Perhaps you can contact an arborist to get you wood chips as mulch. I heard that's free. I just don't know how to go about depositing it in the desert as I doubt they'll dump their material way out there.
Hey Shaun!! Try planting your trees with cactus pads or agave leaves. They do this in Italy where there isn’t any water. The cactus stores water for the tree. Chop them up in the bottom of the tree hole and completely cover the cactus and water once at the time of planting. And sparsely water here and there after.
@@dustupstexas You sure do get a lot of advice, Shaun! Nice boots. Awesome to see your efforts through all the setbacks and learning taking root and growing!! Happy December to your family, and may the first rains be gentle and long lasting!
For the last two years, I've been working on creating a homestead. I have done a lot on my property (which started with nothing), but still no house. I'm feeling more and more confident in my abilities in what I've learned over the last two years, to be the one to build my own house. I started from nothing, lived in a city my whole life, I never even used a power drill until 4 years ago. I've progressed a lot since then, but I have one major progression still left. I was just telling my wife, if you can build your desert forest, with all the odds stacked against you, then I can build my own house! I'm looking forward to both of us accomplishing our dreams!
dad built all and everything we owned in the 50's, bar the glass and tiles steel and cement. Built our brick shed, Built the brick house, stripped cars to last nut and bolt and rebuilt, built the TV, the welder, the lathe, the pedestal drill.... and on and on and on, then he got bored and bought a farm hahahah for weekends, built the road, built the house, rebuilt the tractor, rebuilt , several times, a Nord bulldozer. We even re machined and re lapped the crankshaft still in the engine. Gave up on that, moved away bought 500 acre farm. This time he got abuilder to build the house but spent as much time telling the builder how to build, arguing the building codes and engineering certifications with council. Basically taught the council many many things ( they just had THEIR rules, which were NOT the proper engineering specs.) he always won. You grow up in this environment and think you learn nothing, hahahahahahahahahha, you have a complete degree in so many skills.
Mulch, Grow, Mulch and Mulch! It takes a long time but you are giving your Land the best starting point from now! That’s what matters! I wonder if you could organise a “Dustups” Compost Heap for Volunteers to drop off Manure/ Cuttings/ Grass etc somewhere on the Highway, on route to your place, where a massive Compost Heap could be held. I think many people would love to contribute. Especially when your Dustups is so inaccessible.
in this climate though the compost will be dry all the time and composting needs moisture. BUT I think this idea might work if you digg a deep hole of maybe 3 to 6 foot and let them dump all the organic matter in there.
Try cutting sleeves into cardboard so it looks like the cut on a "do not disturb" sign for a hotel door, then put it around the base of the Agave (weigh down with rocks)to block the sun from hitting the ground and evaporating moisture whenever you water them.
Love what you are doing. Just a few quick tips on germination, almost all seeds do not require light to germinate. In a lot of cases excess light will sterilize and kill seeds. You should be trying to cover the seeded areas with a thin layer of mulch to protect it from sun, wind and keep moisture in the soil. The little seedling will wiggle its way around smaller mulch so as long as you dont have a log on top life will find a way!
I live in kashmir, the most green valley , people call it paradise on earth , every week i see dustups on youtube,Now i have started appreciating greenery, rains and snow at my place. I have got a differnt thinking of my place now and i am waiting for the dustups to get green. This is a long project but i surely believe this will look green one day
God it must be so frustrating. Every week I expect at some point to see rain for crying out loud and finally get a chance to see those plants get some water and the dam actually hold back some water for God sake. But it's the desert and of course week after week, after week, after week, after week dust.................Hence the name I suppose. You have the patience of Job.
In that area, most of the rain falls during the summer months. You can get some nice climatology data for the area by looking up El Paso on WeatherSpark.
I "had" a farm and walked into three years of worst drought in living memory and worst fires. was pure hell. I pledged never to curse rain again. Drought broke to record floods ( never seemed to have stopped now,, storms storms storms) But I had to near bite my toungue off dozens of times, bogged to the axles a mile from home with a day or a week of work to get out. If you need instruction in getting out of four wheels bogged to both diffs, ask me. very very simple solution. Need a tree.
If you are looking for perennials, look at milkweed plants. There are lots of desert species that put down very deep roots. They also attract lots of native pollinators.
Pruning and mulching. That's how you make the soil and the plants better. I once mulched a garden bed entirely out of tree sticks. But it was a success.
Some of the pruning of those plants seems a little rough. Especially with the dicots, they need to be pruned just above a node to promote quick healing and regrowth. I know you said you expected some of the plants to die anyway, but correctly pruning the plant could actually help it survive longer rather than accelerate their deaths, if done correctly.
Shaun, you spent a lot of time, effort, and money and you have grown enough green to chop and drop! Congrats! Looking forward to spring in the desert and seeing what sprouts up in your Texas oasis.
Sorghum will take a light frost. There's a decent chance it will regrow at least a little bit. That said... You really should be using a forage sorghum or a sorghum sudangrass hybrid to maximize biomass yield. What you have appears to be a dwarf sorghum for grain production, i.e., one that has been bred to maximize seed yield on a dwarf (low biomass!) plant. Just being the relatively uninformed armchair critic here, I think you should be considering starting some sorghum sudangrass (and perhaps other annuals) shortly before your next summer "rainy" season so you can transplant it as the rains start. Perennials are the long term goal, but when it comes to injecting some life into that gravel you call soil you should use strategically timed annual plantings to maximize productivity whenever you can.
