
Living Fences & Intergenerational Pruning at Earthaven Ecovillage
Transcript from video:
Courtney: What are y’all doing?
Zev: Stone’s giving me a sawdust snack. Pruning.
Courtney: What kind of tree is that?
Stone: Ash. Ah it doesn’t taste like ash though.
Courtney: Ash.
Zev: And we’ve been pruning black locusts and mulberries and this is part of the living fence around this field with the living trees acting as fence posts.
Courtney: What’s a living fence?
Zev: It’s when you use live plants for a fence instead of wooden or metal posts that will rot or rust and then the live trees become stronger over time and make all kinds of other yields like mulberry fruit and foliage for feeding to animals.
Courtney: Hello!
Zev: And we’re doing a special type of pruning called pollarding to keep the trees compact. Oakley and Stone have just been learning how to do the pruning today.
Courtney: Is this the first time you’ve ever pollarad at a tree, Stone?
Stone: Yes.
Courtney: All right!
Zev: Yeah! And Oakley’s first time too.
Courtney: Intergenerational pruning.
Zev: So next year I’m planning to just be sitting in a hammock in March and they’re gonna be doing all the pruning. Isn’t that right stone?
Stone: What share of the fruit do we get?
Courtney Whoa negotiating. “What share of the fruit do they get?” You can have all the ash fruit you want.
Zev: Did you undercut that one?
Stone: Yeah.
Courtney This is the fence… this is the fence that the living fence and the living fence post that have already been pruned. You can see that’s already been pollarded and there’s um let’s see what is the living fence made from there’s mulberries, ash, black locust, and alder and then we’ve got hazelnut and muscadines and rosa rigosa, air potatoes.
Zev: All right
Stone: I don’t think we’re done yet.
Black Locust, Living Fence, Mulberry, Pruning, zev
