Hey, folks, welcome back. This is Andy with the Port Pearls Almanac. This is part two of our conversation with Mark Krasik. If you haven't listened to part one,

hop over to the episode before this and take a listen. For the rest of you, let's continue forward with this

interview. So it definitely leaves a lot to be desired in that sense.

What I've really struggled with personally in my experiences when it comes to tree hay is around managing for tree hay and coppicing at the same time.

Because in a lot of ways, they don't always really overlap in terms of the tree management

to keep the tree healthy.

So I don't know if you think you could talk a little bit about that or?

Yeah, I think what I'm, what I think you're referring to is the fact that like generally

with coppicing, best practice would would be that you do all your cutting during the dormant

months.

Exactly.

Which means that, you know,

the energy of the plant is largely in the root system. You're exposing the cut surfaces,

or you're not exposing cut surfaces to, you know, fungus and insect damage or infestation potentially, you give the regrowth the entire season

to get established because you've cut it in the wintertime. You're not doing, you're doing

minimal damage to the soils through compaction because in a lot of cases, the ground's frozen.

So there's some of the reasons why coppicing happens during dormancy.

But if you're cutting for tree hay, obviously you want the leaves.

And so you need to cut during the growing season.

And there's also, there's a lot of layers of complexity that build on that because during that first flush of growth in the springtime is when we often

see like kind of the most potent, the nutritional value being most potent, the digestibility of

those leaves being at their peak, but we have the least volume of material. So as the season goes on, you're going to have that much more, you know, leaf matter that you're

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