EEC Forest Stewardship

Since I first moved to the land that hosts EEC Forest Stewardship, the sound of a lone Pacific tree frog has called from a number of hidden places around the front porch. This wild companion has a love affair with potted plants, and I appreciate its careful tending of the somewhat exotic species that are watered more often and offer the frog a wet place to hang. The frog is here for the moisture. Usually, I don’s get to see it, but when I was watering the bonsai yesterday, the frog was out and enjoying the warm afternoon next to a blue marble. I had sat down to enjoy a brief respite in the shade when I noticed the amphibian friend. In that moment, I felt completely connected to place and self, the frog and I were living in the same world and resting in that moment together at peace. What an experience to take time with.

Frogs are a sign of water, grounding, and connectiveness of the two. The common bonds between all living things are held, symbolically, in this little creature. It’s a nod to emotional health, and well as physical. Reclaiming that center, I shared that moment with the frog on the porch and felt wonderful. What a privilege to just sit with another being, all the beings, the potted plant was also alive with us, still and present. The garden beyond, the forest, the stream, river to the ocean, back to the frog sitting under the tree, next to me. Perhaps, if we all took a little more time to sit and reflect in stillness, we would better anchor to place and have a sense of belonging. Connecting with other living things brings peace. For those unable to connect in such a way, there is great sadness and fear.

Alone is not part of the world’s being. Things are intimately connected throughout the world. Denying, refusing, or ignoring does not make it go away. You can always sit with your own heart beat if there is nothing else living around. Listen to the life pumping through you, carried in complex cycles, the blood re-oxygenated with your breath, electrical impulses from the brain, firing without your command, it’s happening independently, to keep you alive. The greater living world works the same way, independently, in a cycle to keep things alive. The frog is an anchor, holding water and soil together, relying on the cooperation of two elements, along with air to breath so its body can follow the same cycles, maybe in a slightly different physical composition, but connected in the same way. Sitting with frog offers stillness and inner peace. If you can, find your way to a wet place with some growing things around it and you can sit with frog too. You might not get a chance to see it the first few times you come and sit quietly, but eventually, if you keep at the connection, frog might come out to sit with you, to gaze into your eyes and have its own reflections on connection and place.

There is so much bounty in late summer here at EEC Forest Stewardship. We’ve been sharing the harvest with neighbors and friends, and receiving as well. Cucumbers and radishes from a neighbor’s amazing garden, baked goods and jam from other friends who came and picked blackberries, and more of the berries themselves, a fine crop this year, and good return for all the struggle keeping them from overtaking the landscape. There were rains in August, which set off another growing spree, and seed germination in any bare soil. I’m cutting back the grape arbor for a second time, watching the final maturity on the fruit, to harvest before birds, insects, and mold moves in. The weather is cooling off enough to invite mildew, so cutting back the new leafy growth on this plant will help ventilate the grapes to repel unwanted spoiling.

The fruit trees are having a mast year. I’ve been gathering early shed fruit from the ground and feeding the sheep a welcome treat. Why gather fallen fruit that is not ripe? It still rots and sends out a smell that tells bears to come and get it. By gleaning the dropped fruit early, you stay ahead of the bears and birds, preventing unwanted guests in your orchard. I was at a neighbor’s backyard, gathering plumbs last night, and taught them this savvy oversight to protect the trees and fruit crop. Bears like to climb up in fruit trees, and since most cultivar verities are dwarf, they don’t have branches strong enough to hold a heavily laden fruit crop and the bear at the same time. Bearing the bear becomes impossible, and branches break, causing the loss of part of that year’s crop, as well as future fruit from that hard grown branch, and much more for the tree’s long term health and balance. The devil in the details! I always talk about this, and it’s where a sort of evil can creep in over time. In the form of production and viability loss. But I can digress into tree health, fruit tree lifespan, grafting to salvage, and on and on, but this blog post is about bounty, and there’s a lot to eat.