@@Dmitrisnikioff Unless I missed something somewhere, you're likely speaking of Arundo donax ("elephant grass", also known as giant reed). Not the same plant. What I'm referring to are common agricultural plants with some drought tolerance widely grown (even in Texas) for feeding cattle.
shaun , I am from the uk. Love what you are doing hope you can be sucsefull with your ranch. Good luck dude and please keep us all updated with your progress.
Just a little tid bit that’ll help you out, if you use the hackzall for pruning, get the pruning specific blades. They work sooo much better and faster than regular wood cutting blades.
Pruning is hard and often seems counterintuitive and it is a long wait to see results. Patience and faith in the process and in the advice of your experts is what is needed and I can see you are doing your best to make it work! Best wishes and I am there with you, willing things to grow! Cheers!
A lot of comments here about more leafy trees. One thing people should remember is this simple rule of basically any plants: bigger leaves need more water and tiny leaves don't. Thats why rainforest trees have huge leaves and desert trees have tiny. Growing big leaves needs alot of energy and water for photosynthesis. Desert plants are capable of surviving in baking sun with close to no water because among their strategies they also photosynthesis so little it doesn't require much water. Also cactai are capable of closing the pores on their skin when its hot to avoid having water evaporate. Thats why Shaun is not planting big leafy trees, they wouldn't survive.
very few big leaves in deserts, prickles, spines, spherical leaves, no leaves just stem phyllodes, rolling leaves...water conservation is everything. In Cacti the leaves are lost and become spines, the trunk is the "leaf" . You never run out of sun in the desert , always out of water. Leaf adaptions to water conservation are endless and fascinating, taught courses on it in Australia. You get interested and just keep collecting examples.
Small leaves are also better for soil cover because they allow seeds to sprout more easily. I use both large leaves and small in my conservation work, and small leaves have proven to be far, far better in allowing plants to sprout. FWIW, the same is true of wood chips vs sawdust; I used chainsaw sawdust on paths because grass etc. sprouts right up through it whereas wood chips, being larger, inhibit sprouting.
the land acreage he's working with is no where near big enough to accomplish that. You'd need 10's of square miles of coverage, not just a few hundred acres.
I think it would be more helpful for the plants to trim the ends of all of the plants rather than select one leader and cut the rest down to the stem. doing this will get you tall but thinner trees and bushes. I think what you want is more bushy plants that spread horizontally. a tall thin tree is more exposed to dry air and hot sun than a short bushy tree which would help to build microclimates that hold water in the air and increase shade. the thicker parts of the stem/trunk/branches will be more robust and hold more water for the plant, and the ends will be less robust, more flexible and better for mulch. I'm not telling you how to suck eggs but I think the more you can get vegetation to spread and help cover the ground and hold water, the better.
you are right to think that a good boot is the answer to the work you do. this is an awesome idea and you put up a good video, this is my new favorite channel.
A thought: @12:00 when you're processing those bushes: cut all the vertical stems at maybe head height and process the top bits. then cut the remaining stems starting at the top and cutting off 6" at a time until you hit the ground. Organize at the end. you should be able to work right down a stem snip, snip, snip and not be fondling a loose stem on the ground when you cut it at the base first
I wish you all, the bestof rainy seasons, patience you already have, and determination, too, only lacking thing is water, and if we dont see again before end of year, happy new year
Yo seeing that dam from the air with the dozer really shows the scale of the project. Congrats on getting that pretty much done in a year with a handful of workers.
As others on here , my son got me some workpro portable pruners as a gift , he knew i would think them a bit lame and not use them , he stood there until i cut a branch in my living room . Boy o boy how right he was , 400 cuts per charge , on branches over an inch thick . It means you can put your energy into the job and not sweating for fun ,and the cuts are surgically clean. Never going back to cheap pruners with missing return springs or parts coming loose ever again.
Impressed with your progress on your 30 year teraforming project to turn the desert into a forest: terraces, bath tubs, beaver dam equivalents, a mulch factory and I applaud the FMNR pruning technique that you are using to promote growth and protect existing hardy plants. By the way, nice drone shots. Drones make such impressive video images.
Well done Shaun! Watching your progression in soil knowledge is great and I really think it's beneficial for people to see the process. I'm stoked to hear you are trimming the local flora, that its going to speed up the rate of all your projects. As a 20 year veteran of this kind of work, I recommend investing in a good set of knee pads, they will save your back and allow you to do "knee walking." One small suggestion: I would level out the ground around each plant by building a small berm on the downhill side. This will increase water infiltration and decrease nutrient leaching. I LOVE hearing you talk about soil contact with the detritus, I don't know where you got this information from, but it is spot on. I gotta say, you don't even sound like the same person as when you started. Aloha from the valley isle, I honestly would come by and pitch in if I lived closer, keep up the good works brother 🤙👍
If only Geoff Lawton could see the absolute beauty and poetry in motion of your very own "chop and drop". I would not be so concerned with eliminating the seed pods, as much as we know now that sorghum grass is a powerful and vigorous biomass producer. Way to go Shaun ....you are a major success.
