Category: Virginia forestry

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Forest Visit March 2018

It was cold & windy today on the farms. I have said before but will say again that this is the least attractive time of the year on the farms, but one of the best times to look around, since it never is so open as now.

My longleaf are okay. The ones we burned a few months ago have buds, hard to see but there. The ones on last year’s burn also have buds. I could not see the top buds, since they were over my head, but I got a picture of a branch. Both are below.

I spent a lot of time pulling vines. It is good exercise & satisfying, but ineffective. I am not going to stop the vine pulling, but I think I will spray Diamond Grove at the end of this growing season for thinning in 2019-20. The spray will take out most of the vines and give the trees a year to put on extra weight. The benefits will continue after the thinning, as the remaining trees will get to take full advantage of the sunlight, space and water w/o vine competition.

The longleaf show up well now against the yellow grass and the generally dead stalks. There are a few empty places where we need to plant replacements. I am going to get the kids to help. I need to make paths so that they don’t get hung up on the brambles. I want to make the experience as pleasant as possible. It is hard work enough w/o hostile brambles. Best would be to burn, but I want to get them in the ground by November and I doubt it will be a good burning opportunity after growing season but before November. The stalks and brambles will not be dry enough.

The fire burned off the lower branches, which is as it should be. I think that when they get their growth this year, they will be spectacular.

My last picture is Diamond Grove Road. You can see my car at the end of the road for size comparison. I usually take the picture from the other direction. Because of the peculiarities of road construction in 1960, the road goes through our land instead of being the boundary. We own about 100 yards in on the east side of the picture, so we can keep it looking nice on both sides.

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Bodenhamer Farms in Rowland, NC

When I found out that my longleaf pine came from Bodenhamer Farms in Rowland, NC, I called to see if I could see where my trees were born.

There I met some of the friendliest people ever. There was not much to see, since this is the time when most of the last year’s seedlings are shipped and the new ones are just seeds, but I did get to see some of the plugs.

Louie Bodenhamer showed me the mycorrhizal fungi on the plugs. Mycorrhizal fungi live in the soil in a symbiotic relationship with roots. The fungi can reach farther and provide nutrients for the growing plant. In return, the plant provides sugars from its photosynthesis.

It is only recently (recent decades) that we have appreciated how this works. Herbicides and even plowing the soil can break up and kill mycorrhizal fungi. This loss is responsible for significant loss in practical fertility and plant vigor, but it was difficult to detect in soil chemistry, since chemically everything is there, just not working.

Soil is a living medium, at least when it is right. It is not mere chemistry and cannot be treated as this. The old saying that we feed the soil and it feeds us makes a lot of sense. And a big part of living soil is mycorrhizal fungi.

You can add this to your soil and this is a promising new field of fertilizer. It might also be good to let it grow.

I will buy some seedlings from Louie Bodenhamer this fall. He thinks that the best time to plant is October or November. This is what I hear from my friends at TNC too (they told me to get them in before Christmas) and what I have read. The natural seed fall for longleaf is autumn. They get a head start over the winter, taking advantage of winter rains and less evaporation is the colder weather.

I can fit a few thousand seedlings in my SUV. Each box (see picture) has just over 300 seedlings. I will ask the kids to help plant, so Mariza, Alex & Espen, please take note. Brunswick County is real great place in fall. It will be fun, the promise of the future and a blessing for today.

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Tree Farm Visit January 25, 2018

Went down to the tree farms, mostly just to look around.  Ted Garner, from West Fraser Timber, wanted to look at the farms. He read what I wrote about biosolids and wanted to see for himself. I am always happy to tell anybody willing to listen about the farms.

Trees are okay, although they are at their most unattractive at this time of the year. They have dropped all the needles that they will do and new ones are not yet grown in. Everything is a little dull for now but soon better.

Longleaf are looking good and you can see them more easily against the brown grass, as you can see in the picture. We will soon thin the 1996 loblolly nearby, so maybe next time I take this picture the longleaf will look the similar but the backgrounds will be different.

I did the usual vine pulling on the Chrissy’s Pond place. It is good exercise and gives me reason to be in woods.  Funny thing is that I “discovered” another stream management zone.  I mean, I knew it was there, but I never actually walked down there.  The CP place is 178 acres total, of which only 110 acres are loblolly pine. That leaves 68 acres of SMZ or wildlife plots. I have not explored all of the even now.