It’s great to invite others for some evening pick your own. This year has produced enough bounty for 3 blackberry harvests over a month and a half. The right warmth and full sun brought on the flush of sweet reward, considering the aggressive nature of this Colonial introduced species. I’ll reflect on the fact that all this fruit is Colonially introduced, even the hybrid crabapples (far left below), are a far cry from q̓aʔxʷ. That’s Lushootseed for Pacific Crabapple. Pacific crabapple trees were prized by tribes as a late summer, early fall food crop. They preserved them in watertight boxed underwater! The advanced technology there is astounding, removing oxygen from the slightly cooked fruit for preservation. Let’s see ya carve or weave a water tight container, then fill it with the slightly cooked crabapples, and store it for a late winter food source. No plastic or complex global trade to meet basic needs, though the fruit was traded widely and often eaten with animal grease. Now, could the crabapples feed the cities of today, no, never. Well, maybe if we concentrated all our efforts on regenerative, climate resilient food growing and stepped back from our screens a little more. With population as it is, due in huge part to industrial processes that make more in the short term, but cost dearly in the tailing arc of human existence, we’re overtaxing what there is of this finite life.

We’re cooked. But maybe not in my lifetime, so I keep tending the fruit treed, planting berry bushes, and slowly bringing more Pacific crabapples into the mix. They don’t need the irrigation, pruning, or protection that the orchard of cultivar’s demands. I am glad to pick fruit the size of my fist, rather than the size of a pea. This Colonially developed fruit is a big payoff for my troubles, but without a dehydrator, glass jars, and freezer, I’m left with little time to scarf down all that I grow and share. The sheep, chickens, and geese get the fallen fruit, and what I can’t glean for eating or jam. Such bounty for my perceived labors and time, but maybe not for all of us, and maybe not available for everyone. The gratitude for this pleasure at crafting, labor of love that give back abundance in food and connection to place, this is the paradise spoken of in some holy books, but at great cost to many others in this whole.

Once there were uncountable salmon runs that fed the people who lived here for thousands of years. Enough berries, fish, elk and deer, birds, and endless forests, camas fields, all tended and lived with by intelligent, well established people. I took a deep dive on Nancy J. Turner’s work in finding a living presence of traditional land care practices up in British Colombia. The same species and practices were happening in Washington too, because First Nations didn’t have the same boundaries white men drew up when mapping “unexplored” land. Ecology linked the people in the greater landscape of this west coast, with inland trading and exchange, which was laced into a much greater framework that connected all the continents of what is today, know as The Americas. Again, pulling the wheels of my mind back to abundance and the bounty of this year’s harvest.

Here in the home garden, there is still a struggle with bindweed, an type of abundance I am not so excited about. The morning glory continues its vie for supremacy, yet with a half day of pulling, I can get ahead enough to let other plants shine. Figs planted last fall are now established and expanding their branches. Sunflowers are about to unfold their discs of sun worship, and native roses, berry bushes, and pollinator shrubs like mock orange, slowly morph from root stock to viable plant on the scene. Future understory champions to fill in the forest recovery effort. There’s a black cap raspberry making a jump to second story level after three years of coaxing into a stable south west corner of the garden. It’s teaming up with a swamp gooseberry to overtake a decorative snowball Viburnum, which is native to Asia. Still, towering above it all in the background is x̌payac, the life tree for tribal peoples of this area, still used for countless articles, from clothing to those water tight boxes to store crabapples. Yes, it took a lot of time and effort to make a box that was air tight and durable for food storage, but what are we doing today? Plastic air tight containers of forever chemicals, which are killing us, and making the future generations sick. I can’t avoid thinking about the microplastics in our food now, even these beautiful fruit trees many of us dreamed of planting in our own orchards, if we were so lucky. Anyway, that does sometimes keep me up at night.

I want to tie back to that bear climbing into fruit trees, and breaking branches. There is something rather smart in the animal’s culling of branches. He naturally prunes the fruit tree. Last summer, a black bear climbed into one of the pear trees and had a feast. he took all the fruit, and took down several of the tree’s branches. As I stand and look at my pear tree this year, at the same time, there is still tons of fruit on the tree, and in fact, it shed a few overburdened branches last week on its own. To help prevent more cracking branches, I’ve done a few shakes of the pear tree to let some of the fruit fall to save branches. I know I can’t eat all the Asian pears on this tree, and the early falling stuff is not ripe, but the sheep will enjoy them, and I’ll get more mature fruit from what’s left- if the bear does not come through again. One thing to point out- I don’t have to do any of this management on my native fruit bearing species- like that crabapple I’ve been going on about, but then again, q̓aʔxʷ would not put out so much soft, fleshy fruit that my culture, and pallet prefer. Gratitude for all the choices in food I get to make here at EEC Forest Stewardship, and all the people who get to share in this modest bounty.

