We thinned 86 acres in 2010/11. We did our first clear cut harvest last year (June 2015). Some people hate clear cutting and it certainly is not appropriate everywhere. But if you want to grow pine trees, clear cutting is the only option. The little trees will not grow in the shade of the bigger ones, I have explained and illustrated below.
You need to look at clear cutting in both place and time. A clear cut forest is STILL a forest. It is in transition. We need old growth forests, young forests and middle aged ones. Each provides a particular sort of ecology.
My pictures show the land that we clear cut 14 months ago. You see how fast vegetation has grown it. It is now a wonderful place for wildlife. It is full of deer, rabbits, quail and our neighbors have seen a few bear. I am unenthusiastic about the bear. This part of the forest transition is very productive.
We planted around 20,000 seedlings in April, but the trees in the background are supplying even more. We will need to thin back. The land will be covered with trees in a few years. The last picture shows trees that are about thirty years old. This piece of land has been clear cut harvested three times according to my neighbor who is about my age and has seen three harvests.
Best forestry practices tell us to protect the water of Virginia by not cutting timber within stream management zones. We give at least 50 feet, usually more. Where several streams come together this can be a fair amount of land. Our Diamond Grove farm, for example, is 178 acres. Of that 68 acres are in SMZ. For my Milwaukee friends and relatives, the comparison is Humboldt Park, which is 70 acres, or the area of about 61 football fields, not a small amount of space.
These pictures are from the Freeman farm. It is interesting because you can see the natural succession. The big trees are planted loblolly pine. They are probably 50-70 years old. Somebody planted them, probably with the intention of harvesting, but never did. The pines are the biggest trees, but notice that there are no little pines. They will not grow in the shade of their parents. This SMZ is transforming into a hardwood forest. Eventually, in this part of Virginia, it will be a forest dominated by beech and maples, with understories of things like holly & hornbeams. But it takes time for these things to arrive. The loblolly will live a few more decades and form I kind of nursery for the hardwoods. Absent disturbance, the hardwood will soon be established. Well … soon in the ecological sense, maybe around 2050. The first and second photos just show the SMZ. It is becoming a deep forest. Picture #3 is flower I thought looked nice. Picture #4 shows the big loblolly looking up the last picture shows that these trees were planted. You can still see the rows.
Took advantage of the nice weather to go down to the farms and spent most of my time clearing brush and pulling down vines.
We are planning on burning under the longleaf pine in January. Longleaf are fire dependent. My pictures show the longleaf pine planted in 2012. You can see that the brush and grass is getting high, but the pines are getting up there too. The longleaf is a very rich ecosystem because it combines grass and forbs with trees, all moderated by fire.
My pines have grown remarkably. You can see the pines today. They are many sizes but the smallest are about my height. The first picture of me with the pine tree was taken on April 18, 2015. That was the biggest one at that time. The other one was taken last month. Note that the pine changes but I stay the same.
The boys and I went down to the farms to check on the pines and talk to the NRCS soil folks in Lawrenceville. They have programs to help with longleaf pine restoration. Brunswick County is the north and westernmost county to be eligible for longleaf conservation programs, since the edge of its natural range ran right through the middle of the county.
You can see how the longleaf grow in my pictures. The first picture is me standing next to one of the biggest ones that were planted in 2012. Notice the shape. It has few lower branches and kind of shoots straight up. This is an adaption to frequent fire. A fire on the ground will burn the lower parts of the tree, prune them, but leave the important terminal bud. They sometimes have arms like cactus or maybe Joshua Trees.
We burned this land in 2011, before planting the longleaf. We will burn again in January next year and after that every 2-3 years in order to recreate the ecology of Virginia around 1607. My next picture shows 20-year-old loblolly. You can see me, very small, in the middle for size reference. The last picture shows the growth on the cutover (clear cut in June-July last years and replanted in April this year.) You cannot see the little trees underneath. We will manage this with fire soon. You can see some of the wildflowers coming in. I cannot identify many of them. Something I need to learn. I have some native plants, such as butterfly weed, Joe-Pye weed and black eyed Susan, but there are also daisies and Queen Anne’s lace, which are very pretty but invasive.
