Ohia Ash shown to Improve Ohia Health

[Kenney]

The same goes with human health.
A well fed person with a full, balanced array of nutrients will be better able to resist and survive attacks by insects, fungus, virus or bacteria.

[ohiagrrl]

Shout out to a gal from HPP who asked a good question ystdy at the boat dock. Q: Did I burn diseased wood to treat healthy trees. The answer is yes! Over the span of one year I treated an assortment of healthy Ohia by using the wood ash from both diseased trees that had been recently cut down, as well as logs that had been lying in the forest for years. All of the ash treated trees are experiencing new growth today. She was concerned that the fire would drive spores out of the dead wood and into the forest. However, I was told by Irene, the forestry stewardship gal at the DLNR that all you have to do is heat treat wood in order to kill the CF pathogen, (but who has a huge wood kiln lying around?) However, logic dictates that raw fire is hotter than a warming kiln so it's likely an instant kill for fungal pathogen. We have so much dead Ohia that while some of it's value is in structural materials, the larger value may lie in use as soil amendments. There is some evidence that the smoke is actually good for the forest but I'm still working on mining the supporting data for that one so give me time.

My feeling is that if Ohia had been as pretty dead as it is alive, it would already have been denuded along with the Koa which was a major nitrogen fixer for the islands. We are now seeing a rise in fast growing, invasive, nitrogen fixers because of it. Albizia and Gunpowder tree to name a couple. Then there is one with parasol leaves and sticky, banana bunch style seed pods that grow lightening fast and do not die when you cut them down that I do not know the name of, looks like tako arms reaching out of the ground. These trees will suffocate Ohia as well within the next decade if nothing is done. The super soft wood means they aren't as good for storm protection as the hard slow growing wood of Ohia. Think of what happened to the top heavy Albizia during Iselle. Ohia must be maintained and from all angles it looks like no easy fixes but a lot of good old fashioned hard work.

[Obie]

I took the liberty to email JB Friday and copied the original post.This is his reply :

"Wood ash is generally good for plants. It also functions as a liming agent in acid soils. Slash and burn agriculture works and has been used for millennia based on the fertilizer properties of wood ash. Effects of ash would vary greatly depending on the soils and would be very different on the organic muck soils of lower Puna vs the deep ash soils north of Hilo. That said, I don't think it would help at all in preventing Rapid Ohia Death. The trees that are succumbing to Rapid Ohia Death are not nutrient starved. The fungus is systemic in the tree, throughout the stem, so cutting individual branches won't do anything to eliminate the fungus. There are other fungi that cause localized infections and pruning will indeed help these. If just one branch on an otherwise healthy tree dies, it may just be one of these other diseases that causes a localized infection. In that case pruning as described would work well. Burning does kill the fungus so burning would be a safe way to dispose of infected material. You would need a burn permit from the County to burn agricultural waste. Lastly, I know it is wet in lower Puna, but burning is dangerous and wildfires are common, even in wet areas like Puna. Please be careful with fire. "

Aloha
JB

[Slow Walker]

[quote]Originally posted by Obie

I took the liberty to email JB Friday and copied the original post.This is his reply :

"Wood ash is generally good for plants. It also functions as a liming agent in acid soils. Slash and burn agriculture works and has been used for millennia based on the fertilizer properties of wood ash. Effects of ash would vary greatly depending on the soils and would be very different on the organic muck soils of lower Puna vs the deep ash soils north of Hilo. That said, I don't think it would help at all in preventing Rapid Ohia Death. The trees that are succumbing to Rapid Ohia Death are not nutrient starved. The fungus is systemic in the tree, throughout the stem, so cutting individual branches won't do anything to eliminate the fungus. There are other fungi that cause localized infections and pruning will indeed help these. If just one branch on an otherwise healthy tree dies, it may just be one of these other diseases that causes a localized infection. In that case pruning as described would work well. Burning does kill the fungus so burning would be a safe way to dispose of infected material. You would need a burn permit from the County to burn agricultural waste. Lastly, I know it is wet in lower Puna, but burning is dangerous and wildfires are common, even in wet areas like Puna. Please be careful with fire. "

Aloha
JB

Thanks for checking with JB Obie. I should have done what you did by passing the thread to him or as SR could have done on the trouble at shower and pohaku drive to the DOT.

[ohiagrrl]

Thanks Obie Wan, that's way more than I got out of him a year ago, so I guess it's progress. Interesting point he had about the soils responding differently to soil amendments. It would make sense that "deep ash soils" would not need as much alkalizing as thin veils of "muck soil" on pahoehoe. However, I never wrote anything about doing any pruning and actually don't do that as a rule, as I don't want to add any extra vulnerabilities to the equation.

