It’s September while I’m writing this. It’s raining pine needles.  After a stressful summer for most plants, you can see pine trees with lots of brown needles ready to drop.  Ironically, you can also see grasses that have suddenly become green again after some heavy rain.  Mother nature is preparing for winter. A good question might be “What is she up to and why?”  A reasonable (even if highly irritating) answer would be “It depends.”

Along the lines of “The more you know, the more you realize that you don’t know,” a word of caution here.  The differences in soils between sand, clay, rock and loam; the differences in crops between perennial, annual, orchard, field and row crops; the differences in weather between wet, dry, cold and hot; and the differences in terroir between hills, meadows, forest, minerals and microclimates are all important in deciding how to prepare your ground for winter.  Things I write or you read elsewhere have to be interpreted by your own developing sense of soil.

Having said that, a good general principle is that nature avoids bare soil.  So if you are thinking “Let’s get all of these stems and weeds out and leave a clean bed for spring,” please stop. Multiple bad things happen when soil is bare.  Rain and snow make heavier pieces of rock and sand sink and lighter dust and clay stay in the liquid.  When that dries, the clay layer makes water run off without sinking in. The water goes on to create erosion. The microbes in the soil die of thirst.  Living plants, dead plants, mulch… anything is better than bare soil, especially if that soil has a lot of clay.

Your underground livestock: bacteria, fungi, protists, nematodes and worms need air, moisture, food and shelter to survive the winter. Living plants are the best because fungi exchange nutrients with plant roots in exchange for sugars produced by plant leaves. Fungi can also live on just woody material like straw, sawdust, cardboard and wood chips.  That slows way down under a cover of snow and ice. But even plants that die during the winter are good food for the other organisms.  Take forage radishes, AKA tillage radishes, for instance.  In hard soil and clay they tunnel down several inches.  When they die, they leave passageways for water to seep in stopping runoff and food for microbes and fungi.

My soil is sandy.  When we got here we never found rocks in post holes, but also no worms.  Red wiggler worms burrow down several inches to survive the cold.  But they don’t like sand.  They like warm rotting stuff and give your whole biome a big boost.  I am building up my soil year by year, but for worm insurance I am also building up a large compost pile.  The worms will migrate to the bottom when it gets cold and survive. They also don’t like it too hot.   Right now it is over 90° at the bottom of the pile, too hot for worms.  Up a little higher it is 70° to 80° and has a lot of rotting produce, worm heaven.

Out in the vineyard there is a nice crop of green grass.  Soon the grape leaves will fall on top of the grass. This is the natural mulch that makes deciduous forest soil so rich and is built up just before winter.  Unlike a garden or flower bed, the vineyard is a perennial forest of vines and pasture.  Some people would like to have all the dirt around the vines tilled up.  That would disturb overwintering pests like leafhoppers and eliminate weeds that would “compete” with the vines for nutrients.  I don’t look at it that way.

Green plants, especially grass, feed fungi during the winter with sugars in exchange for water and minerals. The more microbes you have living in the soil, the more nutrients are available in the spring.  The nitrogen in green grass is especially valuable.  I intend to mow the grass before adding mulch, such as woody material or sawdust, over it.  The grass will help break down the mulch layer. The best thing would be to have animals eat the grass and return it as manure to the soil.  I don’t have the right critters for that and am pretty sure most of them would prefer the grapes to the grass.

Part of the deal is that grass has huge roots.  I have potted grape plants outside and grass sometimes gets in the pots.  Most weeds pull out of the pot easily leaving just the grape plant in the soil.  Not grass.  Grass wants to take all the soil with it when you pull it. It thrives after being eaten down once and bounces back.  The big roots prevent grass from being pulled by grazing animals and give it a food reserve to draw on for the rebound.

The grasses on the Great Plains built fertility for thousands of years before being plowed under.  At first the rotting grass roots were very fertile and crops were great.  But after having all the organic matter removed each year and laying fallow over the winters, they have lost 70% of the carbon and 70% of their water holding potential (For the Love of Soil, Nicole Masters).  So I want to keep the grasses in my vineyard.