The last two weeks of August have signaled the start of fruit harvest. Blackberries have been particularly abundant this year, and as I’ve been cutting back the bramble cane, I’ve picked fruit from the invasive hedges of Armenian Blackberry on the fence lines around the property. There is a sweet reward from all that bramble, and I’ve been taking full advantage of this corp for many years. This year, 2025, was the best yet, with about 60lbs of fruit picked and crushed, then heated and strained into two five gallon carboys for fall fermentation. Blackberry wine is divine, and I look forward to bottling the end of summer sweetness to uncork in the cold dark winter to celebrate, letting a little of that summer warmth pour into our festive cups.

wine making is an active craft, from harvest to bottling, each step takes hours of prep and execution- not to mention the clean up. During the first fermentation of alcohol, berries need additional sugar to feed the yeast enough for chaptalization, turning the glucose into alcohol. So, the additional 10lbs of sugar in each carboy are not there to sweeten the wine, but to feed the yeast for higher alcoholic content. The first three days of fermentation, oxygen is allowed into the jugs to multiply the yeast. After that, each carboy has an airlock to allow gas out, but no oxygen in. Ethanol and carbon dioxide are released during fermentation, so there has to be an escape rout for the gasses, but you don’t want air in, so the lock is a must for wine making. I am comforted by the slow bubbling noises during winter evenings, in fact, last winter when I bottled the wine and the airlocks went silent, it took me a few days to get used to the silence.

While cooking the fruit before fermentation starts, I take time to skim off froth and sift out some of the seeds. In my first batch, I did a lot of sifting. In the second batch, I only skimmed froth, and left most of the seeds through this first step in fermentation. After 2-3 months, I’ll rack the wine, sifting out all the fruit pulp and seeds, then let the liquid ferment another 2-3 month before bottling. It’s good to get the sediment out of the wine before final fermentation, otherwise you’ll have a lot of gross lee in your wine, which can develop funky flavors in time. Still, I like having the whole fruit in the wine for the first few months of wine making. It invites more fine lees into the wine, for complex flavors like nuts, honey, or bread in the taste, the dead yeast cells are included in this fine sediment that you might like in your wine. I’m not quite that advanced in my wine making skills yet, but every year I learn a little more, which then improves my wine making. I hope to have one of my most comprehensive batches in 2026.

Home-brewing is an important craft at Leafhopper Farm. Our two main crops for wine production are dandelions and blackberries, both endemic species here, and most of North America. They are considered light fruit wines, with lower alcohol count, and best served cold with a charcuterie platter. I’m also a fan of room temperature blackberry wine with stews or crispy goose. Combining the terrior of fruit from our land with the meat from our sheep makes for an incredible pairing. I also like to lay a few bottles down each year to keep for a few years, just to compare flavors over time. Blackberry wine can fortify nicely, if kept cool. I’ll often have at least one bottle pop in the summer due to warm temperatures in the house when the outside temps get into the 90s. It makes aging wine a bit of a challenge. I’m thinking seriously about building a root cellar to protect the vintages as I get more productive. No, I don’t plan to ever start selling wine from Leafhopper Farm, but it will feature with our lamb for friends and family.

As I wipe up all the spilled juice and sugar from the kitchen floor and cabinets, I think of the taste to come and don’t mind the mess. Home brewing is not simple, and you make a lot of mess, but the outcome is superb, unless your wine goes south due to a bad fungus infestation or what I call sock flavor getting in. This is caused by unwanted bacteria that can get into the wine if your tools aren’t sterile, or oxygenation happens late in fermentation. All sorts of problems can arise in brewing, any fermentation really, so ideally, you do a lot of experimentation and learn what works and what doesn’t. I’m now 15 years into wine making, and have so much to understand. Life long learning for sure! I’m glad to get a drink out of this schooling from time to time. I will say that at this point in my wine making journey, I bottle more success than bitterness.

