Let’s make this the place to share all our questions, ideas and results of any type of composting we can think of. Whether you’ve been composting for decades or just forgot to empty the green bin and doing bokashi by accident, let us know how and why you do things the way you do. Share your stories and your photos. Your designs, or designs you found online or perhaps in some cool old book you stumbled upon. Anything goes.
To kick off and introduce ourselves, why not drop a short messages on what your favourite composting methods are?
Worm composting is my traditional composting method. The other method would be chop-and-drop composting but accelerated through the use of coppice and pollard cutting techniques by planting trees/shrubs densely and intended for that very purpose (but mainly pollard due to herbivore pressures).
I had to lookup ‘coppice’ and ‘pollard’, didn’t expect to learn something new within the first five posts on this community. If you know of any nice introduction video on the topic, please post it to the sub.
An ancient technique that fell out of favour in the past 400 years. If you really get into the historical side of it, there are archaeological records of coppice timber being used thousands of years ago. It’s very solarpunk.
As for videos, I have no idea. I’m a qualified arborist so my knowledge of them started by figuring out tree physiological response to pruning and then working out the techniques from there. In the past few years there has been a significant resurgence in information and if you lived in Europe, you would have been exposed to it more than any other continent for years prior. I’d bet there are videos, technically I should be one of the people making them.
There was a book on the history released recently: https://www.williambryantlogan.com/ - called Sprout Lands. It’s not a technical manual, more of a flowery piece dedicated to the discovery of the cultures that performed it and why it worked from a functional sense. Worth reading.
And, unless it’s on FB, the only place I know of discussion for it is https://www.teddit.net/r/coppicing - maybe if Lemmy picks up and a “tree” community (not cannabis) gets going. There are probably some arboricultural forums still plodding along but we all know how centralisation went for them. Composting isn’t the right niche for it, farming, while associated, isn’t either.
Managed to find a copy of Sprout Lands, and reading the synopsis I see ‘living hedge’ mentioned. In season 2 of Clarkson’s Farm (Jeremy Clarkson trying to run a farm) there’s a match organized where folks make traditional living hedges, something I had never heard of but found fascinating. So thanks for this recommendation, sounds right up my alley.
There is an excellent video on YouTube on the hedge laying process. There is a old guy, I think in WWII assisted by a young person (young lady if I can assume gender) and it runs through the whole traditional technique. He smokes the entire time while working.
If you read about hedgerow loss through England and Europe, you can see what a negative effect that has had on ecological outcomes. Sprout Lands goes into how cycling trees for product, rather than clearfelling improved areas over time, animals and plants adapting to the changes over thousands of years. Fire is also a coppice technique and in Australia, indigenous people did it for so long, animals evolved with the changes.
I’ll have a look for video now and edit it in if I find it.
Here it is. Throw it into your frontend of choice:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoprVhpOKIk
Please consider making a dedicated post for that (or any other similar) video if you find it, sounds like it deserves its own place and that way more people might find it.
c/farming? Where do you think it’s relevant?
Did you want to make a trees community before the cannabis people take it?
Good question. I have no clue how much content/traffic we would get on such a topic. We could do c/Trees but maybe c/Arboriculture is more accurate?
Let me have a look at which communities are already there now, maybe something fits.