Read Online Trees of Power Ten Essential Arboreal Allies Audible Audio Edition Akiva Silver Madison Niederhauser Chelsea Green Publishing Company Books
Download As PDF : Trees of Power Ten Essential Arboreal Allies Audible Audio Edition Akiva Silver Madison Niederhauser Chelsea Green Publishing Company Books
The organic grower's guide to planting, propagation, culture, and ecology.Â
Trees are our allies in healing the world. Partnering with trees allows us to build soil, enhance biodiversity, increase wildlife populations, grow food and medicine, and pull carbon out of the atmosphere, sequestering it in the soil. Author Akiva Silver is an enthusiastic tree grower with years of experience running his own commercial nursery. In this audiobook, he clearly explains the most important concepts necessary for success with perennial woody plants.Â
It's broken down into two parts the first covering concepts and horticultural skills and the second with in-depth information on individual species. You'll learn different ways to propagate trees by seed, grafting, layering, or with cuttings. These time-honored techniques make it easy for anyone to increase their stock of trees, simply and inexpensively.Â
Ten chapters focus on the specific ecology, culture, and uses of different trees, ones that are common to North America and in other temperate parts of the worldÂ
- Chestnut the bread tree
- Apple the magnetic center
- Poplar the homemaker
- Ash maker of wood
- Mulberry the giving tree
- Elderberry the caretaker
- Hickory pillar of life
- Hazelnut the provider
- Black Locust the restoration tree
- Beech the root runner
Trees of Power fills an urgent need for up-to-date information on some of our most important tree species, those that have multiple benefits for humans, animals, and nature. It also provides inspiration for new generations of tree stewards and caretakers who will not only benefit themselves, but leave a lasting legacy for future generations.
Trees of Power is for everyone who wants to connect with trees. It is for the survivalist, the gardener, the homesteader, the forager, the permaculturist, the environmentalist, the parent, the schoolteacher, the farmer, and anyone who feels a deep kinship with these magnificent beings.
Read Online Trees of Power Ten Essential Arboreal Allies Audible Audio Edition Akiva Silver Madison Niederhauser Chelsea Green Publishing Company Books
"Most inspiring book I've read since "The Good Life""
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Trees of Power Ten Essential Arboreal Allies Audible Audio Edition Akiva Silver Madison Niederhauser Chelsea Green Publishing Company Books Reviews :
Trees of Power Ten Essential Arboreal Allies Audible Audio Edition Akiva Silver Madison Niederhauser Chelsea Green Publishing Company Books Reviews
- Most inspiring book I've read since "The Good Life"
- This excellent book from a tree propagator should be read by anyone concerned about climate change, feeding the people of today and the future, biodiversity loss, atmospheric carbon.
Maybe you have seen the YouTube video of a TED talk about restoring desertifying land using mobs of cattle, bunched and moved regularly. What the cattle do is eat up dead grasses and put organic compost, including seeds, on the ground. Traditional mixed farmers and organic farmers know this already. In just the same way, this book explains how plants naturally put carbon, humus and moisture in the ground for microscopic life to break down. By flattening fields and tilling them humans destroy the structure and biology of the soil, until there is nothing left but bare clay that needs chemical fertiliser, watering, then weedkiller and pesticide because there are no predators for the pests.
The author gives us the benefit of all the lessons he has learned. The trees he plants grow fast, healthy young stocks for planting out elsewhere. While the author doesn't like selling potted trees, preferring bare roots, I would point out that his wish not to sell his soil with a tree, means the tree has none of the microbes with it in its new home.
I like the section on how old forests are full of pits where a tree uprooted and mounds where a tree trunk lay and rotted. Amphibians will live in the pits but a good point is that fish can't because they dry up, so the life that fish would eat can thrive. In redwood forests, not mentioned, the seedlings grow on the length of a nurse tree like this, roots reaching down for water and nutrients provided by fungi. Mixed stands of trees are also favoured by any sensible forester, because of the possibility of disease and squirrel strike; deciduous trees with their annually shed, fast rotting leaves are mixed through conifers to fertilise and improve the soil. In Ireland, UCD studies proved that biodiversity shoots up from five bird species to twenty-three when a soft edging of shrubs and smaller native trees are planted around a block of spruces.
The author takes us through budding, grafting, rooting and growing from seed, with many recommendations including a list of what is good to add to soil, from wood chips to comfrey tea and cardboard. Biochar is presented as the best long term way to add fertiliser and sequester carbon.
Then the author presents his 'allies' the major types of tree which can feed us and replace ground crops to a great extent. Sweet chestnuts (we are more familiar with horse chestnuts here) produce vast quantities of rich nuts and the author suggests hybridising Asian varieties with the American varieties to impart resistance to Asian fungal strains. This is being carried out on European trees. He tells the story of the American chestnut, a keystone species and supporter of many farm families, wiped out by disease. We learn of the attempts to save it by outcrossing, still under way. And as the young pure trees die after 15 years but have produced seed and sprout from the root, they can be kept going, which is what happened with elm trees here after Dutch Elm disease. I am hoping the coppiced trees will develop resistance which they pass on to seeds.
Apples; poplar, which is only good for paper and matches but helps with biodiversity and draining water; ash; mulberry; elderberry (perfect edge of forest shrub); hickory; hazelnut; black locust; beech; these are the core trees the author advises us to plant, for wildlife and ourselves. We don't have all of them here (I'd put in walnut, oak and rowan) but I'd take any of them over a sterile stand of Sitka. We are given information about each species and its benefits, how to grow it.
The author tells us some exercises to help us relax, open to the natural world and see better. He mentions one called 'owl eyes' or seeing with peripheral vision (he calls it wide vision) and he says this can help you find things at night. The reason would be that the focal vision is handled mostly by cone cells in the eye, which see colour, but the peripheral vision sees with a good mix of rod cells which see black and white, so they have an advantage in low light and spot movement.
Last we get a list of books on trees, farms and pre-Columbian culture which the author recommends. I would add the excellent The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben about the apex beech forests in central Europe and how they and other trees communicate and support life.
I enjoyed this read very much, as a tree surgeon and ecologist, and it is packed with colour photos and some old b/w ones, so we get a good understanding of the subject matter. Gardeners, tree lovers, ecologists, farmers and those mentioned at the start who want to reverse climate change, need to read this book.
Notes P273 - 276. I counted three names which I could be sure were female.
I downloaded an e-ARC from Net Galley (but will be getting my own copy). This is an unbiased review.