It’s mid August here at EEC Forest Stewardship and the fruit and nuts are on. Though chestnut harvest will happen later this fall, it’s great to see so many burrs forming on the ever growing branches of these hard wood masterpieces. They are flanked by blackberry understory, which I’ve been harvesting by the bucket loads this summer. Though this bramble is usually a foe to be hacked back, it also gifts us with a fine crop each year, and our Cascade Katahdins love browsing the lush leaves of this invasive plant. I’ve been reflecting deeply on this vegetation, and find it’s trying to tell us something crucial about our environment- plant trees. When a shade of continuous overstory comes back, the blackberry goes away. It cannot live in an evergreen forest, and so, plant back the rainforest and remove the blackberry. Even with the slow return of the trees, I find myself cutting a lot of cane in late summer, after the flowers have bloomed for the pollinators and ripe berries are picked. First year cane can go any time, and I have to cut it back anyway, to reach the older growth where the berries are. Nothing cut goes to waste mind you- even if it sits on the ground where it drops and decomposes, the dead carbon material and green manure are wonderful for the soil. Remember the old permaculture adage- the problem is the solution.

Dearth comes in late summer. Dry, crisp leaves accompany the yellow brittle grasses in the pasture. Almost all the flowers have wilted into fruit or dropped off the stem. Nectar death stalks the pollinator community. Shallow rooted vegetation withers into obscurity as the dust clouds up with any disturbance on the moon dust surface of exposed soil. When the rains do return, they will carry these exposed micro materials away in their currents, robbing the soil of it’s fertility for future generations. This is where the blackberry tried to protect the landscape by reaching out tall stocks of cover with broad leaves that spread to defuse heavy rain and shade out the punishing UV rays that bake the soil into oblivion. Look under a bramble patch some time and the soil below is mulched and cool. Layering vegetation, even invasives, are better than parched soil. Where trees offer shade, and dense bramble crops up around the tree’s skirts, a lot of restoration is taking place.

There is still lush green on the trees and shrubs that scatter about the Savannah in the farm’s “back 40” pasture. It’s the furthest from the house and high activity parts of the land. Still, I can drive through 3 gates and be there, and a fine bridge over Weiss Creek gives me full access without much trouble to mother nature’s home. I do not drive back there in winter, when the ground is soft and vulnerable to erosion. Late summer is the best time to be driving back there, usually to carry water to the sheep. I’ve also pulled and bagged the few remaining Canada and bull thistle starting to seed out, and picked the shredded tarp from a fencing project out of the grass before it becomes horrid microplastics… too late. I began this pasture’s restoration planting with chestnuts because there was space for the large trees to mature, and adequate healthy soil to support nut production. There is no irrigation for these trees, so their development is slow going. The actual harvest remains minuscule, especially in hot dry years. At least the rains are returning tomorrow. An expected half inch or more will be enough to help support these young nuts to maturity. The trees are growing up beautifully, and as they spread their canopy and shade out the hot sun, their roots will retain more of the moisture from the soil, and hopefully, better nut crops will come in time.

Blackberry may not be the best companion planting for a nut orchard. I’m certainly not encouraging it long term, but the relationship has been mutual enough for now, with some heavy handed help. I do pull the cane off the trees every few years to prevent them from overtaking the canopy. It’s rewarding to harvest the berries before taking down the lattice of spiked netting. My sheep clamor around the new salad bar eagerly. They love blackberries too, and get the low hanging fruit early in the season. While trimming, I take a closer look at my young nut trees and make sure they are all growing up healthy. This year I will be pruning the chestnuts for the first time. They are all well established now, with 5 out of eight of the original plantings surviving and thriving- that’s about what you can expect from grafted varieties in Western Washington. I have also planted a couple of seed germinated American Chestnuts, but they have not taken off, and I fear the blight will have them in the end. Most commercial nut trees have to be grafted, and the same goes for fruit trees. Berry cane does not have the same challenge. You can bury a cut stock in fall and expect a new plant to grow the following spring. If only our prized nut and fruit trees could to the same.