I feel sure Dr Friday is a very busy man and am grateful he took some time to respond, however, I can't help but be reminded of a boyfriend I had a few years back who was a mathematician. The only thing he liked better than proving his own theories was disproving someone else's. "Kick to the balls!" he would yell gleefully after finishing a paper. Status quo.

Now that I have your attention, in case it was my writing that was confusing, let me try to reiterate. An estimated 300 year old tree (Let's call it Tree X) at the top of our property had half perished in a span of two weeks. I decided to burn dead wood from Tree Y, a tree that had just been taken down at the bottom of our property after being consumed by CF. (Felling Tree Y possibly hastened the spread of the infection to Tree X.) We had a mountain of branches. After the burn, I then scattered the hard wood ashes from Tree Y around the base of Tree X. The result was that the remaining working roots of Tree X drew the nutrients up to the remaining living branches. This seems to suggest that there may be several "stems" within one Ohia trunk that provide nutrients to dedicated branches. The half of Tree X that died never rebounded, but the living half is still limping along a year later. None of it's major branches have fallen or been pruned. I did also scatter a few handfuls of lime around this particular tree after carefully eliminating root competition.

I informed various members of Dr Friday's department at the beginning of this experiment last year and requested a test through one of his associates that I managed to reach phone. I naively thought that someone in the Tropical Sciences Department would be as excited as I was, but was met with a similar lack of curiosity as the above response from DR Friday who is poo pooing based solely on theory. Respectfully, while theoretical sciences have unlimited value, in my opinion, that value is measured by actual investigation. I spend a great deal of my time in the forest in a slow conversation with these trees. Action and response, this is the cross-species language that is spoken. Healthy and unhealthy trees, here in the "muck soils of Puna", have both shown profoundly positive responses to ash soil amendments. (Pesky historical data.) While the "deep ash soils" up north may be our bread basket, the "mucky" forests of Puna and Ka'u are our lungs. Residential forests in Puna makes up about 1/6 of the landmass of Hawai'i Island and it's concerns shouldn't be minimized.

Considering no one is really sure exactly how the fungus is spread, I concede that maybe it is premature to decide that the nutrition factor is the leading edge of these good results, because the alkalization, and saponification, or a trifecta of all these qualities may be what makes this treatment an effective balm; saponification, in that when potassium hydroxide (KOH) meets any fat, it literally becomes soap. Select fungal pathogens, parasites and bacteria wrap themselves in biofilms (fats) as a protective barrier against immune response from host. So regarding ash, as well as providing substantial nutrients, theoretically, if caught in time the KOH could act as an internal power wash to the vascular systems of these trees. Allowing a living tree participate in it's own treatment through uptake is just practical. Any microscope jockey's out there wanna join in this game? If my Tree X is an anomaly, the only way we shall find out, is if others residents who have time and care, also give it a try. The academics don't seem to want this experiment. Puzzling. I tried to be polite and leave out the general lack of interest from Camp-Friday from this thread but you guys pushed for it. I am certainly not trying to discredit anyone. All solid Brain Power welcome. I posted this experiment with the expectation that others would investigate on their own terms. Treasure Hunt! I hope some light bulbs switched on with today's posting.

Again, I only used a small barrel to burn small amounts of wood at a time. Nothing overly ambitious and while fire always presents an element of risk, a small, well tended burn pit in an open clearing is pretty manageable, (this is Ag land for Pete's sake!) I keep copious amounts of water nearby. I use the heat from the fire to process personal stores of foods. Economy of motion. This is legal in Hawaii County and not needing a permit. Due to my physical limitations, I only create a couple of pounds of ash at a time but this packs a whallop for trees in an area with constant soil erosion from copious amounts of acid rain. These small measures should be reassuring to folks who are overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of this problem. If one lil' ol' gardner can reverse a trend on one acre of property then the goal of blight abatement is not outside our collective reach.

Anyone afraid of fire in Puna should be truly concerned about the entire forest dying because the more trees that die, the greater the potential risk of substantial property losses. Anyone giving grief about small burn pits, didn't notice the $100k worth of arial displays going off on New Years above our largely dead forests. That was awesome, but good thing there was weather! It was the fear of our forest burning that led me to check out the ecological function of fire without actually burning anything down. Do we not possess opposable thumbs and fire extinguishers?

Re: protocol, Some of you are in favor of fire regulations, some are not. If County intends to regulate the disposal of significant amounts of diseased Ohia/ copious bio waste/ tinder via permit enforcement and fines, they should maybe consider providing us with a solution, such as a dedicated burn station/ash repository, somewhere way out there in the lava desert.