Went over to National Arboretum. Well worth it. They had an exhibition on lawns and were testing various sorts of grass. That is my first picture. Next is an example of field and trees, also at the Arboretum. The last two photos are from the Botanical Gardens. There are lots of nice places to sit and read, listen to audio-books or just listen in general.
Washington has an extraordinary number of things you can do for free. On the one hand, I am happy that I can find such solitude in public places. On the other hand, it is sad that so few people take advantage of what is so freely and easily available.
You really do not need your own back yard when you can use your Uncle Sam’s.
Boydton used to be a bigger deal until the I-85 went through and made South Hill the big city. It is still the county seat, but there are only about 500 people living there. That is why I was a little surprised to learn that Microsoft was building its server farm, its cloud that will serve much of the East Coast right there in “suburban” Boydton.
I was in the area to visit the Virginia Department of Forestry office. This is the one that is responsible for Brunswick County and I was there to see what I could do with them to make our forests better. Government has a legitimate role to play in forestry. Forest perform lots of ecological services that help make our environment work, but they do it on a time-scale that is difficult for individual humans to appreciate or manage. State foresters can give good advice and they have programs that create incentives for long-term good land management.
SaveThe State of Virginia is trying to encourage restoration of longleaf pine ecosystems for example. Longleaf pine is relatively hard to grow and we are learning how to do it in Virginia while doing it. The Department of Forestry can help with things like release and prescribed burning. I signed up for some help burning under the 2012 generation longleaf on the Freeman property and burning the seedlings on the Brodnax place. We want to do it in January, when the fire will be cooler and the trees dormant. After the first time, we can do growing season burns. The DOF folks were especially interested in working on our land because we have a variety of ages and – more importantly – the places I want to burn are not near houses or roads.
Returning to the server farm, they chose Boydton because land was inexpensive and the site was close enough to power lines and good highway connection (HWY 58 & I-85). Server farms don’t really need to be very near the places they serve, but they do need lots of electric power to run the servers and the air conditioning to keep them cool. Microsoft will invest half a billion dollars in this facility. It will not create too many jobs, unfortunately. It just does not take too many people to run these things. But it will help the tax base.
My first picture shows the water tower at the Microsoft site. They evidently need it for cooling. Next is the site itself. Changing gears, picture #3 is the bulldozer and trencher they use for fires. The trencher forms the firebreak. The last picture is the forester and me. The odd part is that the bucolic looking forestry center is right up against the server farm. Save Save
Garland Gray Forestry Center will ship 30 million loblolly seedlings for planting next spring. The weather has been favorable for the seedlings and there will be more than ever, but demand still will exceed supply. These trees have been developed for the specifics of Virginia climate and conditions.
Loblolly pines grow naturally from Florida to New Jersey, but the trees that grow well in Florida are not ideal for colder Virginia. Virginia’s weather is unreliable during the spring planting season. The trees from Garland Gray go completely dormant during the winter, so that will not as easily perish if there is a cold snap or prolonged dry spell. This cost a little in terms of growth. A Florida loblolly pine will be quicker out of the start, great if the weather is warm and moist, deadly if not. A Virginia loblolly seedling may turn reddish brown if it gets cold before its roots are established, but it will usually come back.
We are past the third generation of loblolly pine in Virginia. In the first generation, they just gathered cones. The idea was simple reforestation and the ordinary native true was okay. But they improved, taking the seeds from the strongest, straightest and fastest growing.
The newest generation of loblolly is as different from the first as a Chihuahua is from a German shepherd. They are the same species but you wouldn’t know to look at them, even after only a few years. The natural loblolly is a bit of a weedy tree. It tends to grow crooked and branches. It is also susceptible to various maladies. The newer versions just genetically superior. They grow better on the same sites with less fertilizer.
