Think about just one little piece of the carbon cycle. Carbon is in dry leaves, branches, old dead garden stuff, and paper. When those things burn, the carbon flies away into the sky.
I think most of us have learned that carbon in the sky is a bad thing, holding earth’s heat like a mother hen fluffing her feathers to keep her chicks warm.
Burning the leaf pile was lots of fun. We could keep it going until suppertime by finding little twigs to feed it. How about a big roaring brush pile in the pasture after we cleared some brush? Marshmallows on a stick, melting, sagging, burning black!
Little did we know that the smoke, in eye-stinging eddies, contributed to global warming.
Ways to keep carbon in the ground can be interesting and productive. I cut a lot of sumac in the fall and piled it 15 or 20 feet from the bird feeding area.
When a hungry sharp-shinned hawk appears, little birds dive into the brush pile. An hour later, little faces peek out as the tree sparrows and juncos cautiously look around for the predator.
Not that I like to deprive the little hawk its dinner. After all, it has to eat, too, but it doesn’t seem fair to attract lots of juicy little birds in one place for the hawk’s profit.
Instead of clipping off all the gone-by plants, we leave them to slow the blowing snow, inviting it to settle like a blanket over the garden. Birds like some of the flower seeds.
If you misidentify a pigweed seed head, just call it “lambs quarters” and let a few seedlings grow. It has a light, mild taste in salads, or as cooked greens, and it freezes well for winter greens. It is related to spinach, and gentler, but if you leave several thousand tiny pigweed seeds, you probably won’t do that again.
A common cause of damage to young plants in winter is frost heaving. Moisture in the soil freezes in crystals that can lift soil and plants, exposing the roots to drying. Covering the soil with mulch and snow may keep the ground from freezing clear to China; but more importantly, it prevents frost heaving and premature tender growth.
Snow drops seem to be delayed by thick mulch, but they come up early through the thin snow under the Japanese quince bush.
I used to think that calling snow “poor man’s fertilizer,” was just about keeping soil moist to welcome plant growth in spring. Now science finds that it’s not just the water in snow.
According to herbalist, educator, and food writer Susan Belsinger, in her article “Snow: Poor Man’s Fertilizer,” published on the Fine Gardening website, finegardening.com:
“In fact, snow does contain nitrogen and other particulates like sulfur, which it collects as it falls through the atmosphere, however so do rain, sleet, and hail, and believe it or not, lightning. Rain and lightning contain more nitrogen than snow. Statistics from agricultural studies estimate that as a result of snow and rainfall averages, between 2 to 12 pounds of nitrogen are deposited per acre in the U.S. per year.”
Seems to me, 12 pounds per acre must fall in places with lots of rain, snow, and lightning. Like on a mountain where the weather might be too violent for plants like big, blowsy modern irises.
A life-staining climate on our planet depends on keeping as much carbon as possible out of the sky over Mt. Washington and everywhere else.
