{"id":58453,"date":"2021-07-01T08:03:47","date_gmt":"2021-07-01T13:03:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=58453"},"modified":"2021-07-01T08:03:47","modified_gmt":"2021-07-01T13:03:47","slug":"how-i-grew-and-lost-a-rainforest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=58453","title":{"rendered":"How I grew, and lost, a rainforest"},"content":{"rendered":"<header class=\"entry-header\">\n<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/smallfarmfuture.org.uk\/?p=1820\">How I grew, and lost, a rainforest<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<p>And so I\u2019ve come to the end of my posts concerning Part II of\u00a0<em>A Small Farm Future<\/em>\u00a0and I shall soon be moving onto Parts III and IV, which are the ones that have generated most of the discussions and disputations over the book. I include this post by way of a deep breath, reflecting back on the ground we\u2019ve recently covered and forward toward what\u2019s to come.<\/p>\n<p>Let me begin by reprising the tale of our woodland here at Vallis Veg, which I\u2019ve previously discussed\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smallfarmfuture.org.uk\/?p=1543\">here<\/a>, among other places. Between 2004 and 2007 we planted seven acres of young saplings on our site, which have now grown into some pretty hefty trees providing numerous benefits \u2013 constructional timber, firewood, food, wildlife habitat, wind protection and recreation among them. I\u2019ve discussed before the debate about whether it\u2019s better to allow natural regeneration, or to force the issue by planting saplings, as we did. In any given situation there can be arguments either way, with the balance of them perhaps usually favouring the low input natural regeneration route.<\/p>\n<p>But I\u2019ve come to think of this debate as rather pointless. Given the human dominance of the farmed landscape, what really matters is the decision to opt for trees. If you take the natural regeneration route, you\u2019ll probably lose several years of potential tree growth \u2013 which could be significant for humans on our short-run timescales, but not really significant on forest time. In our woodland, wild trees and herbaceous understory plants that we never designed into the system ourselves are beginning to make their presence felt. In a few decades, I don\u2019t think it will have mattered much to anybody but ourselves during a few head-start years how the trees came about&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How I grew, and lost, a rainforest And so I\u2019ve come to the end of my posts concerning Part II of\u00a0A Small Farm Future\u00a0and I shall soon be moving onto Parts III and IV, which are the ones that have generated most of the discussions and disputations over the book. I include this post by [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7],"tags":[15683,7093,31401,9738],"class_list":["post-58453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-survival-2","tag-chris-smaje","tag-forest","tag-natural-habitat","tag-small-farm-future"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=58453"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58453\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58454,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58453\/revisions\/58454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}