In Frank Herbert’s book, Dune, giant sandworms produce a drug called “melange” (known colloquially as “the spice”), which is highly prized across the universe for its medicinal and mystical properties.  (wikipedia.org)  Although wildly fictional, some truths linger in that account.  Melange is created when excretions of the sandworms’ larvae react with water and sunlight. At this point the tale gets a bit, shall we say, “messy”.  In the real world, worm excretions, castings, are an indication of healthy soil and contribute to it.  Can they eat sand? How big do they get?  What is really going on down there?

These persistent questions kept making me think of someone one of my grape plant customers mentioned, “Marvin the Worm Guy” in Spokane.  So I Googled it.  Well the closest thing is Marle Worm Growers in Otis Orchards.  As it turns out, the worm guy is Jeff Wood, who runs Marle Worm Growers, and indeed knows a lot about worms.  I finally got a chance to meet him in person and we talked and walked around his place for a couple of hours.  It could have been much longer.  Jeff does educational presentations for Spokane Community College, Master Composters and Master Gardeners.  He looks at worms as not just a commodity he grows and sells, but as a highly valuable component of healthy soil. Building healthy soil is his passion.

Jeff called microbes “engines of the soil”.  Carrying that analogy a little further, worms are trains full of microbes spreading them everywhere they go.  Worm castings are not just good plant food, they are highly refined and PH-balanced food that has some surprising qualities.  Seeds drenched in tea from worm castings produce long healthy roots even before emerging from the ground. In a recent episode of the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast, Nicole Masters describes this effect as the highest yield per cost of any enriching application you can do to a crop, costing mere pennies per acre.

It is not surprising then that Jeff makes several kinds of compost tea and says that using compost tea on your plants is a technique that everyone can afford and is tremendously beneficial.  He has a large tea brewer that preheats water, introduces air and grows microbes essentially overnight. So yes, he sells compost tea as well as a huge inventory of other products, besides worms, that are good for the soil.  He also sells soil itself to landscapers, gardeners, greenhouses and farmers.  He points out that crucial consideration are how much time you have and the nutritional needs of plants which change through the course of a season.

Foliar applications of tea enhance growth and can also control insects.  They last 3 to 5 days and need to be modified and applied frequently.  A root drench tea will last 7 to 10 days.  Worm castings added to the soil last a couple of weeks and granular fertilizers, which Jeff also sells, can last a whole month.  Every step of the way means more cost but more time to work with.

When they are young, plants might need some insect protection, mild nitrogen fertilizer and some soluble seaweed extract for its mix of minerals.  With more growth in the middle of the season, plants can feed on more nitrogen-rich fertilizer like aged manures and of course worm castings as the plants put out green leaves. Toward the end of the season, plants don’t need as much feed but you want them to settle into the winter with organic matter that is composting and retaining moisture.

Through all of this, worms have their cycles too.  Being so closely aligned with composting, worms like what compost likes: temperatures from 55° to 77°.  Temperatures above 90° will kill them. At temperatures under 55° they are not very active.  I asked about compost piles that can get to 160° F.  Jeff told me that the worms will move away from the hot compost, usually to the bottom of the pile.  When the compost is cooler but still gooey, they come back to eat.

Worms don’t have teeth.  Like chickens, they grind up their food in a gizzard.  So a little dirt or light sand can help break down the rotten vegetables and fruit (as long as it is not acidic like citrus) that is their main diet.  If you are growing them in a worm bin, it is harder for them to get away from hot compost, so Jeff just adds a little vegetable matter in spots near the top of the bin.  It takes 3 to 4 days for worms to eat a feeding.  They eat their weight in food every day.  If it takes longer, you may be feeding them too much.  They like a combination of green (vegetables, grass and leaves) and brown food (wet bedding and rotten fruit) , with an emphasis on the green.

