Re: wind breaks

I am trying to return an area of pasture to woodland, or rather several areas of woodland, cleared first for gold mining and then put to cropping and later pasture. I am using various Australian species, some endemic to this area others known to grow in this area and with a deserved reputation for toughness in our difficult conditions. We are exposed to winds from all directions and to both extreme frost and extreme heat. We want to have some protection from the elements and also to provide protection for native flora and fauna. In one small area in which we have been successful in raising trees we have found that native ground covers have regenerated with no effort on our part. We have even seen a rare terrestrial orchid in this spot so there is motivation to get trees up and going but, as I have said before in this forum, our litany of disasters over the years is almost comic. We keep going to see what happens next. We have been planting windbreaks as this has been almost dogma over the years - start with a wind break and then you plant in front of it - but we have long lines of broken wind breaks, rows of trees which fail to provide protection because survival rates are extreemly low or because only one species of a mix survives and so we have a wind line not a wind break. A change to the old mantra to plant windbreaks was very marked at the planting day I attended and I wondered how wide spread this change was and what the experience of others had been. As always with these supposedly 'great new' ideas, I always like to hear of contrary experiences so I can judge the level of 'self delusion' or 'placebo' effect that is around. 

Margaret Healey
----- Original Message ----- From: "Diane Whitehead" <voltaire@islandnet.com> 
To: <medit-plants@ucdavis.edu>
Sent: Sunday, July 11, 2010 4:29 PM
Subject: Re: wind breaks
Are you trying to regenerate areas with native plants, perhaps where there has been a fire?
The only large-scale planting here is tree-planting of logged areas. About 200 million trees are planted each year, using a selection of 20 species of trees, depending upon what grows naturally in the area being planted. 

Diane Whitehead
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
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