I would recommend sowing a couple of native bushes to provide cover and shade from the sun. Also you can use their leaves as mulch to improve soil health
Bonnes fêtes Shaun ! - pruning your trees & bushes is great and will create natural parasols for your desert forest ! Don’t lose your energy by going slowly but surely as the most important thing is doing it strait for several years until the nature is strong enough for looking for herself! Kisses from very rainy Normandy France
If you are trying to connect different plant communities use hardscape. A large rock that's vertically oriented between the two provides shade for seed germination, erosion protection for mulch etc
Shaun I wish you the best man and I hope I get to watch you for years to come. I’m back in school studying botany so I can hopefully do stuff like this once I graduate! It’s my dream to repair and bring back species diversity in abused land
Shaun, I'm so impressed by your ongoing journey. Your humility in your learning process in an inspiration to everyone out there that might be hesitant in getting started. Great work!
For the native plants where you're willing to put in that kind of work, a semicircular, one rock high, wall of rocks on the downward slope - a mini rock dam, if you will - would slow rainwater and encourage both sediment and ground water at a location the plant could utilize.
Make sure your folks check the base of bushes or debris piles for snakes. If someone gets bit by a rattler, do you guys have a plan? Feliz Navidad and Happy New Year.
For native US venomous snakes the protocol is always get to a hospital ASAP, remain calm, do not apply a tourniquet, try to lance the wound, try to suck out the venom or anything else. Just remain calm to try to keep your heart rate down, and get to a hospital. Unless you're allergic or receive an unlucky bite directly into a major artery, rattlesnake bites are like a bad bee sting to most healthy adults. There's about 7-8000 venomous bites each year in the US with only an average of 5 deaths. Those deaths include people that keep cobras and stuff as pets and people that handle rattlesnakes in church services and refuse medical treatment. For comparison an average of 36 people/year are killed by dogs in the US.
hope this helps but when you go to start cutting them off the water source completely don't do it all at once. you will likely loose a lot of them slowly introduce them to dryer and dryer conditions. iv noticed when i take care of moms plants and mine where she makes me water them every day 3 times a day as soon as it gets hot basically all will kneel over and dye. yet all of mine seem to be fine going long periods without water and i find i can help them need less water by simply introducing them to drought stress and it seems to make it where i never really have to water so it might be a good idea to do so with the plants on the Terrice if there used to getting water from irrigation. don't know why it seem to do this but iv noticed it and it might happen to you and i don't want you to lose any of them by accident
I don't know Sean, maybe another year or two of sorghum isn't such a bad idea. You certainly need the moisture retaining mulch. Since it's an annual, I don't really believe sorghum is a threat to your long-term goal; rather an ally really. You could certainly discontinue it at any time should need to. Though I do understand you could replant it in the future should you feel the need to. The shade it provides could be thought of as something of an analogue of larger Woody stemmed plants in the future Note: I haven't taken into account sorghum's possible pest-attracting qualities. Pray for rain! Just my naive Layman's 2 cents Edit: oops! I admit I have no freakin idea how long succession of biota would take in a desert forest habitat. Man I'm just throwing this out there bcuz I want to see this succeed. Best always!
You should try planting Buffalo gourd/fox gourd, it would be very good as groundcover/living mulch and it has a deep taproot to help it get enough water
00:06 Sea Overton konzentriert sich auf das Ökosystemmanagement, indem er Pflanzen für das Wachstum im Jahr 2024 entfernt. 02:57 Pflanzengesundheit und -wachstum im Garten ansprechen. 06:15 Anpassung der Pflanzenpflege-Strategien an extreme Hitze- und Trockenheitsbedingungen. 08:55 Kollaboratives Vegetationsclearing auf sichere und effiziente Weise. 10:45 Beschneiden und Organisieren von Pflanzenmaterial für optimales Wachstum. 14:05 Die Beschneidung von Pflanzen für ein gesundes Ökosystem Gleichgewicht. 16:49 Das Beschneiden von Bäumen zur Gesundheit führt zu temporären visuellen Rückgängen. 18:53 Das Projekt umfasst den Bau eines Damms zur besseren Hochwasserprävention.
Shaun, I would like to recommend that you get yourself a cordless electric garden pruner. Much more efficient & less damaging to the branches you are trimming. The saw you are currently using can possibly leave a wound easily accessible to rot, disease & insect damage. That is just my opinion. Keep up the good work. Peace ✌️
Maybe look at doing an experiment in two washes? In one, manually prune the plants. In the other use that weed wacker. See what results you get. If the manual pruning doesn't show significant benefits, then you can save a bunch of time by just using the machine
In terms of mulch I've had good success putting down the large cut trimmings reasonably close together then covering with scattered grass clippings. The effect of th clippings is to trap air between the cut material so wind doesn't steal moisture. BTW, have you checked which species will respond to cutting by getting more dense growth? How to trim depends on how each plant responds. Also, dead branches in bushes benefit the bushes by providing shade. I've seen brush die when too much dead material was cut out! About the dam: I would cover the sides of the dam with a mix of wood chips and grass clippings. That combination works well to reduce erosion on the sloping sides.
If you stick poles into the ground, you can weave these long, finger-like branches through them, creating a basket-like structure perfect for building the smaller dams on your property.
