Rick......

I think you are right. I know that Nature hates a void, yet after more than a decade nothing was growing there.

Thanks.

Rose Blush: That must have been a really hot fire over relatively thin soil. I have been interested in fire regimes for some time, and how slash and burn horticulture works. I never finished with the research, but I did find that in slash and burn there is a rotation of burning among a designated group of fields. It takes 12 to 15 years after a field is burned before it can be farmed. And old fields have advanced to the development of trees and those are the one's that will be in line to be burned. The trees provide biomass and ash that improve the fertility of the fields. But most slash and burn farm regimes are in the tropics. And of course few governments have ever taken the trouble to learn how they work--they only want to kill slash and burn because it encroaches on land they want for development. It only seems wasteful to them, and slash and burn mostly has a bad (undeserved) reputation.

But I wonder if there are not some type of grasses that could be planted on your burned area in a dry climate to start a cycle of plant life.

Maybe it has to do with the concentration of ashes. Slash and burn practices might lay down a thinner layer of ash than RoseBlush1 did in her experiment:

>> I dumped a couple of cans of wood ash about nine years ago.

Or maybe, surrounded by tropical jungle, new duff accumulated faster than it does in her part of northern CA mountains.

I think it's a cool part of science, or generous on the part of nature, that most experiments raise more questions than they answer. It means we'll never run out of mysteries to explore.

Yes, it was a hot fire. Any fire started after the end of the rainy season will be a very hot fire because we get no rain from June until October. Everything is very, very dry.

I've only read little bits and pieces about the use of fire as a tool for farming. I know that land was cleared for farming by the use of fire and there was something about using scorched earth as a farming technique, but I read about that years ago.

I often hear that the Native Americans often used their version of controlled burns to make the forest more healthy and to lessen the danger of an uncontrolled wildfire in this area, but I haven't really studied much about it. My understanding is that they timed their controlled burns around the rainy season, but can't tell you more.

I do know the US Forest Service is using controlled burns around the towns up here to create a safer forest so that defending the towns and property is an easier task. But, at this stage, they are still experimenting with the process.

I also don't know what chemicals are used in the fire retardants that they drop to slow down a wildfire and how they affect the soil.

On the way up the mountain, I could see where property owners had limbed their trees and had cleared the ladder fuels that feed a wildfire, but once we crossed over into Federal lands, nothing of that sort of work was done. Of course, 75% of the land up here is owned by the Feds and there are budget cuts that impact what can and cannot be done.

As for grass seed ... I might think it was a good idea, but I don't know if the soil is fertile enough to support plant life. Even grass.

Smiles,
Lyn

I may have confused the cans-of-wood-ash experiment with the patch of burned-off forest.

>> I often hear that the Native Americans often used their version of controlled burns to make the forest more healthy and to lessen the danger of an uncontrolled wildfire in this area,

I've read that native Australians would deliberately start fires to change the wild population towards more edible species. Someone speculated that that was one step in the direction towards agriculture (but that Australia had few plants that were well-suited to breeding for agriculture. Large-headed cereal grains were thought to be the easiest candidates for cultivation.

I have tromped through those N. California mountains years ago, but I don't remember much about the soil.

I have also surveyed through coal lands, which in most cases have been stripped below subsoil and re-planting has to follow a succession of plants, but I don't know what the succession is. Or, if the coal lands (which are humid) would be the same as the high elevation California soils.

We should ask Benedetta. She has worked on coal lands, I think, for the Forestry service.

(Edited - was posted to the worng thread.)

Gloria...

It was so very unexpected to see something like that. It makes one feel kind of small because the destruction of such beautiful land was so beyond anything I ever expected to see.

I wish we knew of a solution, but having a hint that it might have something to do with the type of destruction kind of makes a difference to me.

Lyn

http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/n...

This article talks about reseeding with native grasses. Probably native grass in your area would be different. I wonder if the forestry service might not have a mix of native grass seed for your area. It is strange that nothing has colonized there after all this time.

Northern California dead zone - so what was growing there that was burned down - in the first place?
Was it the sequoias and redwoods?

