New Zealander Ayla Hutchinson, now 16, invented this ingenuous device when she was just 14 years old.
After seeing her mother cut her hand while using a splitting axe, Ayla set out to invent a safer way to split firewood. Her initial invention, made of welded scrap metal, won her first prize at her school science fair.
Since then, she’s won a Rising Star Award from Buy New Zealand Made, the Fieldays Young Inventor
of the Year Award, and the New Zealand Innovation Most Inspiring
Individual Award.
The Kindling cracker has gone on to be a bestseller on Amazon. Every sale supports her burgeoning business.
Some cultivars will do this not once, but twice, making a three-level onion ‘tree,’ Although most will stop at an onion of double height.
The stalks eventually bend over from the weight of the bulblets, and re-plant themselves about 20-40 cm from the parent plant. This motion progresses season-to-season, which, if sped up, would give the appearance of the onion “walking” around the garden.
The larger onion in the ground, the stalks and leaves, and the bulblets on the top can all be eaten, and once planted, these onions will stick around for the long haul.
Pollarding is a pruning method that is much like coppicing, but branches are removed above the grazing line to avoid damage by herbivores; traditionally it has been performed to harvest food, fuel, and fodder on rotations that were between 2-15 years.
The practice of pollarding has evolved into an aesthetic of tree maintenance that is common in urban areas, where trees cannot be allowed to grow to their full dimensions. Like many modes of forcing plants to maintain juvenile tissues (ie. bonsai), pollarding often makes the organisms that undergo it live longer.
This several-decades-old tree was not well-maintained, and fruit production was waning, so I opted for a drastic pruning strategy. Over the next three years, I will cut each of the three leaders down another metre (one per season, so as to avoid over-stressing the tree, and to maintain fruit production). I don’t think there is much of a point in having an apple tree in a domestic garden if you can’t easily reach up and pluck a fruit, and that’s not happening when the fruit-bearing limbs are 3 metres off the ground.
I suggest this renewal strategy to a lot of people trying to add new trees to an established landscape. Pollarded trees allow more solar energy to reach shrubs, perennials, or seedling trees, and the process of pollarding generates resources like firewood, mulch, and timber for hügelkultur.
The lichen-covered wood from this single old apple tree made a dense hügelkultur mound that spans 5 metres in length, at 0.5 metres in height and width.
*** I am happy to report that despite the drastic winter pruning, this tree is
alive and kicking this spring, as is the crabapple I pollarded last year!
I use seeds and cuttings from “the wild” all the time: using local species is a much more sustainable way to garden. I’ve dug up and transplanted common seedling trees from the local forested area (those that were doomed to be shaded out), or taken forest deadfall to inoculate my soil with beneficial fungi and microorganisms. I also coppice wood from the local area.
It’s one thing to dig up a common tree or shrub in a non-threatened habitat, it’s quite another to be harvesting things like rare orchids and carnivorous plants in threatened habitats.
Basically, try and use good judgement. There is no one right answer.
Have to agree it can be a very very grey subject overall and changes depending on what plant it is. (also gotta add cacti to the orchid/carnivorous plants at threat list, all three groups grow so slow and specialized that it’s so darn easy to poach them into extinction) Though Rarity / Ecological Status (locally and/or internationally) are very important factors as to what plants must absolutely not be touched whatsoever. For example of international; vs local status, Asimina triloba and Magnolia acuminata could be considered common enough internationally in their natural ranges, but in Ontario/Canada the specific genotype of these plants is considered threatened to full on endangered.
In my very local area I’m the only one who’s even touched the native flora of the woodlands here and primarily either to start stock nursery plants (in such cases I’ve kept my collecting extremely stingy/minimal and only in areas where they are very very very common) or to just move them due to the threat of their habitat being destroyed. In other areas of Ontario though the very same native plants are being heavily poached in perfectly unthreatened habitat, the very reason as to why natives like Arisaema and Trillum are very much on the teetering between doing just fine to being classified as threatened due to poachers. There may even come a time where such species are very much considered endangered species if it were to keep up like this. If you can access nursery propagated/raised stock of plants of your local genotype, seek those first above most of anything else.
In the case of seeds/cuttings the same rules should be applied as collecting an entire plant, and if/when collecting is morally sound one still needs to be equally cautious; for seeds one must take few and not all from one single individual and only if it’s the species is producing heavily in it’s habitat; not only for the sake of the plant’s propagation in the wild, but also for the sake of the wildlife that depend on the fruits/seeds for food. Cuttings one needs to only do so on the most vigorous/healthy specimens to be VERY biosanitary and keep any tools/hands sterilized, any wounds on wild plants can be an invitation for fungi/pests (native or otherwise) which can become detrimental to the plants.
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