Win Fast Forest Presentation at Wright-Locke Farm

Presentation at the Wright-Locke Farm
Learn about the cost of chickadees (& other birds), why caterpillars rock, and why mature forests are crucial to the earth’s wellbeing. Prassede Calabi (PhD) discussed what forests have to do with food pyramids, why we all need to eat our ‘brights’ and how to keep those chickadees going.
Come learn about the Win Fast Forest mission and how you can get involved!

The Win Fast Forest is located on Wright-Locke Farm past the pond and before the forest. Go to https://wfmchub.org/growlocal/ to learn more and volunteer for the April 20th community planting of the forest.

presenter: Prassede Calabi
camera, editor, producer: Margo Attaya
equipment and production facilities: WinCAM
birds song: Soundstripe.com

Grow Local for the Planet is a program of Winchester Farmers Market Community Hub

We are very excited to be collaborating on this uh very unique project some of you has anyone seen it down there in person ASI Beginnings yeah so we’re happy to be uh collaborating on the on the fast for us um and we’re glad that

We have the space to be able to do it um so so looking forward to hearing all that you have to share but feel free to reach out if you have any questions and thanks for coming so yes thank you for coming um we also took the uh idea that you could do

Lots of things on the farm here and decided to plant a forest because after all who wouldn’t want to plant a forest I’m here to talk to you about the wind Fast Forest project I’m pretta kabi a few other members of the team are here uh it’s a project under grow local

For the planet which is under the Winchester Farmers Market Community Hub I have degree in behavioral ecology and behavior and ecology ecology in particular is kind of my passion vocation and avocation and the way the group started um it’s over three years ago we got together to talk about

Regenerating soil and growing things there was you may remember a mad rush for pollinator patches and habitat in general and we in particular were looking at healing the Earth was our was our motto is still our motto um it turns out that well one of the things we

Learned in doing this planting is that there are a lot of people who would like to plant and can’t they live in condos they rent apartments um they don’t have the money to do a garden or they’re 16 and their parents aren’t very keen on them tearing up the lawn and replacing

It so one of the things that grew out of our three years was thinking that it would be wonderful to have a place where the community can plant it’s true we have a Town Forest but this is very different in ways that you will come to see so we’re working on this

Particularly Forest New England used to be very foresty it is right ecologically evolutionarily has been very foresty in particular we know that in the last couple of decades we’ve lost globally over a third of the forest which is pretty terrible because forests do so much for us I’ll say but for the planet

Right they’re they act like lungs they take up a lot of pollutants including carbon dioxide they regulate moisture they regulate temperature and for me particularly passionately they are habitat for a lot of Critters and to destroy those we also destroy all the critters and it turns out that people in general are quite

Concerned about this issue we’re not the only ones so concerned that there is now terminology for it Eco grief and Eco anxiety are two of the terms that have been put forward Eco anxiety has become such a pervasive problem particularly in younger people that the American Psychiatry Association booted it to

Their top five concerns for this year it’s a real big problem so one of the things that addresses pretty much all of these is planting forest in particular dense mature native Forest when I started this I was fairly uh ambitious and I put the colors here thinking I

Would color code this color code the slides to each of these issues didn’t happen but you you’ll figure it out I hope from the process so one of the interesting things about a forest is a food pyramid you remember from fourth grade the food pyramid right and you

Remember the bases the plant and so a couple of interesting things one of them is that there’s now we know another base an invisible base we talk about the visible base is the plants but the microbiome in the soil is in fact the base without the right microbiome you

Really don’t get the plants and if you don’t get the plants you don’t get the herb Wars and so you lose the whole chain it there’s been a lot of science recently about microbiome it turns out that every ecosystem has a signature microbiome which means that everything ants Birds mice plants have the

Microbiome that is typical of that ecosystem and you can do G genetic testing of the microbiome and from two different places and you can tell which species come from which place based on their microbiome so it’s a very core part of the whole system and we do in

Fact account for it in the forest but in terms of talking about the food pyramid I’m going to focus on the plants and we’re going to talk about a very very simplified food chain with chickies as the Predators caterpillars as the herbivores and plants will be playing the role of

