland cedar, especially in Vermont cedar likes Cal carries bedrock.
19:50:28 So you know Gordo Champlain on the legends you'll see senior grown in those places.
19:50:36 So yeah, again it comes down to you know where is it appropriate to maybe harvest cedar.
19:50:44 Now it's a, it's a, it's a great would i mean it's it's as you said is very raw resistant it's lightweight, for a long lasting.
19:50:54 Yeah, then you know the Northeast Kingdom has one of the few cedar sawmills.
19:51:07 You know, in, I think it's the only one in Vermont, I think, a pretty important part of the economy there but yeah yeah very sensitive soils is going to be really really cautious about.
19:51:15 And some of them you just probably shouldn't be in at all. So, yeah,
19:51:22 quick comment on theaters, communities, which is that they have some pretty cool understory plants you'll see things like our native honey cycles in there, bunch of other understory plants that take a while to establish and can be pretty easily disturbed
19:51:35 so you know as Jim and Michael in Chicago are saying it's good to use a light touch in those areas and attention so pretty cool ecology there. I believe that cedar swamp has a natural community is considered state ranked uncommon in Vermont, meaning that
19:51:50 you know quality intact examples are not rare and threatened and the danger but they're uncommon so yeah if you have that on your property, it's really cool ecological future.
19:52:03 Thank you all so much for touching on that.
19:52:07 And here's a question for everyone.
19:52:09 And so we'll go in order.
19:52:13 You've all touched on tapping into the waste stream to advance ecological goals.
19:52:18 Does anyone want to elaborate on what what you're doing and how you're feeling about it. I'm going to go to Sam first.
19:52:30 Okay, I guess, to make sure I understand the question.
19:52:34 I guess I'm curious what the waste stream is that they're thinking of, because if it's, you know, things like slash brush tree tops in my mind that's not really waste in forestry, and then you know there's been some cool discussion about agro forestry
19:52:48 here which is pretty far outside my realm of expertise, and then more traditional forestry and ecological forestry, you know that those products are considered waste sometimes or might be, you know, used as a very low quality wood product are actually
19:53:03 really important parts of sustaining a forest and standing for soils, basically compost forest, keeping the trees, the leaves branches, twigs on the ground when you're harvesting or if you're just looking trees fall where they are.
19:53:18 So I guess that's my take on the waste stream, you know, we're talking about waste being things like exhaust from equipment that's a whole different topic.
19:53:27 But, yeah, there are a lot of a lot of products that are, in my mind, not really wasted all, and it can be, you know, I guess I also wanted to touch on the point that Michael in Chicago made about their property where you know there was some pretty, maybe
19:53:39 not the right kind of messy left behind. Even though there was a lot of downed wood. So there's, you know there's sort of a distinction to be made there whether trees were cutting left just for convenience, or, you know, in sort of a messy way that isn't
19:53:54 beneficial versus, you know, leaving some of those ecologically valuable large down logs that provide habitat for salamanders or brush piles that provide cover for songbirds.
19:54:06 So, yeah, let's say, you know, understanding the ecology of this. Suppose that waste products is really important.
19:54:16 I'll pass it over to Jim next
19:54:22 door. Um, yeah like Sam was talking about you know the waste.
19:54:25 the slash you know that's a common
19:54:30 perception you know it looks messy to us so again it goes back to that right kind of messy.
19:54:36 I would actually propose a different term for slash and this came from someone I work with a number of years ago.
19:54:47 He likes to call it retained organic material.
19:54:51 So in other words you know with the retained. It implies that it's purposeful.
19:54:58 We're leaving it there for a reason.
19:55:11 Organic now that's what it is it's a woody debris that breaks down, I don't want to use the word debris it indicates trash. Right. You know, it's what do you material it breaks down becomes the soil, again, eventually, and in the meantime, providing cover
19:55:19 for different small mammals, birds amphibians, etc.
19:55:25 Maybe providing some protection for seedlings to come up through and areas of high deer populations.
19:55:32 So retain organic material just kind of a neutral term rather than debris or something like that. So, and then another example of waste that I was thinking about was years ago I worked for a logging contractor and we use, you know for bar and channel
19:55:52 oil in our chain saws we used used vegetable from from from a restaurant.
19:56:00 And it was.
19:56:03 I think there was some sort of attitude that had to go into it, to stabilize it to make sure didn't just pulling off with all the RPM.
19:56:12 But that was pretty interesting use of a quote unquote waste product. So, yeah,
19:56:23 my concert Corey, any thoughts on your end.
19:56:27 Um, as for waste, I think that if you can utilize it, then use it especially people who throw out bags of leaves, even newspapers, build up your soil and use this to break down and build soil wood chips.
19:56:42 You know, all sorts of stuff.
19:56:43 We have piles of cedar that the people who love left and Michael Hand splits cedar shakes for us for buildings, and we also use Twitter posts and Jim on that vegetable oil chainsaw material we use that all the time.
19:57:00 that's what we use for our woods. Right.
19:57:03 And, and kind of like Jim and say we're saying, I like the idea of the retained organic material, we've got, you know 10 acres of land that we don't touch, because we don't, you know we value it there's value there, not in terms of monetary value but
19:57:18 in terms of, you know, we're value to go out there and take a walk but we don't like to, you know, we're not we're not creating huge amounts of the 12 acres of land because that would be an impractical and probably impossible.
19:57:30 But a couple of those. Those waste areas are very crucial habitats for all sorts of critters and and even, even some plant species as well.
19:57:42 Thank you, and then Jones aka, anything to add for your land.
19:57:49 I don't think we have too much to add that hasn't already been said, You know, I think everything that might be considered waste here gets somehow put back into, you know, into what we do.
19:58:05 So, you know, we have a lot of animals here and all of their ways to get to utilize, you know and and, yeah, I don't think we have that much to add but I also like the term have retained organic material, so awesome.
19:58:25 Agreed. I think somebody should go ahead and get tattooed somewhere.
19:58:32 Um, with that, I want to thank all of our speakers tonight.
19:58:36 The complexity of the issues that you're discussing, and just your expertise and how you really bring your full selves into your work. We are also grateful to be learning from you.
19:58:48 Thank you. If any questions were asked in the chat that we didn't get to.
19:58:52 We will send those to the speakers and get some responses and send them out and event bright and the soils coalition listserv.
19:59:00 I'm going to share my screen one final time tonight.
19:59:05 Just to let you all know about our final.
19:59:13 Well webinar as part of the soil series. So, in two weeks from tonight. It'll be our sixth and final event.
19:59:21 It's called Learning from the original Vermonters, and it will be featuring john Stevens chief of the Mohegan band of the classic American nation, and president of ha ha.
19:59:32 I haven't actually helping you. And we will also have Dr. Fred Wiseman of the Vermont indigenous Heritage Center.
19:59:39 And we hope that you will join us for that event as well. We also hope that you will fill out the survey that I'll be sending out tomorrow, and please share our recordings and ask any more questions on the Vermont healthy soils, let's run healthy soils
19:59:52 coalition listserv that you can be added to when you go and fill out that survey.
19:59:57 And with that, I want to say thanks to everyone.
20:00:01 And I hope that you have a lovely evening.
20:00:08 Thank you.
20:00:11 Thank you so much you
20:00:15 everyone.
20:00:19 Good night everyone.
20:00:22 Good night.