permaculture

[Steve Diver <steved@ncatark.uark.edu>]

The Jean Pain method came up; i.e., using chopped brushwood to generate
biogas and/or to wrap water pipes around a very *large* brushwood
pile for the purpose of  capturing heat from thermophyllic composting
(for example, to distribute hot water through hydronic tubing in
greenhouse production beds in association with rootzone heating).

An interesting parallel to the Jean Pain method is the Ramial wood chip
mulching work at Laval University in Quebec.  Several years ago a
farmer here in the Ozarks imported a special brushwood chipper to
generate mulch for their organic orchard / farm.  I talked to them last
year and they said they love the benefits of the brushwood mulch,
but it is a lot of labor to cut enough brushwood and chip the material
to generate the bulk quantities of mulch needed each spring, coming
also at a time when the farm is really busy.

Here are some web notes I collected May 2001 on the Jean Pain method.

Jean Pain resources, 5-11-01
http://ncatark.uark.edu/~steved/archives/humus/jean-pain-notes.txt

There's some interesting material on Jean Pain + brushwood + humus in
these notes.  A tale unfolds where Jean Pain got his idea on brushwood
mulch from medieval templar monks, who understood humus at a deep
level centuries before the Industrial Revolution racheted things out
of whack ....

The Le Jardinage Naturel material looked pretty good, and worth
re-exploring, but that link now appears to be gone like an Internet
memory; though Google has a cache page which you can access
for a glimpse.

Steve Diver