Plant so if you did not read the blurb for this evening’s talk I’m going to ask you what’s happening here do anybody know want to take a guess so go ahead I heard it who said it chick being caterpillar Chickity in fact being fed a caterpillar so the the begging bird Bird

That’s a typical begging posture is a teenager it has the full plumage but it doesn’t yet have the size of the adult it’s actually a very um dangerous time for them because they’re out of the nest but they really don’t fly well and a lot of them get turned into lunch in this

Case however it is being fed something which I have this Nifty pointer oh damn um what is in the Bill of that adult what does that look like it doesn’t actually look much like it’s a caterpillar so Birds use a lot of caterpillars in fact I sometimes think this should be

Called The Caterpillar Forest and you’ll see why so this is from Nest at the Arnold Arboretum they have cameras looking down into nest boxes these babies have just hat no feathers um it’s a little high contrast but you can see them developing and growing over this time at the last stage they actually

Pretty much what you saw begging with the full adult plumage by day 16 they’ve gone out of the nest so it’s plus or minus but basically by day 16 so they eat caterpillars if you didn’t read the blur do you want to make a guess how many caterpillars for a

Chick people have guessed anywhere from 20 to 10,000 so I’ll give you that as a range pretty much about a thousand um and that that over the 30 days between when they hatch and when they’re fully independent so you might ask why caterpillars well have you ever seen a

Bird get fed a baby bird get fed it’s kind of a rough business right the female just sort or which parent whichever parent just kind of jams it down their throat so one of the good things about caterpillars is that they’re soft and they can go down a

Throat without causing a lot of damage being soft also means they don’t have the hard cat of say a beetle which is pretty undigestible and sort of a waste of stomach space and energy because there’s no food coming out of that they’re very nutritious they have a

Bunch of other things in them in particular oh I was going to you can read all of this they have bright you remember when your mom said eat your brights it’s because brights have carotenoids which is a set of molecules that all photosynthetic things have some bacteria photosynthetic bacteria and all

The rest of us need to eat it we cannot make these and they are the reason that we need to eat our bright and they are a good reason that caterpillars are a good food source for birds so what do carotenoids do they are very strong immune support they mop up um radicals

In the body they’re very powerful antioxidants they photosynthesize they’re part of photosyn synthesis not that we use them for photosynthesis but you know what I’m saying and they provide color structural color in particularly obvious in birds and these colors are very important for species recognition for mate choice in fact

Brighter males of many bird species are preferentially chosen by females and the brighter males are the ones who’ve eaten more carotenoids so there’s a very strong set of reasons behind this importance of carotenoids so how important are carotenoids so this is a little bit cut off but you can see

Caterpillars and nymphs are uh larv no larv what instar the pupy um you can see our way on the left very high carotenoids all this other stuff which is also out there and potentially edible has almost no carotenoids they also to be honest have more kiten they’re not as

Nutritious and so it’s not the only variable I don’t want to oversell it but it’s a really important one how important is it for Birds it turns out if you look at the green bars each one of these graphs represents baby bird food in a different

Family of birds out of 20 families of birds 16 of them primary food of the babies is caterpillars you’re getting the impression you’re getting what I’m trying to say to you here these are really very important and if you think about a th000 per baby chick and like say four to six

Per nest and let’s say one maybe two nests a year and how many chickes are out there and that’s just chickes and then you think of all the other 16 families of birds who are feeding their babies caterpillars we’re talking about a lot of caterpillars and we need to

Feed those caterpillars right we need to have the plants that those caterpillars are going to eat so there’s a trick here this is one of the key key things of this entire talk 70% of insects are herbivores 90% of those are host specific we all know

The story of the Monarch and the milked right it’s been such an important part of our culture that we think it’s very special well it’s not in that there are so many other caterpillars that are similarly specialized maybe not on an individual plant species but on a set of

Species just like the Monarch can eat several different kinds of milkweeds what we have and I won’t point out the window here but let’s say downtown Winchester all those plantings are not native in other words they are not plants with which these caterpillars have any ecological or evolutionary past

