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.
This is really interesting! Do you find that when the leaves re-grow they form a small branch off of the main truck or do they just have a petiole off of the main truck (like the first time they push leaves)? Can you send a photo fo the regrowth?
Will try to take some photos and send to you, but the regrowth is normal as it was originally. In other words, not a new branch.
We have only tested it on morus but we are about to do the same with Leucaena y gilricidia y chaya.
For comparison, another nearby tree of the same size, we only harvested 50% of the leaves. It shows no sign of new leaves forming yet.
For us, this is a real game changer because before our experiment we thought harvesting 100% of the leaves would shock the tree and thereby slow the reproduction. So we had only been harvesting 25 to 50%.
We use a variety of techniques but during the drought season, when feed is in short supply, we simply go down the branch, breaking off each petiole individually. That’s what we did in the photo above with one of our students holding the branch to be able to better see the size of the leaf regrowth compared to her hand. Will send another pic today, which is 7 days later, to see how the petiole is regrowing.
