Miyu has a question here.
Would you please provide examples of different timing
for effective chop and drop in different climates?
What factors might change when I would coppice my trees?
Please explain again the,
"when precipitation exceeds evaporation"
rule of thumb in more detail.
Would you ever break this rule?
Well, mostly we're probably talking about pollard.
Which is the regular, this is pollard,
because it's high enough.
Coppice is way down low,
and if we use a lot of coppice in food forests,
all this stretched out branching kind of gets in the way,
but if it's high enough,
almost head height,
it allows for the branches to be above us,
and gives us more access through,
and allows us to grow the understory trees,
and the small canopy trees as they develop.
So this is a pollard,
which is a higher coppice.
Now, I would often cut off the smaller branches
like that one,
while is was growing,
and just allow the major branches to come through.
And for them to, you know, have more photosynthesis.
But all of this will get cut off
here in the subtropics at the start of the rainy season.
Now, that's when you get more rainfall than evaporation.
But just prior to that,
you have more evaporation than rainfall.
In other word: dry period.
So, when it's really dry,
the dry part of the year,
which is mid-summer in the temperate climate.
Mid to the end of summer in the temperate climate,
you get a period of the year,
a few weeks,
when you get high temperatures,
not so much rain,
and so you have more evaporation than rainfall.
When that period ends,
you get rainfall and lower temperatures.
So you get more rainfall than evaporation.
So it's the switch between the dry season
and the wet season.
So in the tropical climate,
we have dry in the winter,
and wet in the summer.
So the spring,
early summer,
when the rainy season starts,
we can cut.
So, here in the tropical, sub-tropics, and tropics,
you get more could cover in summer.
You get more humidity and more rain in summer,
and you can cut all this off,
and it can go down to the ground
and you can chop it up to the forest floor,
the forest you're creating,
and the moisture,
and the ground covers,
increase the humidity,
with very little evaporation,
and the moisture and the fungi
rot it down to the ground.
And over that wet period,
cause you'll cut at the start of the wet,
all this starts to regrow.
And by the time we get to the winter,
and it starts to dry off,
and we get more sunshine
and less rain,
and we get,
and towards the end of the winter,
in the spring time before summer,
we'll have evaporation over rainfall,
these will have all regrown.
So we've got shade in the most stressful time of the year.
But let's take that to the temperate climates.
In the temperate climates,
you don't get evaporation over rainfall
until the end of summer.
So at that time,
at the end of summer,
you want all this growth,
shading,
because if there's any time of the year
that it's stressful,
is the end of summer,
when you've got your high temperatures,
and they're often higher temperatures than tropics.
The end of summer in the temperate
can be quite high temperature,
especially continental temperate.
If you're a long way from an ocean,
you get high temperatures.
All this shade is taking the stress off the ground.
And then at the end of summer, start of autumn,
when the autumn rains start,
and the temperatures start to fall,
we can cut all this
and chop it up and put it on the ground.
Now all winter,
we've got low light,
lower light.
And there's more light coming in to the forest.
And there's cloud cover,
and all this material can break down and rot
over the temperate climate winter.
And by the time spring comes,
this all re shoots,
and it starts to gradually grow
and it gets to full height at the end,
towards the end of summer,
when we're back to the stressful period,
with high temperatures,
high evaporation,
and low rainfall.
So you're always looking for that switch
from the hottest, driest time of the year,
to the changeover,
to the wetter, cooler period,
when most decomposition takes place.
So, tropical climates,
mostly your decomposition happens in the wet, humid summer.
In temperate climates,
most of your decomposition happens in your wet, cool winter.
Then you have deserts,
dry lands,
where you don't get much rain at all.
Most of the time,
it's evaporation over rainfall,
and only when it rains,
do you get those periods with cloud cover,
and moisture,
and you start to get rainfall over evaporation,
so you just wait for the rains to start,
it's usually winter rain,
sometimes it's summer rain if you're in tropical deserts,
but in dry lands,
in arid landscapes,
you're just waiting for the rain before you chop.
You don't want,
you want shade cover,
until it rains.
And when you get decent rain in dry lands,
which you will get,
each year you'll get some reasonable rain,
that's when you do your cut.
And that's it.
It's quite simple.
And you don't often change that.
You might cut the herbs in the temperate climate
once or twice in the summer,
you might, in the tropics,
cut one or two times.
As you get to the true tropics,
and the wet tropics,
the equatorial tropics,
you have two rainy seasons.
So you'll have, you know,
sometime around March,
and sometime around September,
you'll have pulses of rain.
So mid-summer and mid-winter,
you can definitely do a cut at the equatorial tropics,
cause those are the only times
you have a slightly drier period,
when you're near the equator,
and you have two rainy seasons.
Cause they will pulse at the equinox.
March the 22nd and September the 22nd
are the days the sun crosses the equator vertical.
furthest away,
the sun is furthest away from its vertical axis
at the equator,
on the equinox.
It's vertical,
but on mid-summer and mid-winter,
north and southern hemisphere,
its furthest away from the equator.
So your cut is then.
It takes a bit of thinking about,
but it always occurs at the same time,
when the evaporation over rainfall finishes,
and the rainfall over evaporation starts.