I am going to spread wood chips. Have a pile ready to go. I don’t trust manure anymore. Everyone seems to use herbicide on their hay fields. Everything grows slowly here, some things won’t grow at all…
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@Pokeweed
Sadly , wood chips are NOT free of risk from persistent herbicides either.
They are usually from power line / + road right of ways ,that may have been sprayed with a cocktail of Persistent herbicides.
Beans and or tomatoes, etc… can be used to do a bioassay of compost ,
In a pot before spreading, to see if they show signs of damage.
Something like this
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Keep a good eye on wood chips when you spread them. I have found a handful of jumping worms in some piles.
Try to source manure at a show horse stable. I get my horse manure from a local lady that her horses only get the best. Not saying that its herbicide free but her horses get the best of the best.
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We never have problems like these here in Kansas with wood chips or manure but i can afford to let a pile sit a year or two before i use it.
I have friend who has horses that only eat pasture grass with no amendments. They have huge piles of clean manure, but it’s 150 miles away. Trying to work that one out. D
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Have you tried Silver Buffalo berry? They grow around many of the lakes where I grew up and the soil is heavily alkaline. So much so that there is a white crust around the lakes.
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They dont have to be friends to get good manure. I can get cow manure that is 15 miles from my house but the guy sprays roundup on the manure piles. And he wont give me any without Roundup…weird.
I have a couple of ‘friends’ that are close with horses but they are recreational riding horses. They let them graze whatever weed they want. Their fenced in area looks like something from Jurassic Park… strange ugly tall weeds that nothing will eat.
The ‘good’ horse stables get sawdust for the floors and pay good money for straw bedding. Horses eat from clean pastures and get fed good grains. Worth it to seek them out.
About 5 years ago i got 5 tons of horse manure dumped in my back garden from a ‘friend’. Same jurassic looking weeds popped up everywhere. Took me a while to get rid of them.
I recently got some free manure from another local farmer. It has pig, goat, rabbit, chicken, horse and cow all mixed in. Its godawful and im scared of it lol. Im gonna let it sit for a year and see about it. Some strange looking flies have been enjoying it. They look like wasps but they are flies…evil looking.
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My opinion only that the roundup should not stay in that pile long. He does that to kill all the stickers that like growing in manure.
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three of the most popular agricultural “novelty” imports in 1900’s were introduced into USA by the notable agricultural “trafficker of thorny species”–Frank Meyer, namely: meyer lemon, jujube, and callery pear. In terms of popularity, the meyer lemon has always been well-received with hardly anyone complaining about it. Taking into account the great number of callery pears used not just for pear rootstock but also as ornamental trees across 30 states, it is clear that callery pears were just as popular as meyer’s lemon, or maybe even more so than his lemon. A tree that needs no pesticides while immune to herbicides and quite invasive(via suckers/seeds)can be seen as either boon or bane. Seems that callery is now considered by many as a constant threat instead of treasure but possible that things may change again in its favor if way more people find it useful as a rootstock for edible pears.
the same goes for wild- thorny-type jujube rootstock, which am almost certain frank meyer brought in to the usa along with Lang and Li cultivars… These wild-types might make awesome rootstock for named cultivars, but like the callery pear when used as rootstock, any dieback of the desired scions down to the graft translates to the rootstock taking over unless grafted over and diligently nipping any rootstock growth. Wild-type jujus are typically fertile too, so the chances of a long-distance air-borne invasion is just as likely as a ground invasion via suckers.
hopefully there will be callery pear hybrids which will be resistant to pests/fireblight and produce quality-fruits that do not produce viable seed.
while where am at-- still in the painstaking process of isolating seed-grown juju cultivars which produce quality fruits while also relatively thornless and unable to produce viable seed even with multiple pollinators.
pears and jujubes(and mulberries) are three of the longest-lived temperate trees that also produce fruits. Longevity and hardiness in a fruit tree don’t just translate to convenience in production of food, but also a great way to utilize otherwise barren tracts of land which no other fruit tree can successfully colonize(without the aid of humans/pesticides) since this also translates to prevention of desertification/landslides/or erosion. And if one is in concurrence with many environmentalists worried about global warming and greenhouse gases, these species will also serve as long-term “carbon sinks” often mentioned by environmentalists.
so going back to topic, the callery which was introduced as a “friend” but is now perceived as invasive foe should be tweaked to produce novel friends that can only be cloned asexually, but will never be able to sexually reproduce.
