Hey there everybody
For folks who are unfamiliar with us, we’re a small scale plant nursery that follows permaculture and regenerative agriculture principles. We’ve used tons of wood chips over the years and we’re getting ready to receive more over today and tomorrow. What would you like to know?
What part of the planet are you located? What are your 3 favorite food bearing plants?
We’re in Maine, in the New England region of the US.
Hands down favorite plant is Ceanothus americanus, New Jersey Tea but it’s a tea plant and not food. I’m also a fan of the Amelanchier family, which may be called serviceberry or saskatoon. We grow and use a whole bunch of Monarda fistulosa, which is called by a number of common names but is an amazing US native plant that supports vast numbers of pollinators. We harvest leaves to dry as an oregano substitute and harvest flowers for tea.
What are you doing to limit the risk that you’ll end up with compost getting hot enough to catch fire?
It gets monitored and turned regularly. We don’t see it dry out much since any turning brings the ducks running from their pond to pick it over for worms and the region has relatively consistent rainfall throughout the year.
I’d recently read about using compost bins inside greenhouses as another source of heat and CO2 - have you done anything with that and if so, what was your experience?
We haven’t yet - currently we just have a small hoophouse for season extension. We have a friend who is planning on replacing some of their steel fence and we’re hoping to get their top rails so we can use another friend’s jig to form the structure of one we’re planning. Once we have a covered space that can accommodate the pile(s) necessary to buffer temps it’s definitely something we plan to use.
Are you planning anything unusual for the new structure? Given the climate where you are, a passive greenhouse or a walipini set into a south-facing hill could be really useful. I worked on a farm growing up in a similar place and never considered until recently how poorly traditional greenhouses/hoophouses fit our climate.
Best of luck!
Ideally I’d set up a few bioreactors and possibly some tubing and low wattage fans on solar to move the air around and warm the root zone. Polycarbonate would be a longer lasting shell but our connections with some other local nursery affords us the chance to receive offcuts from when they rewrap theirs.
I actually talked a friend into doing a walipini but his site has conditions to really maximize its usefulness. Our slope is west-facing and not as great from a structural point of view. Also my wife saw a picture from his project and is not enthusiastic about the idea of replicating it. If I can convince the town planning board to give us a variance I’ll likely build a greenhouse backed against the thermal mass of the house’s west face.
How are woodchips, a product of a significant fossil fueled chain and a removal of a significant amount of nutrients from one area to yours, related to permaculture? What’s permanent about it?
There’s not really anything permanent about their creation in that fashion. I do have a different feeling about the wood chips that I create when I do my own removals with axes and saws.
As for how it relates, the chips are moving from the lot next to ours - several trees were becoming hazards to our neighbor’s home. The company handling the removal would be driving them roughly thirty miles away if we didn’t divert them, using a truck with the capacity to haul 40 tons. I see a benefit to reducing the overall fossil fuel impact of this project, creating a relationship with this company to entice future reductions, and the potential to grow even more native plants to share with our community.
So when you say -“tons over the years”, you meant one time only? Make a lot of chips with saw and axe, do you?
Everyone tries to justify the use of chippers and trucks like it’s doing good (“I’m saving the chips” is a very common excuse) and if that’s what helps you sleep at night, that’s fine. It’s organic gardening at this point, there is nothing permanent about driving woodchips and chippers around (it’s a western culture thing, doesn’t happen many other places). I’m sorry, that’s the ethical stand that I’m making and others should to at this point, it’s not hard to not use woodchips because they have a significant footprint associated with them.
And for those unicorn rare situations when you get to “save” chips, go for it.
These replies feel combative and condescending, and I’m concerned that good points you make will be shrugged off by someone if you put them on the defensive with this style of writing. I want to be clear that I think your stance has merit, and while I agree with you in general context is important. I apologize for leaving it out of the description hoping for it to spur more conversations. This whole exchange could have been more enjoyable if it had started out like “How do you justify the ethics of their use given the considerable carbon footprint of their existence?” but part of that responsibility lies with me.
one time only?
No, we’ve set up relationships with several of the arborists and loggers that operate in the forestry district in which we live. Last year we received the equivalent of a tractor trailer load from another abutting property after it was harvested for firewood. The year before that we took almost three hundred yards of chips from the town during a municipal project. Our arborist friends know that we’d rather those chips be left with their customer, blown out responsibly, or dropped at a location closer to their job site than we are.
“I’m saving the chips” is a common excuse
In our area, the lifecycle of wood chips looks like this: Become chips, get hauled to a processing facility, undergo further grinding or tumbling to become “playground chips” or small enough to become wood pellets or fire bricks. Once at that stage, they’ll be hauled further to be delivered as mulch or turned into heating products which are then packaged and shipped several more times. There are so many pain points along that system from the “stop burning fossil fuels” perspective that you and I share, and it feels correct to do what I can to reduce that consumption.
Mollison, Holmgren, Lawton, Holzer, and others have written about the idea that a use of fossil fuels to set up a productive permaculture system can be justified if that system reduces your other fuel uses. There’s also an emphasis on diverting waste streams and closing those loops, and (tongue in cheek here) I value the marginal impact I have when I can keep the chips from racking up additional fuel consumption. From my perspective if the intentional use of fossil fuels for establishment is “okay”, then establishment which reduces the footprint that would have existed without my involvement is at least an order of magnitude better.
This is a really good answer - thank you for taking the time to write it out. As someone who spends a lot of time and effort scavenging stuff (from electronics to furniture to lumber) to keep it out of the waste stream, this makes sense to me.
Thank you! I have issues with the way so many industries externalize their costs so it feels good to make any impact, even knowing how sisyphean it is. On that note, thank you for what you do!
