Post #22 A partnership...with the dead

Once upon a time, Westchester County's land was cleared and trees were the exception, not the rule.  Trees were sparsely sprinkled across the landscape and grew reliably in only a few locations: shading the farm house, lining the prominent road, marking the property's corner, bordering the swamp.

A painting of 1830's New England.  

If trees were the exception, farms were the rule.  Specifically, sheep farms.  Oh yes – most of the old rock walls you drive past were erected to keep in place big, silly looking Merino sheep.  During the late 1700's and early 1800's wool was one of New England's biggest inland industries. With the opening of the American West by mid-century, the cold rocky soils of New England were abandoned for the cold prairie soils west of the Mississippi.  Some eastern farmland was simply abandoned...and thus began the trend of reforesting New England. Starting then, trees became more of the rule and less of the exception.               

A Merino sheep in need of a hair cut.  

As an abandoned farm grows into a forest we can expect to see a certain pattern in the plants.  At first, fields of flowers and shrubs dominate.  Soon after, fast growing and short lived, 'weedy' trees – like birch, black locust, and eastern red cedar – take over.  Eventually, slower growing and longer lived trees – like the white oak – assume their position on the old farmland.  Across New England,  when farms were left to revert back to forests, the eastern red cedar became a very common tree.

An old field naturally dominated by eastern red cedar trees.  As forests in southern New England regrow from cleared land, they often pass through this stage, which remains evident even after the trees die.   

At the Armstrong House Education Center you can still see this early stage of reforestation.  Here, like in many other forested parts of southern New England, you will see hundreds of eastern red cedar trees standing dead or dying in the shadows of larger trees.  These trees thrived in open, full-light conditions but were slowly killed by the surrounding forest as they were shaded out.  Their naturally rot and insect-resistant wood allows them to persist in the forest as dead trees for over a decade.  Currently, living cedars are not very common; most of the cedars you will run across in Northern Westchester County take the form of fence post, gates, benches or hand rails.

The Pound Ridge Land Conservancy has entered into a partnership with this tree.  The cedar is rot resistant and strong, making it ideal as a long lasting, outdoor building material.  Here at the Armstrong House Education Center we use eastern red cedar posts to hold up our garden fence, prop up our mailbox, keep up the shed wall, strengthen the chicken coop and support the hanging branch of an old gray dogwood tree.  To say the least, we think very highly of its usefulness.

Strong cedar posts hold up our garden fence.

Four cedar posts act as the central support system to our chicken coop, seen here in progress.

A cedar helping to hold up our outdoor work shed

A slender cedar post holding up a very old dogwood branch

So what about this resource in the future?  Will our forests provide us with eastern red cedar to build with in twenty years?  Not unless we plant some new ones today.  And that is exactly what we are doing on the Armstrong Preserve.

Why isn't eastern red cedar growing in the forests of Northern Westchester County today?

Two reasons:

1) These trees require abundant light to get started, which the forest floor does not provide.  Much of Northern Westchester County is forested and the few places that are not forested are typically mowed.

2)  White tailed deer destroy the trees that have managed to find an appropriately sunny location.  In this respect, the eastern red cedar is like all the other trees in the area – the deer are keeping them from growing.  Without a change, our forests will look a lot different in the future.   

To ensure that there will be red cedar for the future we grow it in the following sunny places:
1)  Our tree nursery, a well-lit fenced area attached to our garden.
2) The Armstrong Preserve's cliff face.  This bedrock cliff is bathed in sunlight and is out of reach from deer.
3) And coming soon, eastern red cedar will grow in our meadow.  As part of the Armstrong Meadow Management Plan, we will be establishing a zone of small trees and shrubs around the meadow's perimeter, which is currently occupied by Japanese Barberry.    

Eastern red cedar growing on a rock cliff at the Armstrong Preserve

How does using eastern red cedar as a building material help us Live Lighter on the Land?

