Volunteer Program
At Diversity Farm we offer a working experience for anyone who has a permaculture design certificate and is prepared to camp and contribute $50 a week towards food.
We have a basic farm camp ground with compost toilet and solar shower. The work will involve the general running of the farm on a day to day basis as a permaculture demonstration site and education centre with our farm staff. Bookings are essential. No drugs or alcohol are allowed on the property.
Fungi help some trees weather acid rain, but not all
A discovery reported in the latest edition of the journal Nature (June 13, 2002) — that fungi on the roots of some trees in the Northeastern United States help supply much-needed calcium in forest soils battered by acid rain — would seem to ease worries about the worrisome form of pollution.
But don’t stop worrying just yet, warns Timothy J. Fahey, the Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor of Natural Resources at Cornell University and a co-author of the report, “Mycorrhizal weathering of apatite as an important calcium source in base-poor forest ecosystems.”
“Not all tree species are fortunate enough to be associated with the types of root fungi that supply calcium,” he says, pointing to sugar maples, which in some areas have suffered serious declines in recent years.