Brush pile in the garden
If you're building a
homestead from scratch, you'll end up with plenty of brush. So,
what do you do with it?
The tradition in our
neck of the woods is to pile it up, let it dry out, and then burn
it. But during our early years on the farm, one of our readers
asked me why I'd burn good biomass, and I couldn't think of any good
reason.
In the forest garden
where every bit of topsoil eroded away before we bought the farm, I've
been adding woody debris in the form of hugelkultur mounds to boost organic
matter as quickly as possible. I figured if I let a brush pile
rot down over there, I'd get a similar effect.
The trouble with brush
piles in the garden is that tall weeds and vines are protected from the
lawnmower and tend to take over. Our previous in-garden brush
pile turned into an impenetrable mass of Japanese honeysuckle pretty
quickly, and I could tell Mark thought this one would follow suite.
But the area has been
mowed for a couple of years now, so the honeysuckle is mostly absent,
and the remaining weeds just aren't that ornery. I spent about
half an hour yanking a few of the tallest ones last week, and the pile
looks almost presentable now. It doesn't hurt that the butternuts
are quickly taking over the area, and that a New England aster popped
up in one corner.
What I really need is
some sort of low tech roller to crush the branches down a couple of
times a year. Many of these branches are from the wild
plum and are covered
with thorns, so I have a hard time talking myself into crushing them
with my body. If I keep piling more compact biomass on top,
though, I suspect the pile will naturally turn into high quality garden
area in four or five years.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Anything that is big enough to crush branches will not be easy to transport on your farm. So my thinking is that you'd have to make something that you can assemble in place.
Take a 50 gallon drum, put a tube through the centre of the bottom and the lid. Fill the drum with sand, put the lid on, and flip it over. Pass a rope through the tube and make it into a loop. This will give you a quite substantial roller. But you'd probably need the come-a-long to roll it over the mound!
Jason --- We like hugelkultur a lot (or at least our variant of it.
) It doesn't work as well with brush, though, unless you've got heavy machinery since you have to come up with a lot of dirt and mulch to fill those air spaces. That's why we're trying to invent an alternative that gives similar results, but on a more homestead scale.
Roland --- I was thinking of something like that, but wasn't sure if it'd be more work to manhandle it around than to simply put on really heavy clothes and do it myself.
To crush branches you need to clear a certain threshold of force/surface. Basically there are two ways to reach that:
Since the first is impractical, try using a sharp spade to cut through the branches.