By using wood that is produced in our forests we don't have to import wood from overseas.  This means we use less fuel for shipping.  Also, by being intimately involved in the production and harvest of the wood, we can better understand and appreciate the impact of our actions.  In other words, we can clearly see the ecological impact that our building projects have on our landscape.      

Can you form a partnership with the eastern red cedar?

You sure can.  Just pick a sunny spot on your property and plant a few eastern red cedars.  While they are growing you can actively harvest some dead cedars from your property and you won't be exhausting your supply.  The goal is to always have some new trees growing for future building projects. 

Remember, you need to keep them safe from deer until they are big enough to protect themselves.  You can simply fence them in, or spray them with a deer repellent.  You can buy very cheap saplings from the state here.    

*The introductory paragraph to this post is a generalization of New England's landscape history.  For more information on this interesting topic see here and here.  

Post#21 Partnerships with a BUZZ

Hey, do you like sweets?  Of course you do, who doesn’t?  Have you ever thought about the sugars inside your yogurt, muffin or Snickers bar?  Do you know where sugar comes from? Here in the United States, sugar commonly comes from either sugar cane or corn syrup.  Less common sources of sugar include beets, maple syrup, concentrated fruit juice and honey.  The last one – honey – is the topic of this week’s blog.  Here at the Armstrong House Education Center we have entered into a partnership with a colony of honeybees; we keep them alive and well fed and in return they produce for us honey and wax.  It’s simply beautiful.

Members of my honeybee school checking on a hive in May.

How do honeybees produce honey?

Honey production is a multi-step process, which the honeybees carry out naturally.  First, certain ‘forager’ bees leave the colony to find flowers.  At a flower, they extract nectar (essentially sugar water) and bring it back to the hive.  There, they store the nectar in their comb and process it into honey.  They do this by adding enzymes to the nectar and evaporating the water out of it.  Initially, nectar is roughly 80% water.  In the end, honey is roughly 18% water – the rest was removed by evaporation.   Once the honey reaches the right concentration, the bees ‘cap’ the part of the comb that it is in.  Capped honeycomb means finished honey!

Capped (left) and uncapped (right) honey comb.  The bees cap the honey when it reaches the right sugar concentration.  It is from this capped form that we harvest the honey.  

Honey harvest at honeybee school.  The class used a hot blade to cut open the tops of the comb.  From here, the comb was centrifuged and the honey was released.  

Why would bees go to so much trouble just to make honey?

To the honeybee, honey represents food for the winter.  It’s a simple cycle – honeybees make honey during the growing season, store it in their comb and eat it during the winter.  Without this winter food the bees would starve to death. 

Does extracting honey necessarily mean the death of the colony?

Nope.  The point of beekeeping is to keep the bees alive (hence, beekeeping).  If your bees die, you are out bees, honey and your investment.  Therefore, it is important to leave enough honey in the hive to support your bees all winter long.  If done carefully and correctly, beekeeping can result in honey for our consumption and the long-term health of the colony.  It's a win-win situation. 

Isn’t it a whole lot easier to just go to the store and buy honey?

It is certainly easier, but it is a lot less fun and rewarding.  Keeping your own colony of bees connects you with nature and provides deep insight into another creature’s life.  Plus, much of the honey for sale at your supermarket is tied to industrial agricultural.  How?  Large-scale honey producers truck their bees around the country to collect nectar from large monocultures of crops such as almonds, cranberries and blueberries.  Local honey is usually made from nectar from small, diversified farms, and the bees are able to provide pollination to the area's wild plants throughout the growing season as well.  Lastly, making honey at home or buying it locally reduces the need to truck honey in from distant corners of the world.  Much of the world’s honey is made in China and Argentina; shipping it from across the planet is obviously unnecessary.     

A blooming almond grove in California.  Most of the world's almonds come from this type of monoculture farming.  Hundreds of thousands of honeybees are trucked in to pollinate the trees.   