Marle Worm Growers sells a variety of worm growing equipment.  A common thread is that worms move on to new food when the old is exhausted.  So some systems have you add another box of bedding and food on top of the old, the worms move into the new food after a few days and you can remove the old box to get the castings. Similarly, some systems have two sides with a screen between them.  Feed on one side and the worms move there.  You can encourage the move by letting light shine on the old side and exposing it to a breeze. Worms hate that. Remove the castings from the first side and it is ready for new food.  Keep in mind that the bedding, which can be shredded black and white newspaper, cardboard, peat moss or decomposing leaves in any combination is also consumed.  Keep it as wet as a damp sponge but not too wet.  Worms need air as do compost and roots.

This does sound a little complicated and there is even more equipment in Jeff’s operation to separate worms, castings and unused material.  For small scale growers Jeff is a big proponent of systems that integrate the worms with growing plants.  The most straight forward is a “worm tube”, basically a 6” or so plastic pipe perforated with ½” holes that the worms can crawl through.  Place it straight down in a raised bed or vegetable garden with a fly-proof screen that you can take off to add ground up kitchen waste.  Don’t add meat or oils, they smell and attract pests. The worms do the work of composting the food waste and transporting it to the roots of the plants for 4 to 5 feet around the tube. 

Taking it one step further, there are “garden towers”.  These are essentially worm tubes in the center of a 4 foot high structure that lets plants poke out the sides and feed off the worm castings carried out of the tube by worms.  Additionally, you can pull the worm castings from the bottom of the tower and put them back in on top of the soil.  This is great for gardening on your patio or porch.

What I have however is a vineyard with sandy soil.  I learned from Jeff that the red wiggler worms are going to avoid the sandy soil. They want several inches of organic material on top of the sand.  They will however bury themselves deep in the ground during the winter to avoid freezing.  Even deeper, 3 to 5 feet, are nightcrawlers.  They also produce castings from compost.  Their deep holes help aerate the soil.  They make great fish bait, but are harder to propagate. 

There is a lot more to worms than meets the eye.  The cast of worm species goes on and on.  I am tuning up my compost pile to feed the red wiggler worms.  I’m also covering it to keep in moisture and encourage worms to get closer to the surface. I noticed after uncovering it once that robins were right there pulling out some worms for themselves.  You might want some worms for yourself. Feed them and they will help feed you.

When I was younger, not very studious and there was no Internet, I decided to add pigs to our menagerie of goats, chickens and a donkey.  We had extra milk from the goats and I could supplement the pig diet with culled potatoes from the Doukhobors in Grand Forks, British Columbia.  The pigs didn’t put on a lot of weight during the winter because they didn’t have much shelter, just some bales of hay.  Realizing that was a problem, I built them a solar-heated pig house.

Actually that worked well and they loved it.  Here’s the thing, pigs are naturally happy.  They love to dig for food.  Well they love food period, hence their reputation.  You can’t really herd them, but you can lead them around with a bucket of anything tempting.  They are smart and not really that dirty.  They only pooped in one corner of their pen.  Still they do get big, too big to wrestle or do much with.  So eventually we gave our big sow to a neighbor and she didn’t last long there.  Too much trouble I guess.

That was a different time and place.  I didn’t get into the craze of pot-bellied pigs as pets which followed by a few years.  At least it recognized the Marvelous Pigness of Pigs, which is the title of a book by Joel Salatin.  Joel uses pigs as a study in the divine nature of nature.  I would have preferred a little more direct description of pig farming. Salatin used them to transform a run-down family farm into a thriving regenerative food source by letting them graze on acorns in the woods.

Thinking back on my experience, I realize that I could have used them to plow and fertilize patches of ground for a garden. The old Case 22 bulldozer with a hand-cranked starter that I bought was lousy for plowing and hard to start.  I would have had happier pigs and more pork.  Common practices in raising pigs had skewed my understanding away from their real nature.

So it was with some surprise and enjoyment that I recently saw an email from Eileen of Ramstead Ranch near Ione discussing their use of pigs to prevent forest fires.  No.  We are not talking about Smokey the Pig.  But remember those fire lines that fire fighters dig around a wildfire to contain it?  Pigs do pretty much the same thing naturally but over a wide area and they love doing it.