Which means they can’t feed these specialized herbivores which means it’s a food desert for them so it’s crucial that we plant replace all of these non-natives with natives so that we can get the pairings between the caterpillars and their plants so that all the things that eat caterpillars have enough

Caterpillars if you Garden you know that native plant is a loaded term people argue about how long has it been here where did it come from is it native how do we know what I the basic definition that I use is does it naturally occur here has

It been brought here by humans or has it been here over time there are some non-native plants that have some food value I’m not going to say they don’t especially for nectar but in terms of supporting the entire life cycle of these moths and butterflies it has to be

Native plants it also turns out there’s another interesting reason we need such a diversity of plants many of these species the larv eat different plants than the adults and you probably know that butterflies have these andas have a long probis they’re nectar feeders they don’t actually eat plant

Tissue the way the larv do but so you increasing the necessary diversity in order to get the full life cycle supported also I want to show you I love this slide because it shows the five different sizes of the laral instars the caterpillars they start very and of

Course the egg which isn’t on this slide is even smaller than that so there’s a lot of plant biomass in these caterpillars at this time if you’ve ever raised monarchs you know that when they are hungry get out of their way they are just it’s the only thing they care about

And it’s a very powerful drive because they have to put on all that biomass before they can actually uh pupate so I can’t resist we need a joke at this point um so then here’s a little aside with all these numbers of caterpillars you’re thinking about now why are we not

Covered in caterpillars you know you feel like there should be caterpillars every everywhere well there’s a couple of reasons one of them is that a lot of them get eaten we’ve just established that the other is that they tend to drop down into the litter and the soil which

Is where they do most of their development it’s also a really good argument against using bark mulch in your garden it’s non-native it’s usually dyed or chemically treated unlike Leaf litter it’s very hard it dries out and it doesn’t support these caterpillars so every step along the way we’re trying to recreate

The native conditions so that we can get back up to where we should be in terms of our insects okay so here we are again my color coding we have um talked about why we need species diversity also more ecosystem function per square foot if we plant densely

Which is what we’re going to talk about time so the claim that we have made is within 20 to 30 years you’re going to have a pretty functional Forest here with this method of developing forests that it’s going to be like a 150 year old mature Lo native Forest I’m

Going to explain to you one of the ways that we save that time if you’ve seen an open field somewhere and it’s grassy and then a couple years later it gets shrubby and then there’s some few Woody trees sticking up and so on this is called plant succession and if you leave it

Alone in 150 years you’ll have a mature native Forest we don’t have 150 years what we need is to get these forests really fast with those species so we cut out all these intermediate stages and we’re only planting those species when I say it it sounds so simple but people

Never thought of this until this gentleman came along a hero of mine an absolute genius um Dr Akira Miaki he looked around he was Japanese by origin and spent most of his life there he said we’re losing Forest what can we do about it he’s a Horticultural botanist and he

Thought oh we can change the we can use mature for species we can do he came up with this whole method and developed it with a bunch of people over the 70s it has spread in fact in the last 5 years I think there have been as many forests developed as

There have been from the 70s up until 5 years ago there are over 4,000 of them around the world now from 1,000 square feet to 11 acres the 11 acre one is in India India has been a Pioneer in this um they have developed an extraordinary amount of open access information and

Some DIY videos phenomenal ready available for anybody who wants to plant one of these there’s also now an international organization which is talking about trying to be a clearing house for information and standardizing some of the techniques and helping people who want to do this Dr Miaki won

Uh a blue planet award in 2006 for his efforts this is the Indian company that I was talking about aforest uh and you can see some of the people they’ve worked with zoos schools whatever in this country um there’s one in Cambridge and the state of California has a bunch

Of super moms who are doing them in 30 different schoolyards across the state of California to remove pavement and put in Native forests so it’s it’s quite it’s quite the thing um when we started talking about it here in town there was some ambivalence because it was new to many