My pictures – the first shows the “new” SMZ. Next is the road out of CP, followed by the Brodnax farm, well thinned and ready to burn. After than shows a longleaf pine plantation. Unfortunately, other pines have grown in. A fire would rectify that.  Last is my Freeman longleaf pine stand.
 

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Burn prep

Went down to the farms to talk with Virginia DoF’s Adam Smith about burning the longleaf and under the first set of loblolly on the Brodnax place. I described the plan to patch burn in other posts.

The weather offers a window tomorrow. DoF was over today to freshen the fire lines. We will set off the fires tomorrow around 11am. Predictions are for a warm and dry day. Relative humidity will be lower by mid-day and the dew will have evaporated. It is supposed to be wetter by evening, maybe even rain, so this is a good window.

The topography on Brodnax is a little hillier than on Freeman. Fire burns up hill much faster than on flat, since the oncoming flames can heat and dry ahead of them. The fire lines are around nine feet wide, which should be more than enough to contain the fires.

Anyway, I am in Emporia tonight and looking forward to being on the Brodnax place tomorrow at around 9 am. We hope to be done by dark. I will take pictures and video if I can. This is not always so easy to do, however, since being in the middle of moving fires has a way of making pictures harder to take.

The trick here is to set strips of fire so that it doesn’t get too hot. We want to burn the brush but leave the longleaf. They are still in the grass stage, so the fire should pass harmlessly over them, as long as it does not linger too long. We want a “flash fire.”
Under the loblolly we are going after the brush and fuels. This is a fuel reduction fire plus a brush control. The trees are far apart, with a basal area of around 50. This will let the heat and smoke of the fire rise and dissipate. If the trees were closer together and the canopy more closed, the fire might get hotter and smokier.

These are the theories at least. Tomorrow night I will write about what really happened.
My first picture is my usual Love’s photo. Gas prices are rising. Next is the DoF dozer they used for the fire lines today. After that is one of the fire lines. On the forth picture you can see some of the little pines. They were obscured by the vegetation before and I was a little afraid that they were not there. They are looking good. I think they have sent down their deep tap roots and after the fires will do just fine. Last picture is the land ready to burn.

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November on the farms

The weather man promised sun and pleasant weather by the middle of the day. He was mistaken. It was wet and muddy at the farms.

I walked through the longleaf. Most survived the fire and they are thriving. I noticed some fairly big holes in the plantation. It seems they are mostly in places were the brambles were very thick. I think they may have killed off the little pines. I thought about an alternative explanation, that maybe the planting crew avoided the brambles, but we had burned before planting, so the brambles were not there. Of course, maybe it was something else entirely.

The fire killed a large number of loblolly in their section. I may inter-plant some longleaf there and in the empty spots, but maybe not until next year. I think we will burn again in late 2018 for the general longleaf planting among the loblolly that I will thin to 50 BA plus make the patches. Easier to plant then.

I also noticed a few shorleaf pine that came back after the fire. Shortleaf are also fire adapted. I am letting them grow. Shortleaf don’t get the respect they deserve.
The fire had a few effects besides cleaning out much of the brush. I noticed a lot of double leaders. I think the fire may have affected this, but I am not sure. I lopped off a maybe twenty double leaders. Some of the trees also developed long and almost horizontal lateral branches. I lopped many of them off too, since I fear that an ice storm would weight them down and maybe bend the trees beyond recovery. I don’t know if I am doing the right things, but it seems right.

My first picture shows my boots. The Marines gave them to me in Iraq and they are still good. I wore them every day for the year I was in Iraq, but I now use them only on the farms, so I suppose that is one reason why they are lasting so long. The Freeman farm (with the longleaf) is also related to Iraq, in that I used some of what I made there (danger pay etc) to buy this land. Next picture shows the usual longleaf panorama. They are easier to see now that the grass is yellow. After that is the Freeman lobolly that we are going to thin early next year. Next is my usual Love’s photo, prices are higher. Finally are a couple of the bur oak Espen & I planted last spring. They are just for fun. Bur oaks are cool.

