Sam Bonney

Temperate Syntropic Workshop — Black Creek Farm & Nursery Join Roger Gietzen and Erik Schellenberg for a 4 day interactive training session. Learn the theory and practice of syntropic agroforestry in a temperate climate at Black Creek Farm in Highland, NY. W...

I’m quite wary of agriculture influencers and gurus, and the incestuous infinite ponzi scheme of permaculture design courses. My sense is this course will be different. I’ve been following Erik’s work for a while now, he doesn’t seem content to imitate or stagnate. Exciting, experimental stuff

Bad news: local and global water cycles are fucked, and that may be worse for climate stability than rising CO2. Good news: restoring local water cycles is way more actionable than nagging multinational corps to stop burning fossil fuels, and it has real, local, immediate positive impacts

Lord help me, I am so tempted by the beautifully rebuilt bright blue 1940’s Ford two-row corn planter on Facebook marketplace 🥵

Came home today to these boys casually slapping together a marble staircase… ok go off

Definitely watching this, thank you 🙏

Large trees (likely oaks) in a wood pasture with a moody sky.

There is not enough #woodpasture content here on Blue Sky, because there is not enough wood pasture in this world.

Here are some wood pasture videos.

And go, create wood pasture.
Thorny, diverse, and (nearly) wild.

ptes.org/wppn/videos-...

and their selective browsing was negated by differing selective browsing traits of other herbivores. Forests would be more open, and retain high floral diversity. Now without other herbivores, their selective browsing is concentrated, and we end up with novel "deerscapes."

Interesting conversation on deer. One thought I've had is that the high abundance of deer might be a surrogate replacement for herbivore biomass which was once occupied by a diversity of herbivores. When more herbivore species were present, deer numbers were checked by food competition+

I don’t actually think the solution to that is less deer on the landscape. Severe browsing is not the issue to me — it’s the lack of recovery time (which predators might influence), and the over-emphasis on particular palatable species (which could be balanced by a greater diversity of herbivores)

The result is not a more open forest structure. Instead, the same density of hardwood stems reach maturity as would have otherwise, except only unpalatable species survive. No amount of deer can prevent a New York old field from succeeding into dense forest. They can only alter species composition

I’m open to new interpretations, but my experience of unmitigated deer browse in my region is that it often looks like set-stocking, selective grazing, and overgrazing (to use livestock terms)

I think about this often. Obviously nothing we can do comes close to megaherbivores, but I do think we can leverage our machinery (as long as fossil fuel remains cheap) to do a lot of good vegetation management work, and extract some amount of yield at the same time. Tough balance

Yes it’s a really crazy situation. We need large predators back on the landscape, and mega herbivores with different food preferences to balance the playing field. Until then, we have to keep deer moving in other ways to grant patches adequate recovery

Nor do I think they totally exclude deer — I think the “exclusion” is fear based (deer want clear escape routes) and imperfect, and the walls will degrade with time after saplings have passed deer browse height

I don’t have direct experience with these slash walls but I highly doubt they increase habitat fragmentation. In fact I would guess they make incredible habitat for smaller critters, much like European laid hedges, or larger fallen trees

I’m 100% on the same page, deer are magical woodland ruminants and what more could you ask for? Unfortunately until we reintroduce wolves and cougars, we have to get creative. I don’t even think our deer pop is necessarily too high, it just doesn’t move in the way it used to

YouTube video by ForestConnect Slash walls exclude deer, encourage regeneration, and improve forest diversity.

This is a really good point. Another option might be to manage density across time and space (rather than overall landscape scale density) with structures like these slash walls they're experimenting with at Cornell, kinda parallel to how functional predator populations modulate herbivore movement

Here’s a grafted honey locust from one of those old farms. Once you see this stuff you can’t unsee it!!

Hersheys two farms are pretty mind blowing, even now after so many trees have been cut for development (I’ve been a few times to collect seed and scion with my old boss Buzz Ferver). There’s a number of other incredible spots in PA, contemporaries of Hershey

Me with ‘Shoreham Sunset’, an apple I found in a Champlain valley old field in 2021

The flint corn I grew last year 😻 it’s a blend of Carol Deppe’s ‘Cascade Ruby Gold’ (descended from Northeastern flints like ‘Abenaki Calais’) and North Circle Seeds’ ‘Orange Corn Blend’ (which is a broad mix but seems to lean heavily on the Argentinian Cateto vibes)

This weekend — pruning my Malus breeding orchard (80 unique clonal genotypes, plus 100 seedlings), and winnowing the rest of my flint corn so I can have some good eats the rest of the week 🌈

Dog Milk Palm · Rock Island · Song · 2018

open.spotify.com/track/6GuiDC...

The ecological benefits of more room for rivers - Nature Water This Review synthesizes the ecological features and processes that arise when rivers are given room to move. Understanding these interactions will support more sustainable decisions that weigh river e...

We need free-flowing rivers!

“Giving rivers more room to move can represent a mutually beneficial solution for both the freshwater biodiversity crisis and flood hazard management as climate-driven extremes escalate.”

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Of all the things happening in the US, this is genuinely one of the most terrifying to me

Order plants from our plant sale! Pickup is May 17. We’ll be open for orders until April 14. www.whistledownfarm.com/s/order

Jesse Marksohn of Yellowbud Farm with 2 year old seedling chestnuts

Jesse with a mulberry 2 seasons after topworking. Excuse me, what?

Eric Cornell of Yellowbud farm amidst a chestnut / catalpa inter-cropping trial

Glowing!!!

The best trees around are going up for sale. Seriously. The best. These boys are incredibly meticulous about genetics, + they have grown some insanely vigorous stems (deep spading, gonzo quantities of woodchips, + pasteurized human urine from the Rich Earth Institute will do that) www.yellowbud.farm

Shout out to da best barn cat, Galaxy. Still well under a year old and already showin the voles who’s boss

Fast forward to march 2025, I’m about the head out to prune my orchard (including my Elly tree) and I get this text. Elly lives!! I love trees, I love tree people. We have so much capacity to propagate goodness. Go hard knights of Pomona ⚔️ 🍎

Benford Lepley is a wonderful cider maker and Apple steward in Long Island (Floral Terranes , etc). We were just getting to know each other at the time. I handed off Elly budwood to him at the New York apple camp that year, and he made the magic happen

While moving my one Elly clone in ‘23, I accidentally snapped off a branch that represented my one good piece of future scionwood. Knowing the mother tree was dead, this was a precious little stick. My life was in turmoil + I wasn’t in a position to do anything with it. So I DMed my friend Benford

Hahahahaha

The day after the summer ‘23 flooding in Montpelier. I lived down the street from here, and my nursery was in the front yard which ended up under 5 ft of rushing river. All my bare root trees had to be dug up in July (with biblical rain pounding down on me during the process) 🙃

Moving all my potted trees to their new home in NY a month after the floods. Elly is in there. Poor babies!

Elly in her new home 💘 nestled into a breeding orchard with 80+ unique Malus clones and 120+ seedlings from select parentage. Below it stretches 50ish acres of newly planted chestnut orchard, and the ridge top above is a wild stand of mature yellowbud hickory 🌈🎉🔥😜

I lugged my one tree around in a pot for 2 years. In summer ‘23 I rescued it from the flooding winooski river + that autumn I planted it in its forever home in Granville NY