I don't know how close you are to a larger town, but coffee roasters have those lovely big bags they sell or give away. I am using them in Southern Oregon to stuff into the ditches, I fill them with pine cones which slow the water,catch the silt and it seems to be bringing the soil level up. They would shade your soil around your plants too.. keep the winter rains from washing mulch away.
@dustupstexas would love to see it! Even without much rain, this year has had great improvements, and putting into perspective how far along you've come would surely be a reassuring way to demonstrate the progress made :)
Shaun please talk more about your end goal. I've watched a number of your videos. But, I still am not clear about why you're doing this and what you hope to achieve. Do you plan to build a house and live there one day? Is this just an experiment? Are you doing this to grow a RUclips channel? There seems to be easier ways to make money. Have you actually made money with this channel? Or, have you reinvested everything back into the ranch so far? Help me understand what's going on here!
There is a video where Shaun visits an actual desert forest, complete with deer carcass. I think that transforming Dustups to that kind of landscape is the goal.
I live on the south-east coast of Australia. Three days ago, I got up and looked in the backyard to find an Asian cuckoo merrily eating fruit from one of my bird's eye chilli plants. Birds around here have an odd fascination with them for some reason. We rarely see rabbits or hares as they tend to stick to more rural areas. However, I bet those suckers would at least have a taste test.
I don't know if you guys have them in America but here in Australia we have back packs called Camel Packs,. They have an insulated section with a removable water bladder and a hose that runs out over your shoulder to a tap/mouth peice. They are great for hiking, working, mountain/motor biking. They come in various sized back packs with different sized bladders. I think it would be a great idea where you are and with what you're doing.
yes we built a dam on a dry gully in Australia in an area with good rainfall. Looked like it hardly ever even ran a dribble. Well, big storms in Oz are big and one big storm took the whole thing. We learned from locals with 100 years experience that a creek you can easily walk across, 12 inches deep and 10 yards wide can leaving debris 10 yards high up trees in big storms. They are fast and brief and no one is about to see as conditions are impossible, but they are forces of nature. All streams are controlled in cities so you dont see it.
Coming from England, it looks like a place I expect to be VERY hot, I wonder just how cold it gets in the winter. In an environment that appears to be allergic to trees, I bet the wind chill can be fierce.
I am a bit worried about that dam. It appears to be made of almost all sand, rock and decomposed granite. If it gets water behind it, it will quickly saturate. Once saturated it will loose all stability and quickly fail. Once it fails all that water will cause damage downstream.
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Perhaps you can contact an arborist to get you wood chips as mulch. I heard that's free. I just don't know how to go about depositing it in the desert as I doubt they'll dump their material way out there.
Hey Shaun!! Try planting your trees with cactus pads or agave leaves. They do this in Italy where there isn’t any water. The cactus stores water for the tree. Chop them up in the bottom of the tree hole and completely cover the cactus and water once at the time of planting. And sparsely water here and there after.
Great job!! That’s going to be amazing when it rains!!
Merry Christmas to you and your family!!
@@dustupstexas You sure do get a lot of advice, Shaun! Nice boots. Awesome to see your efforts through all the setbacks and learning taking root and growing!! Happy December to your family, and may the first rains be gentle and long lasting!
For the last two years, I've been working on creating a homestead. I have done a lot on my property (which started with nothing), but still no house. I'm feeling more and more confident in my abilities in what I've learned over the last two years, to be the one to build my own house. I started from nothing, lived in a city my whole life, I never even used a power drill until 4 years ago. I've progressed a lot since then, but I have one major progression still left.
I was just telling my wife, if you can build your desert forest, with all the odds stacked against you, then I can build my own house! I'm looking forward to both of us accomplishing our dreams!
keep chipping away mate , you will get there
I love this
dad built all and everything we owned in the 50's, bar the glass and tiles steel and cement. Built our brick shed, Built the brick house, stripped cars to last nut and bolt and rebuilt, built the TV, the welder, the lathe, the pedestal drill.... and on and on and on, then he got bored and bought a farm hahahah for weekends, built the road, built the house, rebuilt the tractor, rebuilt , several times, a Nord bulldozer. We even re machined and re lapped the crankshaft still in the engine. Gave up on that, moved away bought 500 acre farm. This time he got abuilder to build the house but spent as much time telling the builder how to build, arguing the building codes and engineering certifications with council. Basically taught the council many many things ( they just had THEIR rules, which were NOT the proper engineering specs.) he always won. You grow up in this environment and think you learn nothing, hahahahahahahahahha, you have a complete degree in so many skills.
Mulch, Grow, Mulch and Mulch! It takes a long time but you are giving your Land the best starting point from now! That’s what matters! I wonder if you could organise a “Dustups” Compost Heap for Volunteers to drop off Manure/ Cuttings/ Grass etc somewhere on the Highway, on route to your place, where a massive Compost Heap could be held. I think many people would love to contribute. Especially when your Dustups is so inaccessible.
in this climate though the compost will be dry all the time and composting needs moisture. BUT I think this idea might work if you digg a deep hole of maybe 3 to 6 foot and let them dump all the organic matter in there.
Try cutting sleeves into cardboard so it looks like the cut on a "do not disturb" sign for a hotel door, then put it around the base of the Agave (weigh down with rocks)to block the sun from hitting the ground and evaporating moisture whenever you water them.