Honeybees and your vegetable garden
In the process of extracting nectar from flowers, honeybees carry pollen from one plant to the next.  This pollination is crucial to the plant, for without it, the plant can't produce its fruit.  The best way to ensure that your garden is fully pollinated (aka, fully productive) is to recruit the help of a workaholic pollinator like the honeybee.  With their help, every flower the garden produces has the best chance of being pollinated and turning into a future piece of food – maybe a tomato or a snap pea.  

How do I get my own honeybees?

There are many options for buying honeybees and beekeeping equipment: websites, paper catalogues, local beekeeping services, etc.  The honeybees at the Armstrong House Education Center were purchased from Bedford Bee Honey Bee Service of Bedford, NY.  Its proprietor, DJ Haverkamp, has been keeping bees for over twenty years and is currently teaching beekeeping classes at John Jay Homestead in Bedford, NY and Teatown Reservation, Ossining, NY. 

Bedford Bee Honeybee Service is a company based in Bedford, NY that provides great honeybee services, including an April-October honeybee school, queens for sale and private hive maintenance. 

I want to keep bees in my backyard, but I don’t want to spend the time taking care of them.  Can I still keep bees? 

Yes, companies like the Bedford Honey Bee Service provide a honeybee care service.  Much like a pool service, Bedford Honeybee service will ‘open’ the hive in the spring, provide any maintenance or care throughout the season and ‘close’ the hive in late autumn.  

What does keeping bees have to do with Living Lighter on the Land?
The best backyard food producers are dedicated land stewards; they work to retain their property's natural resources such as rich soil and clean, abundant water and biodiversity.  Remember, in these types of partnerships with nature, the energy you put in is rewarded.  

Also backyard food production is an ecologically responsible alternative to the large scale, industrial farming that has become common in the United States.  For an awesome primer on agricultural trends of the last 50 years, see this.  Lastly, producing food in your backyard – be it honey from bees, eggplant, basil or goat milk – cuts out the fossil fuels used in its transportation.

Post #20 Partnerships

It seems like our world is shrinking.  Everywhere is accessible – the Internet picks up where the interstate highway system leaves off.  We have lightning-fast, global communications – with a satellite phone you can check your stock quotes from the arctic tundra.  Exotic fruit is available all year round – you can buy a star fruit in Shoprite on the winter solstice.  Of course, the planet is the same size it has always been, but it is starting to feel less enormous.  Among all of this planet shrinking, two things remain: 1) human kind, and 2) the rest of nature.  It is no longer an option to separate the two; to coexist we must forge long-lasting partnerships.

Here at the Armstrong House Educational Center, I am doing just that.  I am practicing the old saying of 'you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours' with nature.  I have entered into a partnership with some interesting critters and they have (in a way) agreed to take out my garbage.  No, I haven't trained a troop of chimpanzees to clean my house; I am talking about red wiggler worms.  In something called vermiculture or vermicomposting, I use worms to turn my food scraps into compost.  In fact, they eat more than just household food scraps – these little suckers can take down my coffee grounds, the New York Times, shredded pizza boxes, plant trimmings, kleenex, egg cartons, orange peels and old bread.  It is through this partnership, and others like it, that we can reduce our use of resources and Live Lighter on the Land.

Did Tate say 'worms'?
Yes, worms.  For those of us who don't have outdoor space for compost, using worms is a great indoor alternative.  Did Tate say 'indoors'? Yes, indoor composting.  If managed properly (and believe me, it is easy) these worms don't produce any foul smells or attract flies.  Vermicomposting is very simple – all you need is a worm bin (see below), some organic waste and some red wriggler worms.  The worms eat the organic material and poop out 'castings', which can be directly used as compost.  Simple.  

A red wiggler worm working its way through a pile of organic debris.  They consume food scraps and leave behind castings – a very nutritious growing medium for plants.   