Benedetta: This is Roseblush's description of the burned area from p. 1

Quote: Last Friday, my grandson and I went up to the back country where there had been a wildfire well over a decade ago to harvest some trees for my winter fire wood. When we reached the wildfire area, all I could see for miles were tall, dead trees and absolutely no undergrowth. No grasses, no wild flowers .... nothing. There were no birds, no animals. It was one of the most devastating things I've ever seen.

My grandson told me the land will continue to show little or no life for several lifetimes.

There is air and water, but few organics.

There was some star thistle growing along side the road, a few very young black oak trees scattered here and there, the digger pines which are adapted to wildfire country and that was it. When I reached down to pick up some soil, it's texture was the same as the ashes I remove from my fireplace when I clean it.

The trees we harvested were dead and not even infested with insects.

Most fires up here are started by lightening. It's almost impossible to put them out because the land is so rugged.

I garden in difficult soil, but even my horrid soil can be brought back to life.

I came away from that experience knowing that there are no absolutes, but a lot of variables.

Un quote.

http://ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcor...

Tahoe project

Actually, that situation sounds a whole lot like the ones that Masanabu Fukuoka addresses in his Natural Farming [as opposed to Scientific Farming} method:

Greek Project
http://www.ideassonline.org/pu...

The Natural Way of Farming pdf
http://www.rivendellvillage.or...

One Straw Revolution
ftp://ftp-fc.sc.egov.usda.gov/...

Note: The One Straw Revolution actually begins on p. 43 of this pdf. There is a long introduction on the use of the method in India.

p. 37 " . . . take a barren mountain with poor, red clay soil, and plant
pine or cedar with a ground cover of clover and alfalfa. As the green
manure [Ground cover crops such as clover, vetch, and alfalfa which
condition and nourish the soil.] enriches and softens the soil, weeds and
bushes grow up below the trees, and a rich cycle of regeneration is
begun. There are instances in which the top four inches of soil have
become enriched in less than ten years. "

I just thought that the redwoods might have a way to keep other plant life down untill they can recover. If fires gets really hot from too much underbrush and they have young trees or going to have young trees from the cones that were burned -- it might be some kind of inhibitory of other plants.

Not unusual in the plant kingdom.

The Black walnut, the parsley plant -- I found out this summer that black berry seeds (that I steam cooked boiled beyond live before throwing out in my lettuce patch) still has an inhibitory so now I did not get much lettuce this Fall.

what Fukuoka did to keep down weeds was to plant a succession of green manure crops, (including daikon radish which penetrates deeply into the soil. And, you probably could use kudzu (a legume) as a soil builder also, just plan to have some animals ready to graze it after it has done its job, or you will have kudzu city, like we do here in rural Alabama. The roots of kudzu can penetrate to 150 ft below the soil surface, so it would be good for turning bed rock into soil. Kudzu has a large round flat leaf that resists gully washing erosion from rain.

You might want to check out the types of trees in the Trinity Alps in Trinity County, CA.

Tahoe is on the other side of the valley and has forest comprised of different types of trees.

The forest in the Alps does not have redwood trees in that conditions are far too arid for that type of tree.

The forests in Trinity County are mostly fir and pine with black and white oaks and madrone. At the higher elevations the vegetation changes.

Smiles,
Lyn

Thanks, Lyn. I wasn't sure where you were in N. California. I have been at Tahoe (one summer) but not where you are. Lots of pines at Tahoe as I remember -- Lodgepole pines.

In any case, I think the reforestation procedure is the same. Find whatever the native plants are, and use native grasses to build soil, and faster growing trees. Also, using successions of soil building green manures.

I am amazed that Tomkins and Bird do not cover the work of Masanabu Fukuoka in Secrets of the Soil.

The Forest service will innoculate the soil with very moldy and bacteria ridden mulch before planting grass or trees on the strip mine.
Microbes comes are planted first, so to speak.

If these are pines, then --- that makes it esp important for almost all pines have a very symbiotic dependent relationship with all kinds of fungi. Soem pines cannot grow with out them.

Fukuoka, I have been reading up on him - just a Japaneses farmere -- hardly with all the books, and scientific papers he wrote - very impressive.