I'll make it out there when I have a couple days to spare. I just don't have the time rn
We will all be excited to hear your on-site commentary for sure! Botany doesn't pay but it is engrossing.
@@CrimePaysButBotanyDoesntWe are all looking forward to it!
I love your videos CPBBD. I'll be glad to see you out there.
Careful with rocks. They heat in the sun and radiate that heat, cooking plant roots around them.
Love what you are doing. Just a few quick tips on germination, almost all seeds do not require light to germinate. In a lot of cases excess light will sterilize and kill seeds. You should be trying to cover the seeded areas with a thin layer of mulch to protect it from sun, wind and keep moisture in the soil. The little seedling will wiggle its way around smaller mulch so as long as you dont have a log on top life will find a way!
This!
I live in kashmir, the most green valley , people call it paradise on earth , every week i see dustups on youtube,Now i have started appreciating greenery, rains and snow at my place. I have got a differnt thinking of my place now and i am waiting for the dustups to get green. This is a long project but i surely believe this will look green one day
God it must be so frustrating. Every week I expect at some point to see rain for crying out loud and finally get a chance to see those plants get some water and the dam actually hold back some water for God sake. But it's the desert and of course week after week, after week, after week, after week dust.................Hence the name I suppose. You have the patience of Job.
ITS called Dessert for a reason😅
😂 The rain will come when it comes. Until then, onward!
the next happy rain dance will be a good one for sure !
In that area, most of the rain falls during the summer months. You can get some nice climatology data for the area by looking up El Paso on WeatherSpark.
Desert
I sure wish you would get some rain.
Good luck!
Don’t we all rain 🌧️ rain
I "had" a farm and walked into three years of worst drought in living memory and worst fires. was pure hell. I pledged never to curse rain again. Drought broke to record floods ( never seemed to have stopped now,, storms storms storms) But I had to near bite my toungue off dozens of times, bogged to the axles a mile from home with a day or a week of work to get out. If you need instruction in getting out of four wheels bogged to both diffs, ask me. very very simple solution. Need a tree.
If you are looking for perennials, look at milkweed plants. There are lots of desert species that put down very deep roots. They also attract lots of native pollinators.
Pruning and mulching. That's how you make the soil and the plants better. I once mulched a garden bed entirely out of tree sticks. But it was a success.
Some of the pruning of those plants seems a little rough. Especially with the dicots, they need to be pruned just above a node to promote quick healing and regrowth. I know you said you expected some of the plants to die anyway, but correctly pruning the plant could actually help it survive longer rather than accelerate their deaths, if done correctly.
That is how I see it too. So far I am having a hard time getting through this one.....
Another great video Shaun! I'm super excited to stick with this channel long-term and see where you are 1 year from now, 5 years from now etc.!
I like down to earth videos and I got to say your Desert Dust up is about as down to Earth as you can get .
Shaun, you spent a lot of time, effort, and money and you have grown enough green to chop and drop! Congrats! Looking forward to spring in the desert and seeing what sprouts up in your Texas oasis.
Sorghum will take a light frost. There's a decent chance it will regrow at least a little bit. That said... You really should be using a forage sorghum or a sorghum sudangrass hybrid to maximize biomass yield. What you have appears to be a dwarf sorghum for grain production, i.e., one that has been bred to maximize seed yield on a dwarf (low biomass!) plant.
Just being the relatively uninformed armchair critic here, I think you should be considering starting some sorghum sudangrass (and perhaps other annuals) shortly before your next summer "rainy" season so you can transplant it as the rains start. Perennials are the long term goal, but when it comes to injecting some life into that gravel you call soil you should use strategically timed annual plantings to maximize productivity whenever you can.
from what I remember, that plant was vetoed as invasive
@@Dmitrisnikioff Unless I missed something somewhere, you're likely speaking of Arundo donax ("elephant grass", also known as giant reed). Not the same plant. What I'm referring to are common agricultural plants with some drought tolerance widely grown (even in Texas) for feeding cattle.
shaun , I am from the uk. Love what you are doing hope you can be sucsefull with your ranch. Good luck dude and please keep us all updated with your progress.
The seedhead pods sell for 50 cents apiece as food for caged birds at the pet stores .
Sorghum seed heads that is .
I met a seedhead once
I'm glad Shaun is patient explaining his methods
Just a little tid bit that’ll help you out, if you use the hackzall for pruning, get the pruning specific blades. They work sooo much better and faster than regular wood cutting blades.
Great tip
So exciting to SEE the growth after so much work
Pruning is hard and often seems counterintuitive and it is a long wait to see results. Patience and faith in the process and in the advice of your experts is what is needed and I can see you are doing your best to make it work! Best wishes and I am there with you, willing things to grow! Cheers!
Love the dam. Catch all the rain you can. In every way you can. When the rain comes, none of it should seep away
A lot of comments here about more leafy trees. One thing people should remember is this simple rule of basically any plants: bigger leaves need more water and tiny leaves don't. Thats why rainforest trees have huge leaves and desert trees have tiny. Growing big leaves needs alot of energy and water for photosynthesis. Desert plants are capable of surviving in baking sun with close to no water because among their strategies they also photosynthesis so little it doesn't require much water. Also cactai are capable of closing the pores on their skin when its hot to avoid having water evaporate. Thats why Shaun is not planting big leafy trees, they wouldn't survive.