It’s hard to fully picture the long term environmental change that will happen with the establishment of a nut grove canopy in this field. Eventually, all the brown grassy parts of the picture above will be shaded by mature nut trees like the colossal chestnut above. It will tower high above, dropping a layer of leaf litter each fall that will slowly change the chemical composition of the soil below. I’m planning to seed clover this fall to add more nitrogen fixing around the base of the trees. The sheep will also like that diversity in their grazing diet. Livestock are spreading a layer of cold manure each year to boost soil fertility. They play an important part in the restoration of this landscape by providing an on site conversion of vegetation where it grows back to the soil in pelleted time release abundance in place. How often do we cut the vegetation from the land and take it away? The sheep are butchered and sent off to local family tables, so that abundance is lost to the land, but future generations that are born here retain enough of the cycle to keep things vibrant and in balance on this modest 10 acres. The alfalfa inputs brought here supplement what is taken by providing a dense manure I pick out of the barn each year and spread in the garden beds, orchards, and other productive parts of the farm. Organic material is crucial to maintaining soil. Carbon rich debris like the berry cane or animal bedding are a key part of soil building, and EEC does it by the truckload.

After so much labor, it’s nice to just wander the hedges picking berries and admiring the chestnut burrs as they grow. At the end of summer, bottling the blackberries in a home made wine that will be laid down until winter, when the cork pops and summer’s sweet delight pours into the cold dark winter nights. Sharing a glass with friends and family in front of a fire with chestnuts roasting. This is the image I hold as I pick fruit in the hot afternoon, or when I am pulling bramble down and get poked in the thumb, and even when I sweat in the hot sun cutting cane or shoveling manure onto the hedges where more fruit will grow for years to come. This is the lifestyle I pour my effort into, and from where I stand in the nut grove today, it’s a job well done.

We’ve been cleaning out the barn and prepping the pallets for the annual hay delivery. My usual order is three tons of alfalfa, but because of drought, I ordered an extra 2 tons of orchard grass, in case the pastures can’t recover in time for more grazing this summer. I have about three acres of pasture left, and it won’t hold the flock through another month and a half of the forage they need. I am putting all the cut blackberry into their pasture for extra feed, but if rains don’t return till late September, I’ll have to start supplementing the flock with bought hay, which is never great. Earlier this spring, I wrote about the ewes all dropping singles this year. Well I’m glad they did, because if we had twice as many lambs, we’d already be well out of grazing on this property and having to slaughter early. Local hay can be cheap at the right time, but it’s still more than this farm’s budget and holistic philosophy hope for. I’m going to have to start making stricter choices about the size of flock to remain in balance with what a drought summer can offer.

Hedgerows are setting in, and will offer a lot of vertical forage as they mature. I’ll be reseeding with clover and vetch to diversify grazing and improve diversity in plant life and animal diet. The composted bedding and sheep manure can be spread right onto the ground from the barn after a few months of drying out- so I can easily fork it into the truck and onto the edges. Katahdin sheep manure is nitrogen low, a cold manure that can go right onto the land without burning the plants. This makes it easy to spread on the landscape wherever a little fertilizer is needed. The edges of the property, where hedges are establishing over time, are an easy place to bank up manure compost for future planting. By next spring, I can direct plant into these beds along the fence line and grow another layer of vegetation for future browsing and harvesting.

The hedgerow fence line pictured above includes cherry, twin berry, blackberry, apple, plum, rose, scotch broom, alder, and trailing blackberry. A spread of clover and vetch in the fall will prep this expanded planting area for future shrub and small tree plantings. By slowly plating in from the edges, you turn a pasture back into a forest. These fence line edges won’t expand much more, because the orchard- future food forest with intentional cultivar plantings will continue for at least a few more generations, if fruit trees are needed, if not, the space should be reclaimed by natural forest over time. Oaks can be planted for a savanna recovery from open, somewhat barren pasture scapes that were certainly overgrazed and underappreciated in the last few generations, since their inception at the turn of last century. The heat and drought of our future Puget Lowlands will demand fire resistant, drought resistant ecology, something hemlocks and many red cedars will not survive in as forests evolve. Will this property grow its own alfalfa one day? No, forest canopy and water retention for fire resiliency is the key at EEC Forest Stewardship.

