NEWSLETTERS & POSTS

The Hedge That Pays Twice – You May Want To Rethink Your Composting Strategy

The Hedge That Pays Twice How vetiver grass and its mulch cut farm costs and keep crops alive when the weather turns extreme Ask any farmer what has changed in the last decade and you will hear the same answer on every continent: the weather no longer behaves. Rains arrive late, then fall all at once. Dry spells stretch two weeks longer than they used to. Soil that took generations to build washes away in a single afternoon storm.… Read the rest “The Hedge That Pays Twice – You May Want To Rethink Your Composting Strategy”
Dick Grimshaw
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Labels: agriculture, climate change, climate change adaptation, design standards, erosion, forage, Vineyards, waterTagged , , , , , ,

Floating Islands That Work

Floating Islands That Work: TVNI’s Revised Vetiver Floating Island Specification v2.1 A Vetiver Floating Island is a simple idea: a buoyant raft planted with vetiver grass, anchored on a polluted pond or lagoon, with the plant’s dense vertical roots hanging one to two meters into the water. The root curtain takes up nitrogen, phosphorus, and ammonia, hosts the microbial biofilms that do much of the treatment work, traps sediment, shades out algae, and shelters fish. TVNI has just issued a fully revised design specification for these systems, and the revision changes some long-standing assumptions.… Read the rest “Floating Islands That Work”
Dick Grimshaw
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Labels: health, Phytoremediation, pollution, wastewater, water, water qualityTagged , , , , , , , , ,

Not Every Vetiver Job Needs a Hedge

A new quick-reference sheet on choosing the right layout — and a request for corrections A farmer has a patch of low, wet ground where only rice will grow. He plants a contour hedge across it, because a hedge is what vetiver looks like. Not much happens. There was no runoff for the hedge to intercept. The problem was a water table sitting just below the surface, and what that ground needed was vetiver planted in a block, to open the profile and let the water drain away.… Read the rest “Not Every Vetiver Job Needs a Hedge”
Dick Grimshaw
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Labels: agriculture, climate change, design standards, erosion, Hydrology, slope stabilization, water

Water First — Think Water, Then Erosion

The Vetiver and Water foundation note — and why the order matters Ask most people what vetiver does and they will say it stops erosion. That is true, and it is the wrong place to start. Everything a vetiver hedge achieves begins with what it does to moving water. Slow it, spread it across the slope, let it soak in — and the sediment that builds the terrace, the moisture that reaches the crop, the strengthened ground and the soil life beneath it all follow from that.… Read the rest “Water First — Think Water, Then Erosion”
Dick Grimshaw
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Labels: agriculture, climate change, erosion, Hydrology, land restoration, uncategorized, waterTagged , , , , , ,

The Hedge that Builds Itself

A reader’s guide to the Vetiver Hedge Mechanisms standard, for members who do not build slopes for a living Our design standard guide  Vetiver Hedge Mechanisms now runs to a hundred pages and eighteen annexes, and parts of it are unapologetically for engineers. If you never need Manning’s equation, you never need Annex A. But a good deal more than half of that document was written for people who plant hedges, pay for them, approve them, or have to explain them at a village meeting — and that part answers questions that come up in nearly every project.… Read the rest “The Hedge that Builds Itself”
Dick Grimshaw
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Labels: agriculture, climate change, design standards, Hydrology, infrastructure, slope stabilization, waterTagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

NEWSLETTER (NL2026-07): A Harder Look – Vetiver Design Standards – Guides – Updates and Revisions