People and in May I think there was a front of the New York times above the fold article about miwaukee forest and suddenly was like oh yeah we have one of those too yeah so it was a very nice proof of concept for us so the other things that he did that

Are so genius I’m going to talk to you a little bit specifically about what makes a miwaukee forest different from other forests perhaps because he is Asian he looked at forests and he didn’t say oh they’re all competing with each other isn’t that too bad he looked at Forest

And said what are the bottlenecks that are keeping them from being the best the most the fastest growing that they could possibly be and in their years of developing this they came up with a couple of variables that make the difference between what you see happening on its

Own that takes 150 years and a supercharged Forest so the soil obviously right we’re talking about the microbiome one of the variables is the microbiome itself if you’re in a very poor soil you have to add microbiome the other is the texture of the soil if you Garden you know if it’s

Too clay it doesn’t work if it’s too Sandy it doesn’t work you want something that’s a middle and nutrients so compost you also plant really densely three or four plants per square yard you know that that’s nobody plants like that unless you’re planting you know perennials but who puts Woody plants

Down like that again brilliant you mulch it because you got to keep that microbiome from drying out you don’t want it to freeze and dry in Winter you don’t want it to dry too much in summer so you have to give it protection from the top and the plot has to be big

Enough so that the edges don’t dry it all out the minimum size that this works at is about six parking spaces worth about 1,000 square feet so you can have we can have a ton of them around town we have lots of places where we have a th000 square fet that I

Can think of Conservation Commission happened particularly to like this site here it’s a wetland it just made them feel more secure I hope once we get this one going maybe we’ll have the energy and the oomph to do some others around town so in the first couple of years you

Have to weed it because there are things that will come up through the mulch you put down like five inches or six inches or eight inches of mulch does it work here yeah this is danahe Park the one on the left is 8 months after planting you

See the 4ot steak there’s not a single thing there that’s over 4 feet and in fact when you plant them they look like nothing they look like big like little broomsticks or big Chopsticks they look like nothing the picture on the right is what it looks like two years later so

You can imagine that in 20 years this is going to look pretty Bodacious right it’s going to be a forest the trees are not going to be like 150 year old tree would be but you have the diversity you have the height you have an amazing resource so what about our forest what

Are we doing we have 5,000 ft of wetlands that you go past the goats up the hill a little bit and on the left side you’ll see a nice black field an area where we cleared and where we put down some compost and some of you here have helped sodbusters thank you for

Your work we’re putting in 39 native species 1,200 plants in 5,000 square ft you wouldn’t ever think of doing that right you’d think that wouldn’t work well it does because of the supercharged soil 16 tree species 26 shrub species it’s a red maple swamp wetlands and we’re getting locally

Sourced plants so that we know their genotypes that do well in this kind of an area we’re not coming getting them from South Carolina they’re coming they’re local very local I like this expression we want to maximize the species interactions everything I’ve been talking about is species interactions right herbivores

With their food Predators with their food all the things that are going on in an environment and in 1830 humbal who was quite the naturalist traveled around the world very smart dude talked about nature as being a collection of interactions and interacting species and he said that losing any one species is

Much less damaging to the whole than if you lose interactions I think he was on to something and it’s a key premise underlying the miwaukee forest method but we have other ways of talking about the habitat value as you can imagine there’s an algorithm by which you can assess the habitat value how

Much food nesting opportunities places to mate and meet and have babies and raised babies is there in any given Forest the algorithm takes into consideration whether they’re native species what size they are um how many of them are relative to each other non-native species get a big fat zero so

They don’t count at all um and you put this together and come up with the quality index for your site when we started the site before we started the clearing was mostly jewelweed and Golden Rod both native both very good for bees but in terms of the their overall

Habitat value the quality of that site was about two and people have said well there’s other forests on right L Farm what makes this Forest so special well it is actually different when you do this same quality habitat quality assessment of the other forests it turns out they’re

Somewhere between 12 and 14 because they’re not mature native Forest they’re somewhere along that path they’re not all the way at the mature Forest end the Fast Forest that we’re planting and the species list is on our website if you’re curious what that is has a habitat value