Hay deliveries are crucial to year round livestock operations on this farm. When sheep are scaled out of the restoration timeline, poultry will become a focus, and much of the two largest pasture spaces will have been planted in enough to allow a temperate rainforest her time to recover- several generations of human lifetimes. How many of us can stand in a forest and know our grandparents were alive at it’s planting? How many generations can to trace back in a place? I’m the first of my family to come to and settle on The Pacific Coast. Shepherding goes back though, and droving in Scotland. Perhaps clearcuts of great forests feels ancestral too. How many generations back did my ancestors cut down the oaks in their homelands? Were they also accosted by conquerors, Roman legions that burned the forests to destroy native people in those isles that had lived with the oak for centuries. I cannot weave directly into any first nations of The Americas, but I can trace back along the frayed lines of settlers and spillover from over populated European feudal legacy. Was I talking about hay?

3 tons of alfalfa, there are two stacked here, a first time for Leafhopper Farm’s sheep barn. This temporary greenhouse plastic extension has remained steadfast and true through almost five years. I’m impressed, and recommend this simple building method to expand your barn’s dry cover with little cost and effort. I still tarp this alfalfa for protection against UV rays and opportunistic chickens looking for nesting sites or legume gleaning through the bales. Since I ordered an extra two tons, I had to find more space for the hay this year, thus the rush to get the barn cleaned out, my usual late summer access is blocked by this beautiful winter feed for pregnant ewes.

In the traditional hay barn, I put the two tons of orchard grass, much of which will be eaten by the overwintering rams. That’s right, two this year. Okie is our resident ram from Canfield Farms in Snohomish. His offspring from this year’s lambing, 2025, has shown a promising future breeding ram in Quinn, out of Lickity Split. He has short legs, a sturdy, long back, and mild temperament. Another prospect for quick growth and good frame is “Q”, first born this year and already the size of his dam, the largest ram lamb this year. Size is not always the most favored trait in sheep, but that’s up to the breeder. I look for short legs, long backs, and gentle temperament. There are also breed standards, like no horns, completely shed fleece, and ideally an average of two lambs with each breeding. Those standards should be reached within the genetics of this Katahdin flock. Their winter diet of alfalfa ensures enough good protein for gestation and early life. My ewes produce fantastic milk from well preserved body fat put on during their overwintering in the barn and generous feeding of the precious alfalfa stacked in these barns. This delivery is on par with my firewood stacking. Summer harvest becomes winter larder for the cold days and long nights to come. Or perhaps, to better align with the temperatures of climate change- a larder to get us through the drought of fall and keep up with winter’s cold dark edge.

Western Washington is a place known for dense temperate rainforest. but in late summer, and even by mid July, the weeks without substantive precipitation takes it’s toll on an already dry trend for our bioregion. The winter rains for two years have been thinning out, I’ve watched a couple of our dry cycles come and go, but the overlapping effects of harsh dry heat without dampness or shade bakes the land and evaporates crucial hydration that plants and animals desperately need. Today the creek that graces this landscape for a little over 300 feet of its journey down to The Snoqualmie River, is slowed to a trickle, and we’ve still got two dry months of summer left. It’s the driest I’ve experienced this place since moving here in 2008. I’m watching large, well established trees turning brown. The drought stress has been mounting for years, as the winter rains shrink in length and scope. Dusty soil can’t take in water quickly, and our rain events are getting harder and shorter, where everything comes down at once, instead of the slow winter trickle of continuous revitalization this complex ecology needs to survive.

Pictures I’ve taken at the end of July show a stark difference between areas of intact canopy with shade and replanted understory, vs. areas that remain pasture with little canopy or diverse understory. Some of the forest stands are without understory replanting, and reflect the desolation of summer drought where trees stand alone and vulnerable. Root systems without proper ground cover and the mesh and tangled branches of brush and understory plants that build the many layers of an intact rainforest ecosystem. Some might call such debris a fire hazard, but where there is good mulch and layering in the woods, water will remain in the soil, keeping fire low and slow as it burns through. It would be easy to lite the dry grass and scorched earth where there is no shade or cover for the ground, but where the shade and layers of vegetation remain, the soil is damp to the touch, and none of the green plants will catch a flame.