Why not just throw our organic debris in the garbage?
If we think of our organic debris as valuable material and not just 'waste', it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to throw it in the garbage.  Once we throw it out, it is wasted – buried in a landfill or burned in an incinerator.  This organic debris is filled with energy, nutrients and minerals that can be recycled and used again in our gardens.  Also, by recycling our used organic material we don't have to spend money and fossil fuels to transport it.  Check out what the United States Environmental Protection Agency says about food waste.  According to them, in 2010, food waste accounted for almost 14% of the municipal solid waste stream!  Now that's putting the waste in 'food waste'.          

Where does Tate keep his red wrigglers?
My worms live happily in the corner of my kitchen in a simple plastic container called a 'Wormcycler'.  The Wormcycler is a closed container comprised of a stack of square, mesh bottomed trays. The mechanics are simple – worms and organic debris are placed in the lowest tray.  The worms slowly eat the organic debris and once their food supply is exhausted, they naturally migrate upwards to a fresh tray.

My plastic 'Wormcycler' bin.  This product was generously donated to the Pound Ridge Land Conservancy by worm composting company Nature's Footprint.  You can see that the Wormcycler sits neatly in the corner of my kitchen.             

Where did Tate get his Wormcycler, and can I get one?
My Wormcycler was generously donated by Nature's Footprint, a company specializing in vermiculture and home gardening equipment.  You can get your very own Wormcycler at a discounted price through Nature's Footprint's Create Compost Direct Delivery Program.  Ordering is easy, just see the instructions on the poster below.

A promotional poster.  You can buy a 'Wormcycler' at a discounted price if you use the PRLC's special code.  See instructions on the poster.  

Where can I get my own red wiggler worms?
There are many places you can buy red wiggler worms online.  You can even get them from Nature's Footprint when you get your Wormcycler.  Another fun website is Uncle Jim's Worm Farm.  

How do I care for my worms?
It's actually pretty easy to keep red wigglers alive.  The worms like a slightly moist environment (not dripping wet, but moist to the touch).  It is easy to regulate the level of moisture by adding more wet or dry material.  These are indoor critters – they like an environment between 50-80 degrees F.  If you need specific care information, check the Internet; a quick on-line search will yield dozens of vermiculture websites.  To make it even simpler, the Wormcycler comes with its very own easy-to-understand instruction manual that outlines the Do's and Don'ts of worm husbandry.

Won't the Wormcycler attract flies and turn stinky?
Your Wormcycler will be fly and odor-free if you follow these two key rules:

1. Only feed the worms what they are going to eat.  Over feeding attracts unwanted critters
2. Make sure you have the right level of moisture – not too dry, not too wet.

Really, if your worm bin is acting up, its because you haven't paid any attention to it.  I check my worm bin roughly once every three days and spend roughly 10 minutes making sure everything is fine and dandy.  

What does the inside of a Wormcycler look like?
When you first add your organic material (50% food, 50% bedding), individual food items will be recognizable.  Over time, as the worms start to eat the material, the contents of your Wormcycler will become indistinguishable and black.  Once all the food is eaten and the worms migrate upwards to another tray, you can harvest your compost.  In these pictures, you can see how my food scraps broke down in just one month.  

Day 1 of my Wormcycler.  I added bits of food, old leaves from houseplants, shredded newspaper and coffee grounds.  

Black gold, 4 weeks old.  Most of what you see here has been produced by red wiggler worms.  The large uncomposted items are mostly pieces of eggshells.  Next time I will make sure that I dry and grind up my eggshells before adding them – this will ensure their proper breakdown.    

Wait, Tate said that this was a 'partnership'.  What do the worms get out of it?
In addition to their world-class fame and popularity, red wiggler worms used in vermiculture are provided with an ideal living environment.  They are well fed, well cared for and safe.  It is in our best human interest to rear large populations of red wiggler worms and keep them as a tool in our waste reduction/ waste recycling.  By producing less waste we can literally Live Lighter on the Land.