The following standards and guides have been corrected and updated: D4 – VGT – Microbial Root Dips for Vetiver Establishment v3 D5 – VGT – Vetiver and Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi (AMF): Soil Health, Water, and Nutrient Transfer  v3 D6- VGT – Vetiver Grass Technology (VGT) for Nematode Suppression and Soil Biological Recovery in Open Fields and Agroforestry Systems v3 D7- VGT – Vetiver as a Dead-End Trap Plant for Cereal Stem Borers  v3 D8- VGT – Forage Management of Vetiver Grass v2 (new v2) D10a- VGT –Three Perennial Grasses Compared–Chrysopogon nigritanus and Chrysopogon zizanioides, and Napier – Pennisetum purpureum  v2 D14- VGT – Vetiver and Soil Carbon  v2 GVF – Level 1 Observation (tally) Sheet v2 Six months of standards, and what prompted them Over the past six months TVNI has been building something it did not previously have: a set of design standards and structured guides covering vetiver applications, with the underlying data referenced and, wherever possible, checked.… Read the rest “NEWSLETTER (NL2026-07): A Harder Look – Vetiver Design Standards – Guides – Updates and Revisions”
Dick Grimshaw
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Labels: agriculture, design standards, nematodes, plant, uncategorized, waterTagged , , , , , , , , ,

One Grass, Three Jobs: A Trilogy on Vetiver’s Living Functions

For most of its working life, vetiver has been valued as an “engineer”. It holds slopes, slows runoff, traps sediment, drains waterlogged ground, and treats decontaminated water and land . That reputation is deserved and thoroughly documented. But the same plant is also a living organism in a farmed landscape, and over the past year we have set out to write down, carefully, what it does biologically rather than mechanically: how it interferes with an insect pest, how it behaves toward the nematodes in the soil, and how it partners with the fungi that quietly govern soil fertility.… Read the rest “One Grass, Three Jobs: A Trilogy on Vetiver’s Living Functions”
Dick Grimshaw
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Labels: agricultureTagged , , , , , , ,

Vetiver Against Stem Borers: One Simple Rule Decides Where It Travels

Vetiver Against Stem Borers: One Simple Rule Decides Where It Travels In the paddy fields of Zhejiang, China, a quiet revolution in rice pest management has been running for more than a decade. Farmers plant rows of vetiver grass along the bunds and ditches of their rice fields, and the striped stem borer — one of Asia’s most destructive rice pests — is drawn to lay its eggs on the vetiver rather than on the rice.… Read the rest “Vetiver Against Stem Borers: One Simple Rule Decides Where It Travels”
Dick Grimshaw
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Vetiver Genotypes by Region, Fertility and Weed Status

A reference table separating the sterile cultivars used in Vetiver Grass Technology from the fertile, seed-bearing accessions that carry the invasiveness record Invasiveness in vetiver is a property of the genotype, not of the species. The material used in Vetiver Grass Technology (VGT) across the world is a sterile, vegetatively propagated clone that sets no viable seed and does not runner; it stays where it is planted and is trimmed at the hedge boundary. The documented weed record attaches to the other end of the plant — fertile, seed-producing accessions, chiefly the wild North Indian type of C.… Read the rest “Vetiver Genotypes by Region, Fertility and Weed Status”
Dick Grimshaw
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Labels: plant, uncategorized, Vetiver researchTagged , ,

Reading the Land from Space – A Compendium on Satellite Imagery and Field Evidence for the Vetiver System

Reading the Land from Space — A Compendium on Satellite Imagery and Field Evidence for the Vetiver System Guide to the seven documents, and the order to read them This compendium brings together what a land-restoration program can and cannot learn about vetiver from satellite imagery, where the free tools genuinely help, where they mislead, and where the real evidence has to come from the field instead. The worked examples are drawn from Ethiopia – the Witchi, Gebra Dima, Jafti, Mettu, Gule, and Talube catchments, and comparison with the Vanya food forest in India – but the principles, methods, and cautions are general.… Read the rest “Reading the Land from Space – A Compendium on Satellite Imagery and Field Evidence for the Vetiver System”
Dick Grimshaw
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Labels: agriculture, climate change, design standards, erosion, land restoration, Vetiver technical publications, watershed managementTagged , , , , , , ,