Of about 30 so we feel pretty confident that we’re going to do what we want to do here in this site if you haven’t seen it you got to go down there the compost alone is gorgeous it also has lime under it um because the pH wasn’t quite what

We wanted and between these two things it’s going to be pretty ready for planting in April so we’re still fundraising I have to say um we’ve made a lot of progress you we we invite you to join financially if not otherwise your name or the name of anyone in whose

Honor you want to make a donation will be on our permanent donor sponsor list which will be on the website of our our website as well as the right loock Farm website and we hope it will be there forever the forest will certainly be there for hundreds of years years we’re

Also inviting you to join us for the planting this is obviously not us cuz we haven’t planted yet but it’s pretty much of a party there’s a lot of plants it’s very active you get to help whether you want to carry plants whether you carry water whether you’re going to dig holes

Whatever it is you’re going to do we have a sign up sheet and we hope I mean we we’re looking we have 200 people hour slot and a lot of people will do more more than one hour and more than one plant so we hope you join us even if you

Just come to look we don’t care if you don’t do anything but just come hang out with us so summary the benefits of the Fast Forest I think you’ve gotten the habitat value I think the creating Community part is pretty important the way I like

To say it is it’s 51% forest and 49% Community it has been amazing to us as a group the response that we’ve had everywhere we talk about it with people I think it’s because it creates here’s another even newer phrase climate hope instead of Eco anxiety and you know there’s something

About it you’re outside you’re with people you’re planting you’ve got Sun you’ve got endorphins and it’s proactive it’s you can recycle and turn the lights off and do whatever you want and you don’t ever see it I’m not going to oversell this and tell you this is going

To change the global CO2 equation cuz it’s not right but we want a lot of them we want them close together we want more habitat and we want it to be something that’s going to be there for the next Generations we’ve kind of troed up the planet and one of the things that

Resonated the most with the high school students when I was talking with them was when I said we’re doing this for you guys it’s going to be here for hundreds of years and when you go off to college and you come home it’s going to be here

And it’s going to be bigger and you’re going to know that we did this for you we really want this for you so I think it’s kind of a big deal in all these ways here are people who are already part of active part of our community

Everyone who has donated 8th grade girl scouts are preparing a curriculum for elementary school on Fast forests we have an eagle scout who’s doing our planting day organization and raising money and a bake sale Winchester high school students and the environmental Club are we have like 25 of them all

Signed up wanting to help the Lincoln Green Team First Congregational Church they also made this the focus of their blessing of the animals service in October um the Episcopal church we have three research projects by peer rreview scientists everybody here I don’t know a

Lot of you we would never have met if it wasn’t for this talk so it’s working right there’s more Community these are people to whom we owe special thanks for their participation so far um in this I’ll leave this up for a moment particularly because there’s in the room the

Sodbusters thank you all nine Saturdays in a row nine hour nine 9 to 12 3 hours of digging and preparing the soil that’s a pretty big deal I can see people coming once but then you go well you know what that’s kind of a lot of work these people came nine

Times and the Heart of the Fast Forest some of the team is here some of them are not here thank you guys it’s been an amazing ride so far and we’re not finished yet so we hope to see you all on the 20th and I’m happy to take any questions comments disbelief thank

You Bruce are there any examples in this area the Dene park is in Cambridge on Sherman Street if you go Sherman Street entrance in Cambridge you walk in a few hundred yards and on the right you see this exuberant green thing theirs is about 4500 square F feet and that’s the

Picture that I showed you I can go back to the picture that’s that that’s their forest and they do it it’s a it’s a public project unlike us we’re a 501c3 the DPW and they have a Fast Forest person um on their DPW staff and they did a lot of partnering between

Volunteers and the DPW I’m hoping we can get to that point also that would be nice how many years is that from the first one to the second one this is two years this is eight months two years I don’t know if you Garden that’s you know that’s crazy and

That’s because of the supercharged soil it really works yes so how fast can this forest grow Beyond its original boundaries kind of slow because of so that’s a really interesting question in Cambridge for example they are having a big conversation over whether they’re going to let this thing go into the green here