So naturally this left a lot more questions in my mind and I arranged to talk to Eileen about them.  Remembering how hard it was to keep these four-footed track hoes from digging under fences I asked how Ramstead kept them in.  Eileen said it’s no big deal once they become familiar with electric fencing.  At Ramstead they start them young getting to recognize electric fence wire.  Being pretty smart they tend to stay clear even if it is not turned on.  So a little electric fencing that can be moved to rotate pasture areas is all you need.

They do well on grasses and friends of ours have used them to root out quack grass, which has LOTS of long-running roots.  But bushes and their roots, thistles and a wide variety of plants are all dinner for the pigs.  At Ramstead they can use a one-two punch by having cattle trample bigger woody material and pigs rotovate it into the ground.  After a season or two of this kind of rotated grazing, their brushy woods with lots of “ladder fuels” (small trees, brush and low branches that fire can climb up into tree tops), are eliminated and the woodlot turns into “silvopasture”, grasses under trees where cattle, sheep and pigs can graze comfortably away from scorching sun.

Don’t get the idea that these are far-flung fields where wolves and dogs can become a problem.  Pigs still need fresh water and supplemental feed that need to be hauled out to them.  If they are close to where they were raised as young with plenty of food and drink, they are more likely to stay close even if they escape the electric fencing. 

So remember what I said about pigs being naturally happy?  I’ve heard stories of them digging head first up to their hind legs in pursuit of tasty roots and then popping back up again ready to dig out another.  But normally we think of them in crowded pens, making a mess, smelling bad and creating huge runoff problems for streams and neighbors.  Salatin notes that “Factory farming pigs makes them stressed, so they fight each other and develop other problems.” He decries efforts to find a “porcine stress gene” and genetically modify it as if that would eliminate those problems.

Eileen is proud of how low-stress life is for Ramstead’s pigs.  She notes “Our pigs live outdoors in the sun and shade.  They run, root, wallow, lounge and get to behave like real pigs.”  The waste they produce is worked directly into the ground where it does the most good.  As a result the meat is cleaner, leaner and tastier than factory-farmed pork.  That is the kind of benefit from recognizing the marvelous pigness of pigs that I didn’t realize when we had them.

Actually I’m also recognizing the difference between how a city boy (that would be me 40 years ago) sees animals as cows, horses, chickens, sheep and pigs but a country boy (not that I am entirely there yet) sees breeds of cows, horses, sheep and pigs.  Beyond that if you really raise these animals, you see personalities.  There may be general tendencies of breeds but for instance can you really say that since you have known one cat, you know them all?  Both nature and nurture make a big difference. 

Eileen prefers Berkshire pigs, a heritage breed recognized as far back as 1642 in Reading England as renowned for its size and the quality of its bacon and ham.  They are also known to be gentle and friendly to other animals and people.  So pigs just want to have fun.  Let them be themselves and we will all be happier and safer.

As I was driving down Webley road to the lumber mill, I remembered my last visit there 35 years ago. I needed to have some 1 x 4 boards planed down to ½” from ¾“ so I could bend them into arches for my first underground arch building.  That old mill was the only place nearby that did that kind of custom work.  The new mill is much bigger with huge logs sitting in the log deck and along the way in many stacks of sawn lumber, some looking to be very old, sticker-stacked for air drying. 

The mill was at the end of the road and I was at the end of my rope.  My new little biochar business needs lots of scrap wood.  Having used mine up, I got permission to cut up the slash piles of a couple friends.  But the wood there was still wet inside.  It would take dry wood to get it burning and would burn slowly with a lot of smoke. Still there would be a good chance of it not turning completely into charcoal. I was thinking I might find some long dry slabs with bark on at Webley Lumber that I could cut into burnable pieces.

I pulled up to the little log cabin office and inside found some very helpful people. They actually knew what biochar is and had used it.  They also pointed me to piles of dry mill ends, clean, already in smaller pieces and FREE for the taking.  I drove home intent on bringing my pickup truck back the next day and loading up. 

During the night I started thinking about something else at Webley Lumber, huge piles of sawdust.  It’s not good for biochar. But so much carbon!  As a carbon farmer intent on getting as much soil-enriching rotten wood back into the ground as possible, I couldn’t get it off my mind.  After loading up the next day I stopped to chat with a guy walking near the office to ask him about the sawdust.  He was Brent Webley, the owner/manager of the mill.  Milling lumber has been his family’s business for generations.