Ash experiments are not here to jeopardize anyone else's research grants, property or dogma and should be seen as supportive to any other protocols (of which there are currently none/few? available to residents.) This is the eleventh hour. Again there is much plasticity in the spread of ROD so the fight against it should be multi-tiered. Test Kits for ROD should be made available to concerned residents.

To readers and participants, I can't claim this is a cure yet but in the mean time it may show a pathway or buy some time until a cure is found. Many unknowns. Sorry for any previous misunderstandings. Please keep debating. Thanks again for having a heart for Ohia!

Ohia and Lehua, the exiled lover's in a desperate bid for their lives. How will the story end?

ohiasolutions@gmail.com

[Slow Walker]

quote:

---

Originally posted by ohiagrrl

Thanks Obie Wan, that's way more than I got out of him a year ago, so I guess it's progress. Interesting point he had about the soils responding differently to soil amendments. It would make sense that deep ash soils would not need as much alkalizing. However, I never wrote anything about doing any pruning and actually don't do that as a rule, as I don't want to add any extra vulnerabilities to the equation.

I feel sure Dr Friday is a very busy man and am grateful he took some time to respond, however, I can't help but be reminded of a boyfriend I had a few years back who was a mathematician. The only thing he liked better than proving his own theories was disproving someone else's. "Kick to the balls!" he would screech gleefully after finishing a paper.

Now that I have your attention, in case it was my writing that was confusing, let me try to reiterate. An estimated 300 year old tree (Let's call it Tree X) at the top of our property had half perished in a span of two weeks. I decided to burn some dead wood from Tree Y, a tree that had just been taken down at the bottom of our property after being consumed by CF. The felling possibly hastened the spread of the infection to Tree X. After the burn, I then scattered the hard wood ashes from Tree Y around the base of Tree X. The result was that the remaining working roots of Tree X drew the nutrients up to the remaining living branches. This seems to suggest that in an older Ohia tree there may be several "stems" within one trunk that provide nutrients to dedicated branches. The half of Tree X that died never rebounded, but the living half is still limping along a year later. None of it's major branches have fallen or been pruned. I informed various members of Dr Friday's department at the beginning of this experiment last year and requested a test through one of his associates that I managed to reach phone. I naively thought that someone in the Tropical Sciences Department would be as excited as I was, but was met with a similar lack of curiosity as the above response from DR Friday who is poo pooing based solely on theory. Respectfully, while theoretical sciences have unlimited value, in my opinion, it is only in conjunction with actual investigation. I spend a great deal of my time in the forest in a slow conversation with these trees. Action and response, this is the cross-species language that is spoken. Healthy and unhealthy trees, here in the "muck soils of Puna", have both shown profoundly positive responses to ash soil amendments. (Pesky historical data.)

Considering no one is really sure exactly how the fungus is spread, I concede that maybe it is premature to decide that the nutrition factor is the leading edge of these good results, because the alkalization, and saponification, or a trifecta of all these qualities may be what makes this treatment an effective balm. Saponification, in that when potassium hydroxide meets any fat, it literally becomes soap. Some parasites and bacteria wrap themselves in biofilms(fats) as a protective barrier. Any microscope jockey's out there? If my Tree X is an anomaly, the only way we shall find out, is if others residents who have time and care, also give it a try. The science guys don't seem to want it. (Yet.)

Again, I only used a small barrel to burn small amounts of wood at a time. Nothing overly ambitious and while fire always presents an element of risk, a small, well tended burn pit in an open clearing is pretty manageable, (this is Ag land for Pete's sake!) I always keep copious amounts of water nearby. I use the heat from the fire to dry meat. Economy of motion. This is legal in Hawaii County and not needing a permit. Due to my physical limitations, I only create a couple of pounds of ash at a time but this packs a whallop for trees in an area with constant soil erosion from copious amounts of acid rain. Anyone afraid of fire in Puna should be truly concerned about the entire forest dying because the more trees that die, the greater the risk. Anyone giving grief about small burn pits, didn't notice the million dollars worth of arial displays going off on New Years above our largely dead forests. That was awesome, but good thing there was weather! It was the fear of our forest burning that led me to check out the ecological function of fire without actually burning anything down. Do we not have opposable thumbs and fire extinguishers? On that note, a 20 acre parcel downhill from us burned up about a decade ago (probably from a cigarette). There is not one visible case of ROD on that property. An oasis of sorts. Food for thought.