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Thanks! I kind of think might be more cost-effective, apart from being more fruitful, for folks to topwork way-ward callery trees instead of trying to kill them.
anyway, have been holding pro-bono grafting workshops at our home, others’ homes, and even at a middle school here, which was so much fun and will keep doing until i die. Also hoping can convince the principals at local schools to get funding to chop down to waist level all the male mulberry trees(which make school kids’ noses runnier than a basset hound’s) and perform transsexual surgery using female mulberry stems every spring. It dont matter much to me if the mulb trees are males from the waist down, as long as they are females above the waist…
anyway, i happily envision orchardists in other states organizing a weekend brigade doing the same for “callery-infested” areas. Converting as many useless calleries into fruitful pear trees whilst holding grafting classes to the general public 
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There are a few folks, like Eliza Greenman, who are searching out those callery hybrids with larger fruit, as potential mast sources for pastured pork production and cider/perry production - as many are too astringent to eat out-of-hand. Many of the classical perry pears are too susceptible to fireblight to survive long here in the eastern USA.
Fruits may look like this; ‘Walnut Hill’ a pear I found in Tallapoosa Co. AL… still carrying a heavy crop of fruit on Jan 1… will sometimes still have fruit hanging as late as early March:
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I have a callery with fruits like that in Madison Al also. I’m working it into my pear orchard.
Invasive species are bad because they have an impact on the ecosystems they have entered.
About pears, it’s a bad idea to give up those domesticated ones that took much effort and centuries to become what they are, and then re-do it all over again.
But a good idea is to take advantage of these strong and resistant species and introduce their features into the gene pool of the domesticated pears (introgression), or to take advantage of the domesticated pears and introduce their genes to make a calleryana with large, non-astringent fruits.
East Asians, P. calleryana, P. betulifolia are good, but in Western Asia, there are arid-adapted species that can be used as well. (P. syriaca, P. glabra, ETC.) to make widely adapted pears.
Southern Kudzu: you easily can hide a 100 gallon rig in a roadside patch, and stink bugs like to eat it.
People continue to struggle to erradicate weeds and invasives but one thing i can promise is they will be here long after us unless a disease or insect is introduced to wipe them out specifically. The problem is with tampering with mother nature in the first place. Every time it is done there are more consequences. Once someone brings in these plants they are here to stay. Chinese elm are imports lets iradicate them first they have no fruit and dont fix nitrogen!
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Ive seen few examples locally of Autumn Olive run amok on land being managed and which is capable of growing much else. I do see it a lot in polluted, nutrient deficient and hard scrabble places where it does quite well. The bigger and better tasting fruits are good enough as to make you realize this is a plant with significant cropping potential. Some have tried to make a business of foraging them and turning them into value added though theres pretty low penetration of awareness about the fruits and how tasty they can be.
Buckthorn is a much tougher customer here in my experience, and is particularly problematic since it finds its way into and grows happily in places youd think (and hope!) it wouldnt, like rich forests and even bogs! Some of these places are inhabited by specialist plants that can’t compete with such a juggernaut and have little opportunity to disperse or grow elsewhere. Whereas Autumn Olive generally grows and loses its leaves in a similar timeframe as other endemic species, Buckthorn leafs out early and keeps its leaves (still green and photosynthesizing) for a month or more after others have fallen. This, and the fact that it fixes nitrogen give it a distinct advantage in understory situations where it can really tend to spread and choke things put.
One thing I seldom hear mentioned in discussions of these and other horticultural problem children is the degree to which availability of seed - both low levels and diversity of similarly adapted “natives” and artificially high levels of “invasive” seed through mass planting, etc.- lead to cascades in population dynamics in the years and decades to follow. It may seem obvious, but is worth bearing in mind that what you see growing is very much a function of site conditions and seed availability, and both of those have been shaped by land use. Like the downward spiral that tends to be precipitated by allopathic interventions, our elimination of healthy successional dynamics particularly in areas given to brush and thickets is at least partly to blame for proliferation of still more tougher more resistant species being so successful. Also, so many of these species seem to grow together, it almost appears to be an ecotype, the common denominator in most cases being humans. In many cases we are unintentional about the ecology of our anthropogenic landscapes. Given that diversity life exists even in the harshest environs - glaciers, volcanoes, the deep sea- we should stop kidding ourselves about the notion that we can keep things “neat and tidy” and free from the nuisance of biological life, for on some level these function as selection pressures that encourage the toughest customers to take root.
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Also Id add that the wildlife value of autumn olive is substantial, not so on buckthorn in my observations. Its a good nectar source, and the fruit is well liked by all manner of birds and mammals. Ive seen turkeys spend hrs jumping to snatch them, and once saw a mid-sized black bear climb to the top of a spindly AO to devour the fruit.
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About a decade ago …maybe it’s been longer as time passes … I ordered a couple dozen
seedlings of autumn olive and of cornelian cherry.
One of the autumn olives is still in it’s 3 gallon pot, but obviously has more roots in the ground than in the pot. And it has simply delicious berries…larger than most, and very tasty, putting aronia and also currants to shame.
Selection could turn this easy to raise plant into orchards for mechanical harvesting, I believe. (If there’s a market for goji or aronia or elderberries…surely there is for autumn olive juice and fruits.)
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