It turns out that I am not the only person who noticed the sawdust piles.  Farmers come and load it up for bedding.  Others come and lay it down around blueberry plants.  In fact a blueberry farm near Reardon gets chipper truck loads full and plants berry bushes right into it.  This is not a really good idea generally speaking but they were loading up from a pile that is 30 years old, 80 feet high and bigger than 2 football fields.  Brent will load a pickup truck for $10, a super good deal.  I was eager to get some of this old sawdust and to learn more from Brent.

Brent caught me up on a little mill history.  His grandfather had a lumber mill in Orient.  His father, Buzz, and an uncle built their first mill a little closer to the start of Webley road which comes off the far side of Gold Hill Loop just west of Colville.  In the 60s and 70s they built newer mills on the current site.  There was a big fire in 2001 but the mill itself did not burn.  I asked him if all of his business is local.  As it turns out, only about half is. Webley regularly ships lumber to Spokane.  Additionally, one of their specialty products is custom shaped logs that can be stacked into log cabins, such as their office.  To do that they need already dry wood that won’t warp or crack.  So they have large bundles of big poles aging on a hillside before they are dry enough to use.  These cabin logs are shipped all over the west and as far away as Japan.  Old sawdust is just a minor income source.

Fresh sawdust is not a balanced soil amendment.  It is acidic.  While breaking down it draws nitrogen from nearby vegetation as well as water.  If you put new sawdust right on your garden, it will pretty-much kill everything.  Biochar is a little like that too.  It will suck up water and does not have any natural nutrients.  Both of these soil amendments have huge amounts of carbon, the main building block of all biological life.  The sawdust can only release its carbon as a nutrient after being digested by microbes.  The biochar doesn’t ever break down but preserves moisture and millions of beneficial microbes which, among other things, can help break down sawdust.

So let’s “break that down” a little more.  There are two main avenues to getting microbes to digest sawdust.  One is to get fungi growing in it.  Fungi are much better at digesting wood than bacteria.  They need water, air and a good source of already living fungi.  Mature compost will usually kick start the process, or even old leaf litter from the forest floor.

What fungi don’t need so much is to be regularly turned over and mixed.  That breaks up the mycelia, the thin threads of fungi that transport water and other nutrients.  You want the mycelia to spread through the sawdust.  Eventually you want them to form a symbiotic tie to living plant roots.   They get sugar from the plants and bring water and minerals in exchange, effectively spreading the reach of the roots by orders of magnitude.  I mix shredded woody material with finished compost, aged manure, rotting fruit pulp and microbe-enriched biochar and spread it under my grape plants to let it mature in place as it would in nature.  (Come to think of it, I’m probably maturing in place myself.)

Meanwhile, remember those farmers that use sawdust and wood chips for bedding?  That is another great way to offset rotting wood’s thirst for nitrogen by getting urine, manure and moisture mixed into the sawdust so it can be digested by microbes quickly.  Animals get the nitrogen in their urine from eating green leaves and grass.  Chlorophyll in green vegetation creates sugars from sunlight.  After going through a digestive system or even just being mixed in fresh with dry plant matter chlorophyll releases nitrogen that bacteria and fungi trade back and forth to create rich organic soil.  One part green vegetation to 3 parts brown is a standard ratio to have in compost.

The key to knowing if it is working is worms.  Worms can eat leafy matter and food waste early in the composting cycle.  But old sawdust that has rotted sufficiently gives worms a long-lasting food supply.  My compost and aged manure piles are full of worms.  There is a lot more to say about them, but let’s stick to sawdust for now.

After I had my truck loaded with two big scoops of damp red sawdust I started back toward home.  As I got onto pavement and speeded up, the sawdust started to blow around.  Out on the highway I was leaving a thin red cloud in my wake and slowing down a few cars in the process.  As soon as possible, I stopped to buy a small tarp and cover the load.  Take my advice and bring a tarp with you if you go to Webley Lumber for sawdust, but by all means go.  Get that carbon into the ground.