Yesterday I started the day by opening a pile of old myco sample packets that I have had for years. I dumped them all into a bowl and crushed up the larger pieces and chunks. I then added the bowl of myco to the rest of the Rootshield that I had in the freezer. This all got dumped in the spreader and cast out over the main garden. Both the Rootshield and the myco build myco webs through the soil and with the roots to help protect against diseases.
After the broadcasting I tilled the last section off the garden. This morning I got a bunch of grain that I will be spreading out in parts of the main garden before I do my second tilling.
After I fed the boys lunch I headed up the hill to the upper pen. There have been a number of fires in the area the past weeks and that made me remember I needed to get the dead trees removed to help with the fire danger. The sheep have done a good job of killing off a lot of the smaller fir trees by girdling them chewing the bark off. After the years of them standing dead they easily push over and pull out of the ground. There are hundreds upon hundreds of them in the pen that need to come out. I spent a couple hours pulling them over and piling them into larger piles.
An hour through the brushing I was stepping over a log and gashed my shin open. I hiked back down the hill to the house and cleaned it up and then put some steri-strips on it to help keep it closed so I could get back out and keep working.
The boys came back up the hill with me for a little while, until they got bored and wandered back to the house. Before they left they found this little tree growing out of the crack in an old downed tree.
It is quite a difference now having pulled what I did. The stand of trees is much more open underneath and you can see through it far easier.
Removing the dead is good for the fire danger aspect but it is also better for the remaining trees as it gives them more space to grow. The remaining are all large enough the sheep won't eat them.
As I hiked back down the hill after getting tired and hot one of our roosters Crumples was in the sheep pen. He put up quite a ruckus when I caught him but then settled down quite nicely. The boys each held him and he was nice and calm.
Today I have already been to town to get 7 barrels of grain now I am getting the boys ready for us to leave to go sailing on the Columbia River by Kettle Falls.
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Gab
Just wondering if you know it takes a mycorrhizae colony 9 months to develop and tilling destroys it? The bacterial colonies take 3 months to develop after tilling. So if one tills, for most of the growing season, the plants don't have the life in the soil to help them with nutrient uptake.
It's a good job taking out all the dead little trees. It did look better for the bigger trees afterwards.
I've found it depends on the type of myco I use. The Rootshield is meant to grow fast and is good for a season. Once the soil is over 48F the fungus grows rapidly. Last year I didn't put any on the garden but with the grain added I found large swaths of the garden had some pretty intense fungal growth among the roots, but everything did amazing. I didn't have much disease in the garden so I think the every other year application may be enough for me.
For some reason, I read this as "old mayo packets", for just a moment my thought was, "why would you use mayonnaise in your soil?"