Hello dear ones,
The subject of this week’s blog is trees, as you can see from the featured image, which I took from the site pixabay.com. It is a very useful website where people upload beautiful and quality photography from all over the world, no copyright and for free use. Anyway, back to our subject. Why this photo, you may ask, well it was the first visual association that came to my mind when I was reading the chapter 6 of Bill Mollison’s “Permaculture: a designer’s guide”. It is a photo of a house in Denmark surrounded by a windbreak. I used to live in Denmark, few years ago, and I remember when I used to go on some trips outside the city area, I would see a house in a middle of a field surrounded by a row of trees as a fence. And Denmark is a very windy country, so it made sense that people wanted their property secured in a way, but now I understand it even more and more.
There are many types of windbreaks depending on the reason why they are planted or to say who and what the trees are protecting. On YouTube there are a lot of videos about this subject, which trees or types of windbreaks are suitable for which area of the world, but this one video that I will share below, has a very good summary covering many questions on the subject and even a free windbreak guide with tree species that you can download for free.
Windbreaks are not the only reason why I would put the trees in the top three components of the design. The role of the trees in the water energy flows on the site is a very important one. Trees participate in catching all three of the main precipitation components, such as fog, dew and rain, and then they (the trees) distribute the water back to the soil, the root and atmosphere. Andrew Millison has a great explanation and visual for this process, so I am sharing his video bellow.
And last but not least, trees affect the temperature, and they do this by evaporation and the condensation. The first one cools the air during warm daytime and the second warms the air at night.
If you are more interested in the magic of the trees, I highly recommend the book “The hidden life of trees” by Peter Wohleben and the movie with the same title. It is not connected to permaculture as such, but it will make you understand trees and their world better.
And as Andrew Millison says in the end of his video –“Go and plant some trees.”
I hope you have a lovely weekend!
Love,
Marija
