We harvest leaves every day for feeding our chickens, rabbits, sheep, and ducks. As you know from my other posts, we mostly only grow perennial plants. Thus most of the leaves we harvest are from trees. Unless we are doing pruning, we only harvest the leaves. In other words, we do not cut the branches. It takes a long time to regrow the branch, but it only takes a few weeks to regrow leaves. We have discovered that if we harvest 100% of the leaves off of a tree, they re-grow very quickly as compared to harvesting only 50% of the leaves off of the tree.
We recently tested with morus alba trees growing in the same area. So, they have the same soil and water conditions, sunlight, etc. The soil is very rocky and highly compacted from foot traffic. We harvested 100% of the leaves of some trees and only 50% of the leaves from the other trees. The trees whose leaves were harvested at 100% rate, returned to full leaf coverage in 30 to 40 days. At the same time those trees harvested at a 50% rate had only begun to form new leaves.
Because our focus is helping the rural poor with very limited land to have a better life, this technique can be a game changer.
Blessings,
Glen