Or whether they’re going to keep it enclosed and I think the whole point would be for it to go and grow and you know take off and here we spend a lot of time taking out the invasives right across the road in the hopes that this would spread into

The forest as opposed to the invasive spreading into our Fast Forest so I don’t know that one of the interesting things about it is that a lot of these are not they haven’t been around for 20 30 Years yet so we don’t actually have a lot of information about that it’s one

Of the fun things about having an international organization would be you’d like a website where everybody puts their data and then you can find out more about that I think it’s a research project that I hope somebody takes on in the high school and that it’s one where the students every year

Go out and measure and see who survived and who hasn’t survived and how they’re doing and stuff like that and what’s happening with the spread are they spreading what species are particularly spreading and so on so I think that’s a great question and can’t wait for the

Answer see if I can detangle questions um having seen the vast Forest site um and there a great deal of work by the this where are where is that in terms of the process I see a classifier for the mulch or for the soils down there um great machine looks um the

Source of the soils has that all been from that site or has some been brought in we have so we have not brought in soil one of the nice things again the reason that we thank the DPW is because they’ve been supportive in particular they we got a lot of compost from the

Transfer station if you bring your own uh Solid Waste you you know that the and it’s very high quality compost I have to say people disparage it I don’t know why it it so before I go off on compost which is a favorite topic the soil is

There has been there it’s been farmed off and on for several hundred years and the unfortunately Golden Rod roots are very ten so we needed to kind of do some work on the Golden Rod Roots yes we took those up we haven’t finished yet uh but we

Made a big um dent in them we we did we sent soil out from several different locations to uh UMass extension it came back as being somewhat low in nitrogen but it’s very acid and we know that acid binds nitrogen so we laid down I want to say 1300 lbs of

Lime none of which is Free by the way that these things are all part of the cost of the forest uh and then we covered it with the compost which was free which comes from the transfer station and we’re kind of letting that get to know get these let these things

Get to know each other we’ll be plowing it in we need to do more soil prep before we can plant in April but it’s been very wet there um as it has been everywhere but there in particular that pond has overflowed somewhat and yeah and we ended up having to put silt

Socks down there which was also an unexpected expense because it was so raining not having been able to plow it earlier the permeability was not as good as it could have been so but that’s all going to come I mean we have two months until the planting day two months minus

A week um we’ve been working pretty hard and we’ll keep it up until we get things into the ground so that’s what’s happened there it it was not one of the people on this project did three of them in Jordan Jordan the country and they did them in Jordan has

Been inhabited and had agriculture for 10,000 years and there are places where there have not been forests for 10,000 years and they had to do a lot cuz that was hard pack and very depleted including they had to bring in microbiome from they had a big ethical

Conversation can we dig up a couple of cubic yard yards of soil from one of the few remaining forests in order to culture microbiome to put in this Forest so there’s every step is has decisions and costs and benefits we didn’t have to do that the soil here is much better

Than that so and it’s another reason that it’s kind of a good site my other dream site is on the high school grounds there’s all that flat area there that isn’t being used for much so anyway other questions yes I could just speak quickly to yeah just for those of you questions

About um its location on the farm so as fretta mentioned it’s just beyond after our agricultural Fields so I think the the screener you were talking about that’s actually our compost screener but it is a helpful tool but if you go beyond that is if you’re walking into

The woods it’s it’s on the left there and that historically for us as the working Farm we have not been growing anything on there um historically it was used for sorry pre right um but for us it was it was a nice spot because as um was mentioned there were some bases

Growing there you probably better able to list some of the ones that you pulled out but I think there was some multi and things like that Bittersweet coming in um some native uh weeds and things like that but nothing that that we were intentionally growing nothing that we needed and again as was

Pointed out um there are a lot of especially buck corn glossy buck corn things like that that are spreading out into the woods if you continue into the trail so it is kind of a hope of ours too that the native species will help to

To take over um so that that is just to say that that area was not being really used by US and it wasn’t a forest it was just kind of kind of weeds sometimes we would pick some flowers to you addition to a flower arrangement but um it was