Plants also have an upper limit to receive sunlight. Once they reach that limit, they shut down and begin to senesce.
very few big leaves in deserts, prickles, spines, spherical leaves, no leaves just stem phyllodes, rolling leaves...water conservation is everything. In Cacti the leaves are lost and become spines, the trunk is the "leaf" . You never run out of sun in the desert , always out of water. Leaf adaptions to water conservation are endless and fascinating, taught courses on it in Australia. You get interested and just keep collecting examples.
Small leaves are also better for soil cover because they allow seeds to sprout more easily. I use both large leaves and small in my conservation work, and small leaves have proven to be far, far better in allowing plants to sprout. FWIW, the same is true of wood chips vs sawdust; I used chainsaw sawdust on paths because grass etc. sprouts right up through it whereas wood chips, being larger, inhibit sprouting.
cant wait until dust ups stores enough water to change the weather in your area
the land acreage he's working with is no where near big enough to accomplish that. You'd need 10's of square miles of coverage, not just a few hundred acres.
@ its only the beginning
Water will make a difference, however it's trees that will actually attract rain....yes that's a fact..
Trees attract rain!!
👏👏👏
I think it would be more helpful for the plants to trim the ends of all of the plants rather than select one leader and cut the rest down to the stem. doing this will get you tall but thinner trees and bushes. I think what you want is more bushy plants that spread horizontally. a tall thin tree is more exposed to dry air and hot sun than a short bushy tree which would help to build microclimates that hold water in the air and increase shade. the thicker parts of the stem/trunk/branches will be more robust and hold more water for the plant, and the ends will be less robust, more flexible and better for mulch. I'm not telling you how to suck eggs but I think the more you can get vegetation to spread and help cover the ground and hold water, the better.
just cut the dead stuff during an extreme drought is my 2 cents. Great work Dust ups crew.
you are right to think that a good boot is the answer to the work you do. this is an awesome idea and you put up a good video, this is my new favorite channel.
A nice rule of thumb I learned is "green cuttings mix with the soil, brown stuff leave on top as mulch"
A thought: @12:00 when you're processing those bushes: cut all the vertical stems at maybe head height and process the top bits. then cut the remaining stems starting at the top and cutting off 6" at a time until you hit the ground. Organize at the end. you should be able to work right down a stem snip, snip, snip and not be fondling a loose stem on the ground when you cut it at the base first
Merry Christmas, push on ! 🫶🏽🔥
The chopped sorghum will add sugar to the soil and aid in microbes, etc
Man, all this preparation, and we're just waiting months and months and months for rain to see how it performs.
I wish you all, the bestof rainy seasons, patience you already have, and determination, too, only lacking thing is water, and if we dont see again before end of year, happy new year
Yo seeing that dam from the air with the dozer really shows the scale of the project. Congrats on getting that pretty much done in a year with a handful of workers.
You also can see it on Google Maps and Apple Maps.
Merry Christmas 🎄and a lot of rain ☔️ 🌝💧💦🌵🌱🌳🌲
Next year you should grow sorghumsudan hybrid. It grows tall and does not need a lot of water. It would produce a large amount of biomass in a season.
look at these thick healthy stems. Its impressive how they have grown over the year. They will be good soil in trhe furutre
As others on here , my son got me some workpro portable pruners as a gift , he knew i would think them a bit lame and not use them , he stood there until i cut a branch in my living room . Boy o boy how right he was , 400 cuts per charge , on branches over an inch thick . It means you can put your energy into the job and not sweating for fun ,and the cuts are surgically clean. Never going back to cheap pruners with missing return springs or parts coming loose ever again.
Amazing work and dedication
All my respect
Impressed with your progress on your 30 year teraforming project to turn the desert into a forest: terraces, bath tubs, beaver dam equivalents, a mulch factory and I applaud the FMNR pruning technique that you are using to promote growth and protect existing hardy plants. By the way, nice drone shots. Drones make such impressive video images.
Well done Shaun! Watching your progression in soil knowledge is great and I really think it's beneficial for people to see the process. I'm stoked to hear you are trimming the local flora, that its going to speed up the rate of all your projects. As a 20 year veteran of this kind of work, I recommend investing in a good set of knee pads, they will save your back and allow you to do "knee walking." One small suggestion: I would level out the ground around each plant by building a small berm on the downhill side. This will increase water infiltration and decrease nutrient leaching. I LOVE hearing you talk about soil contact with the detritus, I don't know where you got this information from, but it is spot on. I gotta say, you don't even sound like the same person as when you started. Aloha from the valley isle, I honestly would come by and pitch in if I lived closer, keep up the good works brother 🤙👍
Yay first year of biomass cut!
I have no advice. Just enjoying watching you learn from your successes and failures.
If only Geoff Lawton could see the absolute beauty and poetry in motion of your very own "chop and drop".
I would not be so concerned with eliminating the seed pods, as much as we know now that sorghum grass is a powerful and vigorous biomass producer.
Way to go Shaun ....you are a major success.
Merry Christmas, Shaun!
Knowing sorghum, they will ignore the winter and grow right back again.