The loblolly became the premier tree of the American South for good reasons. These reasons were man-made as much as natural. As mentioned above, the varieties developed are much better than the natural tree. On the “natural” side, the loblolly is relatively easy to manipulate genetically. It breeds true to its parents’ characteristics. (A contrary example is an apple. Apples do not breed true and the apple you plant from a side will not closely resemble its parents. For that reason, almost all the apples we eat come from clones.) The loblolly also responds especially well to fertilization and release, i.e. if you cut the trees around a loblolly it will grow more rapidly. Most other species do not respond as well. This is not all to the good. Loblolly has replaced other timber trees in wide areas. The more worrying trend, IMO, relates to the length of rotations. This has more to do with prices than with the trees themselves, but the rapid development of loblolly may facilitate it. Let me explain.
The standard loblolly rotation used to be about thirty-five years in Virginia. This meant that you thinned the trees twice, at about fifteen years and again at twenty-four, and then harvested saw timber at the end. This is not a very long rotation, but it does provide a relatively mature forest. When combined with stream management zones, largely left perpetually uncut, you provided a productive wildlife habitat and good protection for soil and water.
New developments permit the use of smaller diameter wood. The prices of saw timber, i.e. bigger logs, and the smaller pulp timber have been converging. You do not get that much more money from saw timber. This means that the payoff from growing trees longer is less but the risks have not diminished. There is also the time value of money. Waiting an additional fifteen or twenty years for the payoff from your forestry requires patience and maybe you will be dead before you get the benefit of your investment. Some experts are advising that we harvest trees on shorter rotation, maybe as little as twelve years. The trees never mature and we never have a true forest. We just maximize fiber production. It is more like a field crop. I don’t like this even a little. While I can see the profit possibilities, I did not get into forestry for this. But I digress.
The loblolly seedlings have also improved over the years. You can see from the pictures that the soil at Garland Gray Forestry Center is very sandy. This make cultivation much easier. They have a machine that trims the roots underground, both horizontally and vertically. The roots are trimmed to about five inches long. This is because most of the tools used to plant trees dig down about seven inches. This makes planting more effective and prevents the development of “J-roots”. They also trim the tops so that seedlings are uniform height. In the old days, they would need to plant more than 700 trees per acre because many were expected to die. Today, they plant only around 450 because almost all of them survive. Loblolly pines need to planted deep, even below the root collar. This is a contrast to longleaf that need to be planted shallow. All the loblolly pines produced at Garland Gray are bare root. All longleaf for Virginia are grown in North Carolina and they are containerized.
Only five people work at Garland Gray. Most of the work is done by machines. They are precise. It is very important that the rows be straight, so that the fertilizer can be applied and so that the machines that lift the seedlings can be used properly.
My pictures show the little pine trees. They have a machine that plants them. It works kind of like a paint brush. You can see the size in relation to my pen. They remind me of those little trees that they use in model train sets. Picture #3 shows the sign for the Garland Gray Center. The last picture shows a longleaf plantation. They represent trees from various states to show which grow the best in Virginia.
Continuing with notes from my recent forest visit.
I have no plans to do much this year except manage the vines and brush. Next year, early in the year, I plan to burn under the 2012 generation longleaf and we will second thin about 80 acres on the Freeman farm late in the year.
Thinking farther ahead, I want to try some shortleaf on the Brodnax place. Shortleaf is the most widely distributed pine in the U.S. but it gets less respect. It grows slower than loblolly and does not have the cache of longleaf. Like longleaf, it is fire dependent, but its ecology is different. As seedlings, longleaf burns to the nub and then regrows. Shortleaf burns to the ground and then regrows. I think it is the only pine to do that.
My pictures show some of the contrast. In the first picture you see shortleaf on the left and loblolly on the far right. Some hardwoods are in the middle. Next is what I like to think of as an “Old Virginy” grove. It has some big shortleaf, native hardwoods like a variety of oaks and gum, and under-story trees like holly. Nobody has cut that for a while and I will not either, but you can see the natural succession. The pines will be gone when the current generation dies. Picture #3 is a closer look and picture #4 is a view of the maturing loblolly in front of a wildlife plot. Our land has these things interspersed in the forests, usually less than an acre, creating the forest-edge communities wildlife likes.
