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Red poppies are blooming today!! @millennialfarmerstn it’s beautiful weather for the flowers to pop out! Don’t you agree!!
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#flowers #poppies #redpoppies #blooms #poppyblooms #poppyflowers #flowergarden #savethebees #bees #flowersforbees #patiogarden #patioflowers #urban #urbangarden #millennialfarmers
Check out our latest project! With only 6 acres, we have to make sure that everything we do on the farm is as productive as it can be while still being sustainable. One thing that fits this is the ancient practice of Pollarding and Coppicing trees.
Several of our trees were actually starting to grow into our power lines, which made them excellent candidates for this practice, and gave us some logs to inoculate with oyster mushroom spawn for our CSA members to enjoy when they fruit. The Pollarded trees are cut back to either the central stem or to main branches just above grazing height - that way the new growth that shoots out from the top is safe from livestock browsing. This new growth is very rapid due to the established root system of the tree and can be anywhere from 3’-8’ in one year!
Coppice is the same thing but done at about 3-6” off the ground verses 6-10’ like Pollarding. We can go through throughout the summer and strip leaves from the pollarded trees, or turn our animals in to graze the Coppice trees to get forage that is higher in minerals and more drought resistant, and every so many years, depending on the species, recut the new growth for things like stakes, wattles, charcoal material, mushroom logs, and firewood.
Trees maintained this way can actually draw down 2-4x as much atmospheric carbon as a normal tree, and since a proportional amount of roots die back every time the tops are cut, carbon is also trapped directly into the soil, further improving the soil and sequestering more green house gasses. Also, since the tree is never killed, there is never any erosion caused by harvesting timber in this way.
With so many positives and no drawbacks besides labor, we couldn’t not implement this technique on our farm. We now have 16 pollarded trees, and we have planted over 200 trees for Coppice so far this year, with many more planned in the future. #trees #coppice #forage #sustainableagriculture #millennialfarmers #project #spring #smallfarm #holisticfarming #ethicalfarming #education #greenthicketlife
Some of last night’s wind damage. We lost some Cornish crosses to flooding in their tractor from the heavy rain, and we had one piglet that was chilled that we had to warm up inside with the hair dryer, but we are thankful that our house and the rest of the animals are fine! Thank you to everyone who checked in on us! ❤️ #weather #tornadoes #justmissedus #spring #farmerproblems #supportlocalfarmers #becausewehavetodealwiththiskindofthing #millennialfarmers #greenthicketlife