Words by Yvonne Riddiford
On the last volunteer of the year we had a different activity than usual, it involved mixing seed which was then broadcast as an understory cover crop and then planting a number of trees into it. This time we had a very small group, only two additional volunteers beyond the family; Sharyn and her son Logan. Another untypical element was that we were working in a place accessible for me and my scooter. I spent most of the morning out there and there was even a small job I could do. This involved carrying the bag of seed mix in the basket of my scooter, staying close to Sharyn. She worked double time taking handfuls of a rich dark mix of seeds and compost and then broadcasting them along the strip. Logan followed up with the rake and behind him Jane positioned the trees. Rod followed with his new toy, the ogre, aka an auger. Lucy brought up the rear doing most of the actual planting. Within a couple of hours, job-done and 70 trees were in the ground.
As I sat on my scooter I let my mind travel back to before the First World War; to around about 1912. My father had just completed the felling of the first patch of bush on the side of Rangitoto mountain in the King Country. The technique was to cut the light undergrowth which, once dried, served as tinder. Once that had been done men with torches strategically placed across the hillside set fire to the perimeter. In his memoir my father describes going to bed feeling despondent. Unless a really hot burn was achieved, it simply meant the understory was consumed but the big trees didn’t catch alight and on this occasion he feared that was happening. At first light he looked up to the hillside. To his relief he saw a cloud of black smoke… “the whole bloody thing was alight” he wrote.
In step with what was happening at the time, my father felt the burn that day was totally successful, however it was only the beginning. He knew it was important to sow the seed for the pasture grass while the ash was still warm. A gang of men stretched out across the hillside, each wearing a cut off sugar sack filled with seed which he spread in the time honoured broadcast action immortalised by Millet in his painting entitle “the sower”. This was not so different than our technique, despite the very different context of our planting.
We were planting a cover crop to hold back the pasture grass and facilitate the growth of native trees along the edge of a driveway paddock. That day we planted manuka, tarata, red matipo and a few of the hardy taller trees like totara and kahikatea, many of the same trees that in my fathers day were burned to make way for the pasture grass.
It seems that these days fertility all too often comes in a packet. I was happy to hear from Jane that they have recently applied ash by hand from fireplaces to increase the levels of potassium and sodium in the soil of the paddock where this year’s Carb Club are growing vegetables for themselves and the wider community.