Really just a wetland so for us this is an opportunity um you know this project is typically done in a city where you know you can add a forest to a more of a an urban setting but we thought how perfect you know because sometimes we’ll

Have people say why plant a forest next to the forest but hopefully as you’ve learned um you know we really want to encourage the native species to come back a great opportunity to just show the benefits of this method and to use it just as an educational um sort of

Demonstration site so that was that was kind of the reasoning on on our side of it is we have the space here that could be used and allow people to kind of learn and research and get the community together which is what we’re all about

So just wanted and and when I came to Archie was still the director when I brought this project and and he was sitting here was sitting here and I was kind of talking and kind no read on them at all and Erica looks at him and goes I think it’s

Perfect oh oh so yes it’s been a wonderful just wonderful Source it’s also worth pointing out um that reminding people that this 15 acres is a combination of Conservancy land and farmland so it fits in with both of those um missions right because it’s got the community and all those things that

Are right lock farm and and as an example and also because it’s habitat and conservation so I had originally wanted to do one in my yard which people do and I thought you know what when you sell the first thing the developer is going to do is cut the whole thing down

I need it somewhere where that’s not going to happen so that was kind of part of my purely selfish motivation for coming here other questions yeah so what are some of the of trees and plants so so there’s uh so if you know the name Doug

Talami he is kind of the professor Dr Doug taly is kind of the guru um Point person for planting habitat in yard his his idea is that we’re all going to we’re going to create 20 million Acres of a native of a national park which is made up of everybody’s backyards and he

Has been very very active in helping people figure out what species are the ones that support the most caterpillars basically he has a top 10 list and we our list of course came completely from that not that it was news to me I do habitat restoration and

Forests around here another way I gave this talk or version of this talk yesterday morning at nor Eastern to um a lab of people who study human environment interactions from the psychology point of view and what the issues are and one of them said well but what good is the forest you

Know you don’t have paths through it you don’t have benches in it you I almost felt like there should be a bubble gum dispensing machine you know whatever she was thinking and I said but you’re wrong there are all these benefits it regulates temperature it regulates

Moisture it holds the soil in place it minimizes the problems with run off and with flooding and with a whole bunch of other things like that said well I didn’t mean those been like okay but we went from it has no benefits from they’re not ones you’re thinking of well

You need to think of these because these are really important benefits so yeah and the temperature thing I sometimes feel it in summer when you drive into Winchester from other places you can feel the temperature drop when you get into our tree area it’s a perceptible difference if you have your windows open

And we want to encourage everybody to do this we’re partnering with Charlestown um through turn it around and hoping that we can can help them plant one there where they have much less green and it’s going to be even more noticeable effect and if we keep putting them in six parking spaces every

Place there’s six parking spaces you can put one of these right I mean we can do it somebody had a I saw a hand yes so can you plant the Fast Forest on steep slope sides and if so you change the planty rockiness of course is going to

Things so slope would affect it but I think that actually it’s would only it’s only a short-term effect because once those roots get in they’re going to actually hold the slope in place better than anything else the place in Charlestown that I have my eye on

Although they don’t know this yet is in fact quite slopey and one reason that that’s a benefit in this case is because you can’t people can’t naysay by oh but you’re taking away place you know where kids want to a play or where you can have picnics you you can’t have a picnic

If the slope is like that but you can plant trees you have to be a little careful when you’re planting so you don’t you know fall down but I don’t think there’s any intrinsic reason I mean the forest New England is very like this right and there’s forests all on

The slopes all over New England so it’s there might be a logistical issue getting it going but it’s going to do very well if that answers your question is that yeah yes it’s remember there’s a fence that’s going to go around this right so how long do you think that fence will

Need to be there and is the purpose the obvious one to keep animals it’s to keep rabbits out in particular I was thinking deer but according to the farmer here the real problem and the director the problem is really rabbits more than more than deer um this Forest the the fence