To my thousand plus readers and participants, Thank you! Some of you are in favor of regulations, some are not. My experiments should not jeopardize anyone else's research grants and should be seen as supportive to any other treatments (of which there are currently none available to residents.) Again there is much plasticity in the spread of ROD so the fight against it should be multi- tiered. Test Kits for ROD should be made available to concerned residents. All initiatives should be supported. This is the eleventh hour. If County is going to regulate the disposal of diseased Ohia and make it difficult for residents to burn significant amounts of this copious bio waste/ tinder via permit enforcement and fines, they should consider providing us with a solution, such as a dedicated burn station/ash repository, somewhere way out there in the lava desert. If not, let us save our own trees. Sorry for any previous misunderstandings. I got confused by the verbal knife fights that erupted during my coming out party. Please keep debating. Thanks again for having a heart for Ohia!

Ohia and Lehua, the exiled lover's in a desperate bid for their lives. How will the story end?

Thanks for the above examples and explanations Ohia Grrl. I was looking for the meat in the soup. Now I see some.

---

[Slow Walker]

Ohiagrrl,

Have you tried mycorrhizal inoculants to help with root development?

I am adding a couple of websites to check out for others who might read this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizophagus_irregularis

I am now using this wettable powder which is in a granular form also but I have not tried anything on ohias.

Better root systems can absorb more nutrients.

https://www.xtreme-gardening.com/mykos

[ohiagrrl]

If it can't be made or cultivated on our property then we probably don't have it and that is less due to purism and more to budgetary constraints. We do have pretty abundant mycellium colonies growing on smaller cut ends of dead wood, here in our neck of the forest. But they are likely as stressed out as everything else from the volcanic output and other atmospheric anomalies (ie: Beijing, Fukushima, nuclear missile testing, jet stream chaos, etc, etc....) It was explained to me that Ohia filter micronutrients from the air blown in on winds from the Gobi desert in China which is how they are able to colonize barren lava rock. So thinking about that toxic gas cloud Beijing passes off as air feeding our trees, coupled with Madame Pele's 1/3 of a century of land growing efforts....is it any wonder that ROD is happening now? Let us know how it works SW! Thanks.

from www.forestry.gov.uk
"Ectomycorrhizal (ECM) fungi are intimately associated with most temperate tree species and have demonstrated important and rapid shifts in species composition and abundance in response to a range of environmental stresses (e.g. droughts, eutrophication and/or acidification of forest soils).

[Slow Walker]

[quote]Originally posted by ohiagrrl

If it can't be made or cultivated on our property then we probably don't have it and that is less due to purism and more to budgetary constraints. We do have pretty abundant mycellium colonies though, here in our neck of the forest. But they are likely as stressed out as everything else from the volcanic output and other atmospheric anomalies (ie: Beijing, Fukushima, nuclear missile testing, jet stream chaos, etc, etc....) It was explained to me that Ohia filter micronutrients from the air blown in on winds from the Gobi desert in China which is how they are able to colonize barren lava rock. So thinking about that toxic gas cloud Beijing passes off as air feeding our trees, coupled with Madame Pele's 1/3 of a century of land growing efforts....is it any wonder that ROD is happening now? Let us know how it works SW! Thanks.

from www.forestry.gov.uk
"Ectomycorrhizal (ECM) fungi are intimately associated with most temperate tree species and have demonstrated important and rapid shifts in species composition and abundance in response to a range of environmental stresses (e.g. droughts, eutrophication and/or acidification of forest soils).
[/quote

I think I will try it on a couple seedlings I try to transplant from the dead palm stump on my property.
Any way you can to lead me to a site with your statement written above?....that.... It was explained to me that Ohia filter micronutrients from the air blown in on winds from the Gobi desert in China which is how they are able to colonize barren lava rock. Thanks

[ohiagrrl]

SW, I wish I could send you to a site...the reference material that my friend gave me was a New Zealand documentary titled 'Maoli No'. You can get it on Amazon pretty cheap.

Is there an Ohia bible out there; an anatomy book? Haven't been able to locate one thus far.

I would think planting seedlings in a stump alone would be enough (they love Haupu'u stumps!) but adding any food support is like rocket fuel for these trees, they seem to have low expectations and show hearty gratitude for soil additives.

Tree psychology is so fascinating. Death en masse is a behavior. Burning down in a lightening strike is behavior. Gaining cooperation from ornery little species like humans is behavior. Responding to soil amendments with rapid new growth and blossom explosion is behavior. The forest is talking to us all the time, we just have to listen. Ohia of all trees are SO dynamic!!!! Read the Botany of Desire if you get a chance. Michael Pollan is such an engaging writer and really illustrates the history of cross species (human/plant) cooperation aspects of botany in general. Such an inspiration.

Big Aloha hugs to Kelii up at your new Knickknackery location in Hilo. You immediately grasped these ideas as part of Mme Pele's perfect symmetry. Such a bright morning star (and your Mid Century Modern has me yearning for a simpler time. Kapiolani and Wainuenue, Yo!