I want some rain dammit! See what happens
I would recommend sowing a couple of native bushes to provide cover and shade from the sun. Also you can use their leaves as mulch to improve soil health
Nothing grows in a freeze
Bonnes fêtes Shaun ! - pruning your trees & bushes is great and will create natural parasols for your desert forest ! Don’t lose your energy by going slowly but surely as the most important thing is doing it strait for several years until the nature is strong enough for looking for herself! Kisses from very rainy Normandy France
Looking forward to one day, years from now, you're doing this in the shade.
LOOKING GOOD!
merry Christmas Shaun, Brandon, and all the volunteers!
Ever thought about growing hemp for biomass? In the right conditions it grows heaps, and good for regrowing quickly? 🤷♂️ Not for smoking Shaun…!
Yes. It requires a $600 permit
Ya did well this year, Who knows a few might survive to sprout again next year,
If you are trying to connect different plant communities use hardscape. A large rock that's vertically oriented between the two provides shade for seed germination, erosion protection for mulch etc
Great work . Who says you can’t grow things in the rocks 🪨 in the desert 🌵 with no rain 🌧️
Shaun I wish you the best man and I hope I get to watch you for years to come. I’m back in school studying botany so I can hopefully do stuff like this once I graduate! It’s my dream to repair and bring back species diversity in abused land
I love seeing your progress! Keep it up!
Shaun, I'm so impressed by your ongoing journey. Your humility in your learning process in an inspiration to everyone out there that might be hesitant in getting started. Great work!
Might I suggest and even denser planting out of Sorghum in future sections/seasons.
Our plan for next year is testing annuals as a nurse crop. We need much better germinations
@@dustupstexas That's true. Can't wait to see the results!
It is going to look great a week after the first rain.
For the native plants where you're willing to put in that kind of work, a semicircular, one rock high, wall of rocks on the downward slope - a mini rock dam, if you will - would slow rainwater and encourage both sediment and ground water at a location the plant could utilize.
There are studies in Canada that say that roots do communicate with each others growth, so good way to discover that truth about that in the desert.
Make sure your folks check the base of bushes or debris piles for snakes. If someone gets bit by a rattler, do you guys have a plan?
Feliz Navidad and Happy New Year.
For native US venomous snakes the protocol is always get to a hospital ASAP, remain calm, do not apply a tourniquet, try to lance the wound, try to suck out the venom or anything else. Just remain calm to try to keep your heart rate down, and get to a hospital. Unless you're allergic or receive an unlucky bite directly into a major artery, rattlesnake bites are like a bad bee sting to most healthy adults. There's about 7-8000 venomous bites each year in the US with only an average of 5 deaths. Those deaths include people that keep cobras and stuff as pets and people that handle rattlesnakes in church services and refuse medical treatment. For comparison an average of 36 people/year are killed by dogs in the US.
@@EarthWalkerOneThere’s no hospital close by though
Love this content of mulching a native vegetation of its own dead wood and stuff. Thank you for sharing ❤❤
Its looking great 👏✌️👍 you are on the right track i hope the snow/frost brings the water for you ✌️
cant wait for some actual rain so we can see those damns fill up a little and add all that water to the ground water
The first beginnings of hardwood🌳
Startup🥾
hope this helps but when you go to start cutting them off the water source completely don't do it all at once. you will likely loose a lot of them slowly introduce them to dryer and dryer conditions. iv noticed when i take care of moms plants and mine where she makes me water them every day 3 times a day as soon as it gets hot basically all will kneel over and dye. yet all of mine seem to be fine going long periods without water and i find i can help them need less water by simply introducing them to drought stress and it seems to make it where i never really have to water so it might be a good idea to do so with the plants on the Terrice if there used to getting water from irrigation. don't know why it seem to do this but iv noticed it and it might happen to you and i don't want you to lose any of them by accident
Merry Christmas and a happy( and I mean Rainy) new year!
I don't know Sean, maybe another year or two of sorghum isn't such a bad idea. You certainly need the moisture retaining mulch. Since it's an annual, I don't really believe sorghum is a threat to your long-term goal; rather an ally really. You could certainly discontinue it at any time should need to. Though I do understand you could replant it in the future should you feel the need to.
The shade it provides could be thought of as something of an analogue of larger Woody stemmed plants in the future
Note: I haven't taken into account sorghum's possible pest-attracting qualities. Pray for rain!
Just my naive Layman's 2 cents
Edit: oops! I admit I have no freakin idea how long succession of biota would take in a desert forest habitat. Man I'm just throwing this out there bcuz I want to see this succeed. Best always!
You should try planting Buffalo gourd/fox gourd, it would be very good as groundcover/living mulch and it has a deep taproot to help it get enough water
00:06 Sea Overton konzentriert sich auf das Ökosystemmanagement, indem er Pflanzen für das Wachstum im Jahr 2024 entfernt.
02:57 Pflanzengesundheit und -wachstum im Garten ansprechen.
06:15 Anpassung der Pflanzenpflege-Strategien an extreme Hitze- und Trockenheitsbedingungen.
08:55 Kollaboratives Vegetationsclearing auf sichere und effiziente Weise.
10:45 Beschneiden und Organisieren von Pflanzenmaterial für optimales Wachstum.
14:05 Die Beschneidung von Pflanzen für ein gesundes Ökosystem Gleichgewicht.
16:49 Das Beschneiden von Bäumen zur Gesundheit führt zu temporären visuellen Rückgängen.
18:53 Das Projekt umfasst den Bau eines Damms zur besseren Hochwasserprävention.