I was down on the farms today cutting vines and inspecting things.
Many people oppose clear cutting and I understand their concern. But it is important to recall that clear cutting is an important tool in forestry. If you want to grow shade intolerant pines or fir, you need to clear cut significant acreage. And if you want to grow shade semi-intolerant oaks, you need to clear some. The fact that nature produced forests of pine, fir, oak or hickory indicates that there have been “natural” disturbances in the past.
A clear cut is a stage in a forest, not the end. It ends only if the land is turned over to non-forest uses.
We clear cut 46 acres exactly a year ago. My first picture show what a clear cut looks like in Virginia after twelve months. We planted 21,000 trees (loblolly & longleaf) in March. You cannot see them under the other growth. Nature is resilient. We will need to treat/burn soon. My second picture shows the where the cut stopped. The third picture is a clear cut after thirteen years. I have been taking this picture with my truck as comparison since 2008. The last picture shows a clear cut after nineteen years, i.e the loblolly in the back of the truck. The longleaf pine in the foreground were planted in 2012 on five acres that was clear cut the year before. I took that photo during with winter, which is why the grass is not green and you can more easily see the longleaf. The last picture shows a longleaf seedling planted in March. You can find them only in the open areas. As you can see, they look like grass and they call this the grass stage for obvious reasons. There are more of them in that bush, but you cannot see them.
I am in Baraboo at a two-day seminar at the Aldo Leopold Foundation. Leopold is the founder of an important stream of conservation, although I am not sure he would have taken credit for it.
Leopold’s “land ethic” is both simple and profound. We all live in the natural world and should be mindful of the choices we are making, both actions and inaction. Things we do that tend to improve the biotic communities on the land are good and those that harm them are bad.
The profound and ostensibly paradoxical part is that Leopold wrote that you cannot write a land ethic in a book. A land ethic has to be written on the land. You leave your signature on the land you manage and you learn from the land you are walking on. You learn from being involved. It is a melding of thinking and doing.
Observe – participate – reflect – observe … It is circular and endless, but even when I write it in this order it is misleading, since they overlap and merge in the practice.
The other point that Leopold made about the land ethic applies to most sorts of practical philosophy. It is dynamic. The process is constant; the conclusions are mutable depending on the interactions and the circumstances. I am thinking about this and I don’t suppose I can explain it in writing. But I think I understand some of it from my interaction with environments all over and from working on my own land.
I have owned my forest land for more than ten years now. I have seen many changes on the land and changes in how I view land, my own and others. I appreciate Leopold’s thinking on this more than I did, more than a could have, before I had the responsibility on my own property.
Anyway, Leopold summed up ethics by explaining that acting ethically meant that you did the right thing even when nobody is looking, even when doing the wrong thing is perfectly legal and maybe acceptable to others. Of course, he did not originate this thought, and never claimed it was original. But it is good to recall and reiterate.
My first picture is the Leopold Foundation buildings. Much of the wood is from trees Leopold planted. The buildings are designed to use lots of natural light and take advantage of the site for climate control. The next picture is a sedge meadow in Stevens Point. This is a wetland dominated by grass and forbs, generally w/o trees. Standing water is present only episodically, but the soils are generally saturated.
I like the Leopold ethic. It fits in well with my mindful boots-on-the-ground philosophy. You have to go to the places, experience them. You gain knowledge through practical experience, and it is always contingent on what happened before. That is why you need to absorb the context. However, while experience is mandatory, learning is optional, which is where the reflection and thinking comes in.
This picture is our group photo. It was taken just before our work pulling invasive plants out of the prairie to get some of that hands-on experience. That is why some of us have gloves. Right after we finished the field work, we discussed Leopold’s essay “Axe in Hand” where he talks about making choices in conservation and understanding how we are affecting the land. The work helped with understanding and internalizing the essay. Save
