Crispy-dry weather and Legacy Infrastructure

 

Dry, crispy weather ahead of us. Look at the separation between the predicted temperatures and the dew-point. Very unlike Michigan.

That is lovely weather to work in as long as I stay hydrated with "electrolytes"...its what plants crave. 

Legacy infrastructure

I have hazy memories of widely spaced walnut trees growing on the hillside that is now the Hill Orchard.

There are still walnut trees growing in the bottom-land at the base of the hill.

The tireless Lucas Machias sent me an article quite some time ago. It was about how the roots of trees in a forest will cross over each other and as they gain girth, they will graft together.

That is a problem when something like Oak Wilt strikes. The disease organism can spread from tree-to-tree-to-tree without the need for a vector.

The positive side is that if the top of a tree dies, the roots continue to live as the neighboring trees continue to trade carbohydrates for water and nutrients. What is totally weird about this is that trees will root-graft to trees of other species!

So that has me wondering, are the walnut roots that are bedeviling the bottom half of the Hill Orchard legacy roots that once belonged to the trees that grew on the hill and have been kept alive via root-grafts with the bottom-land walnut trees? Or are they roots that have always belonged to the trees growing in the bottom-land?

One of the tidbits that stimulated this thought is that the roots we cut when trenching last fall were not where I expected based on the mortality patterns in the Hill Orchard, nor was the diameter of the roots that we cut what I expected. 

If they are vampire roots from the trees that were cut decades ago, then cutting the connection between them and the bottom-land trees means that it is unlikely that the bottom-land trees will make the investment to regrow roots out that far from their stem. If those roots have always belonged to the bottom-land trees and no others, then they will probably grow back.

I am sure there are many other analogies to this issue. Legacy infrastructure can be waste-water and storm drains deeply buried beneath the surface, COBOL or FORTRAN programming or traditional curriculum and "trades" training in social backwaters. Those resources are darned near invisible until they become extinct. And then the cost to replace them is astronomical.