Ja, aber warum auf Deutsch?🤣
Schöne Zusammenfassung.
Shaun, I would like to recommend that you get yourself a cordless electric garden pruner. Much more efficient & less damaging to the branches you are trimming. The saw you are currently using can possibly leave a wound easily accessible to rot, disease & insect damage. That is just my opinion. Keep up the good work. Peace ✌️
Maybe look at doing an experiment in two washes?
In one, manually prune the plants. In the other use that weed wacker. See what results you get.
If the manual pruning doesn't show significant benefits, then you can save a bunch of time by just using the machine
It's more complicated than that. The brush cutter can't get through the tree branches
Yes you are Sir , thank you .
Thanks for another great video
Following you out of New Zealand
Another Kiwi here enjoying this project.
@@stevecorrigan5139 Awesome Not an issue we have in NZ
(For aesthetics 😂) I would clip the very top growth point of Tina so she starts branching
Forget the beaver dams, I’d love to see your Parks and Wildlife Authority sponsor some experimental cloud seeding! 😂
Legend in the making.
In terms of mulch I've had good success putting down the large cut trimmings reasonably close together then covering with scattered grass clippings. The effect of th clippings is to trap air between the cut material so wind doesn't steal moisture.
BTW, have you checked which species will respond to cutting by getting more dense growth? How to trim depends on how each plant responds.
Also, dead branches in bushes benefit the bushes by providing shade. I've seen brush die when too much dead material was cut out!
About the dam: I would cover the sides of the dam with a mix of wood chips and grass clippings. That combination works well to reduce erosion on the sloping sides.
These green plants sure have interesting names
Thanks for another great episode!
Merry Christmas Dustups
If you stick poles into the ground, you can weave these long, finger-like branches through them, creating a basket-like structure perfect for building the smaller dams on your property.
I don't know how close you are to a larger town, but coffee roasters have those lovely big bags they sell or give away. I am using them in Southern Oregon to stuff into the ditches, I fill them with pine cones which slow the water,catch the silt and it seems to be bringing the soil level up.
They would shade your soil around your plants too.. keep the winter rains from washing mulch away.
Are you gonna do a year recap once the year ends, to show the before and after of this year?
That's a good idea
@dustupstexas would love to see it! Even without much rain, this year has had great improvements, and putting into perspective how far along you've come would surely be a reassuring way to demonstrate the progress made :)
Thanks for the updates and sharing
Lopper > sawzall
Merry Christmas dust ups
When someone donates nice plants, please take them home baby them for a few weeks.
Once the nopales are established with new growth they can be thinned and replanted.
Shaun please talk more about your end goal. I've watched a number of your videos. But, I still am not clear about why you're doing this and what you hope to achieve. Do you plan to build a house and live there one day? Is this just an experiment?
Are you doing this to grow a RUclips channel? There seems to be easier ways to make money. Have you actually made money with this channel? Or, have you reinvested everything back into the ranch so far? Help me understand what's going on here!
It's all gone back into the ranch. Next week talks more about the big picture
There is a video where Shaun visits an actual desert forest, complete with deer carcass. I think that transforming Dustups to that kind of landscape is the goal.
I live on the south-east coast of Australia. Three days ago, I got up and looked in the backyard to find an Asian cuckoo merrily eating fruit from one of my bird's eye chilli plants. Birds around here have an odd fascination with them for some reason. We rarely see rabbits or hares as they tend to stick to more rural areas. However, I bet those suckers would at least have a taste test.
Merry Christmas to all!
God Bless Everyone!
I don't know if you guys have them in America but here in Australia we have back packs called Camel Packs,. They have an insulated section with a removable water bladder and a hose that runs out over your shoulder to a tap/mouth peice.
They are great for hiking, working, mountain/motor biking.
They come in various sized back packs with different sized bladders.
I think it would be a great idea where you are and with what you're doing.
Those were invented in texas yes
They've been around in the U.S. for a couple decades now. I bought my first one in 2002.
I find it easier to walk to get water than keep it on my back. I only use them for hiking
Praying for rain for you. Eat them jackrabbits cookumup.
Jackrabbit guts make good fertilizer.
yes we built a dam on a dry gully in Australia in an area with good rainfall. Looked like it hardly ever even ran a dribble. Well, big storms in Oz are big and one big storm took the whole thing. We learned from locals with 100 years experience that a creek you can easily walk across, 12 inches deep and 10 yards wide can leaving debris 10 yards high up trees in big storms. They are fast and brief and no one is about to see as conditions are impossible, but they are forces of nature. All streams are controlled in cities so you dont see it.
Have you considered planting lowland flora above the dams?
Coming from England, it looks like a place I expect to be VERY hot, I wonder just how cold it gets in the winter. In an environment that appears to be allergic to trees, I bet the wind chill can be fierce.
they get snow there . one extreme to the other . tough environment.
-12C is the closest it gets
@@dustupstexas About minus seven is the closest I have felt. The trees help to keep the warm in. Good luck with your's, chap.
consider backing the dam up with a gabion wall, just in case you a 1000 year rain event.
I am a bit worried about that dam. It appears to be made of almost all sand, rock and decomposed granite. If it gets water behind it, it will quickly saturate. Once saturated it will loose all stability and quickly fail. Once it fails all that water will cause damage downstream.