The gate where our upper pasture meets the creek wildlife corridor is a stark demonstration of grazed space compared to stream buffer habitat without grazing. The planted space on the right is still establishing, with a lot of blackberry trying to return, but a fast growing forest with understory is returning, and will shade out the bramble and return more nutrients and moisture to the soil. Pictures below show other parts of this replanting that are established and the growth continues.

This riparian area and surrounding stream buffer remain lush and green, thanks in part to being in a low lying area where the creek runs through. Shade remains another strong protector of the soil and low growing vegetation in the woods. This habitat has an established forest present to offer an umbrella of protection to younger growing trees in the nursery below. Within the upper pasture, there are two protected groves being replanted, there is still a lot of canopy to replace for total shade protection, but the young trees are reaching for the sky and creating small communities of other understory plants as they grow. Hazel and alder, wild rose and elderberry begin stitching together edges and hedgerows to bring vertical growth and more brows into tended spaces. The long term over-story of these replanted savannas is white oak. Because of an oak’s slow growth, I’ve scattered big leaf maple, hazel, and a few chestnuts in for deciduous companionship and leaf debris build up for more good soil. The tannin in the oaks will one day push out the other trees and shrubs so the oaks will have enough space as they establish. Succession is crucial in forest planning, the trees you plant today will not be the forest one-hundred years from now- what does that grove look like? Because of the continued summer drought in our region, I see oak savanna as the long term evolution of this forest- a lot like central California.

Our pastures already look like something out of a dry prairie, and it’s not a great look for what should be temperate rainforest. In these dry times, I think very hard about replanting more forest sooner, to help keep the ground wet, but there has to be enough soil to hold the trees and establish the understory. A wise forester once told me to bring the forest in from the edges, slowly transitioning from where the forest is already established. This continues to be the best working restoration action so far, with young trees slowly woven in at the edges where taller trees offer shade and some protection from the elements. Edges are great places to see the most diversity in a landscape, where sun can still reach the ground, abundance germinates. Where there are no edges or canopy protection, the ground becomes quite vulnerable, and the livestock has to come off this moon dust ground in the same way they have to come off wet ground to prevent erosion. There will not be enough rain in the next few weeks to bring back our grasses.

The landscape has about another month of vegetation for the sheep, then we’ll be forced to put them back in the barn on hay. I’ve already ordered this year’s tonnage and I’m getting two extra tons of hay to tide the flock over. I’m irrigating the fruit trees and gardens to keep valuable cultivars alive. People do not often thing of Western Washington as arid, but the following photos show a landscape without water. The upper pasture is resting now, until a good winter rain revives the vegetation. In the mean time, these grasses lay dormant in the dust and heat. If animals were left on these lands, the roots would be killed and the ground churned up into fine particulates that would blow away in the slightest breeze. That’s what happened in The Midwest, where I come from originally.

We are well educated about The Dust Bowl in Oklahoma. It’s why you have a conservation district wherever you live in The US today. In Western Washington, we tilled up all the trees, burned the slash, and set cattle upon the landscape. The topsoil ran off the hillsides and down into our waterways. To this day, dredging is required to keep the shipping channels open in and around Puget Sound. Over ten feet of the topsoil is gone now, and the trees trying to grow here today are pressing down into about 12-16″ of soil, then stonewalled by glacial compacted clay below. When a larger tree is blown over in the replanted forests of today, we note the pancake like shape of the root ball. Yes, the older trees are failing and falling over because they do not have enough topsoil to root down into. Future windstorms will teach us hard lessons about our disruption to this ecosystem. I’ll keep piling on the manure rich compost, chop and drop vegetation control, and rotational grazing for soil regeneration. 10-20 new trees and shrubs are planted here each year, and more to come. The brittle grasslands will one day be shaded out by a multi-layered canopy of oak, maple, fir, and much much more. Gratitude for all the growth in these forests, and the billions of small things thriving below our feet each and every day.