Is already gone it was gone by like month 20 or something they took it down there was no point to to it uh and I’m sure the same will be true here the trick is to get it up pretty close to when you plant because you don’t want

All those plants to be eaten up and small yeah I won’t tell you it’s a secret I can’t tell you yet but but we it’s another expense is we need $2,000 for the fence and we’re going to donate it to the farm afterwards but The Upfront cost is what The Upfront cost is

So and we may have a fence raising day where everybody comes and helps us pound steaks in and you know the I what do they call them the pins that you put to hold your mesh down into the ground there are different lengths of them I’ve

Used them to keep the rabbits out of my yard um you pound those in to hold the bottom of the because rabbits will just they go under they go over we’ve all read Master McGregor and the rabbits yeah anything else you want to go home yeah David um when it starts out you

Know there’s this great um exaggerated density and um how long does does it want to deify over time things grow not as much as you’d think I mean one of the reasons that these become that they are they get more and more natural as time goes on right

Because there then is competition and some things will do better than other things and some things might have a blight and so on so that there will be some thinning out but it’s not as much as you would think it is um and it doesn’t seem to be any

Detriment it just does what it’s going to do and part of what makes it so great is that they’re maintenance free they’re this one is in fact so dense at the moment that the person who’s doing the insect biodiversity studies can hardly get through it

So it and I think that is also a bonus for a lot of animals because it protects them you know so how it plays out in 20 years or 50 years or whatever is kind of like how any Forest plays out some things die some things will do well

Other stuff might come in from outside it’s going to get more homogeneous Rel to whatever else is around right because stuff’s going to come in but we’re hoping obviously that um they’re going to last 500 years and given the species composition at 500 years it’s not going

To be exactly the same as it is now for sure because there’s going to be replacement but it’s going to be there until we cut it down or until there’s some Mega disaster but we’re not talking about that yeah and and the one of the other projects is what is the other

Project oh yeah microbiome we’re comparing the microbiome in our Fast Forest in the Cambridge Fast Forest and there’s a naturally developed red maple swamp Wetlands for us in wubber so that’s our third one so we’re doing that um comparison to see what they look like and if you do that

You got to do that I mean it’s I just get so excited when I think about the data if you do that like every couple of years and you keep doing that that’s amazing data and a lot of the forests are not collecting any data at all

They’re just being planted and then left and then but we’re surrounded by all these researchy people we should get them to they like it yes and then last question maybe so are you reping that wets with an up Forest mix or are you I’m sorry you keep talking about the

Wetlands and how part of it like are we enhancing that Wetlands so we’re restoring a Wetlands a degraded Wetlands site to a mature Forest Wetland site it’s not going to be bare it’s it’s a bunch of species that can take very wet conditions right you don’t want to plant

Things that are Upland species because they’re not going to do well there because it’s really quite wet so I’m using Wetland is used two ways one is as a legal designation of and then just as a description there’s Uplands there’s Wetlands there’s and I’m sorry if I mix

Them both it’s confusing but so you see what I’m saying okay yeah I was just concerned most of the the projects I’ve read about have been on Baron land or or Wasteland yeah something along that line so when when I heard you were doing weapons I was kind of like well are you

Right enhancing the wet LS or are you like replacing them which worried me so it’s good to know that it’s just an enhancement of what’s it is what would end up there if we gave it 150 years we’re getting a jump started something you said oh yeah so in Cambridge they

Actually built it on um landfill and they went down 2 feet and according to people who have worked on it including someone from our group it was so they were practically in the garbage and they could smell it and they had to put down a lot of soil we didn’t

Have to do that so that’s more like what you’re talking about but you still have to pick species that are going to do well under those conditions and their species are much more up Landy and ours are much more wet land two separate words e because that side is very wet

Their side is not very wet so it’s crucial and we spent you know good time figuring that out because if you don’t plant the right things they’re not going to be very happy thank you so much for coming um we invite you to look at our materials and

Maybe sign up if you’re compelled to sign up for something we’d love to see you again um and if you have any other questions you know don’t hesitate to get in touch you can reach me or any of us through the website and thank you for [Applause] coming for