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Forest visit

Here is my daily beer drinking picture tree farming style. The hat is dopey looking, but the fringe keeps the bugs off. I brought down a bench where I can sit and have lunch, as you can see in the second photo. I have my usual Love’s picture. The price of driving has gone up. Penultimate photo, we got some rocks for the parts of the road that are persistently muddy. Hope it works. Last is one of the plots we will convert to pollinator habitat. It already has lots of what is needed.

I would like to say that I was having the beer after a morning of hard work, but I was doing mostly in anticipation of working.

I went down to the farms mostly to talk the the NRCS folks. They are giving me cost share to establish pollinator habitat and do some prescribed burning. I did do some of the usual vine cutting. The good things about that on a hot day is that you work mostly in the shade of the forests.

It was hot today, the hottest day so far in September. That is a bit ironic, given that it is almost officially fall.

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Is native always better?

This is my submission for this issue of “Virginia Forest.” They will edit and improve it, but this is the general thrust. This issue concerns invasive species.

What is native?
Our bacon and eggs breakfast comes to us thanks to “invasive species.” Pigs, cows, chickens, honeybees, wheat, and apples (Johnny Appleseed was a wholesale purveyor of invasive species) all came from somewhere else and displaced natives. The problem with invasives comes when they disrupt long-established relationships in ways we find harmful. Our tree farms are full of invasive species, wanted and unwanted. Maybe we plant clover to protect soil after a harvest. That same clover is invasive in other circumstances. We fight invasive species like kudzu, multiflora rose and ailanthus, but recall that they came with the enthusiastic support of experts and often through government programs.

We need to develop a more nuanced view of invasive and native. Native is not always better or even really native. Much of the loblolly that we plant in Virginia, for example, comes from genetic stock “native” farther south, modified by select breeding and scarcely resembling the multi-branched, twisted natives of times past. Human activity has changed the game. Virginia’s environment today is far different from 1607. Natives exquisitely adapted to old Virginia may be less appropriate in the future.

This does not imply that we should be unconcerned about invasive species. Their proliferation is the single biggest threat to our forests. Global commerce is increasingly bringing species long-separated into intimate contact, sometimes with catastrophic results. We must be vigilant against the introduction of pests, but know that nasties like longhorn beetles, emerald ash borers, Formosan termites and wooly adelgids will continue to slip through. The rate of natural adaptation is too slow to cope with the rapid introduction of exotic species and altered environments. Humans will need to step in to move some species to new “native” range and work with breeding, even genetic modifications, to protect important species from threats unknown in their earlier evolution. A good example is an American chestnut resistant to the blight that killed whole forests early in the 20th Century; we can restore the tree in its former glory with minimal modification, rather than wait thousands of years for natural selection to produce something else.

Let’s talk options. “Natural and native” is not an option except in isolated areas maintained – ironically – by extraordinary human intervention. “Letting nature take its course” will result in a mess of invasive species in unsustainable and often harmful relationships. Conversely, overactive human management will quickly demonstrate the limits of our wisdom. Recall the kudzu and multiflora rose are with us today because of somebody’s big ideas. There is no single plan. The best choice is what good land managers do: work with natural processes but recognize that the very nature of our work changes them. It’s an iterative, adaptive learning process with a goal of dynamic sustainability that strives not to avoid change but to make it reasonably predictable and benign – simple to say; hard to do. It requires patience, persistence and humility. Details are unknowable in advance, since information is discovered only through experience and often has only local or temporary applicability. It is more a process than a plan, one that relies the intelligence, imagination and innovation of landowners, firms, researchers and government agencies, knowing that none of them will have the answer, but that the many answers will sustain our beloved Virginia ecosystems. Some will not be native.

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Landowner dinner in Freeman

We held a landowner Tree Farm dinner at Reedy Creek Hunt Club in Freeman, Virginia. I sold the hunt club six acres a few years ago and they built a really nice facility. The meet there and can cater lunches or dinners, which they did for us. They made an excellent pulled pork. They can seat around 150. Our local meetings are much smaller, but they can do large or small.

I got to show my land to the dinner guests. I am proud of my longleaf pine and the progress since they were burned in February. We also talked about tree farming and the values of conservation.

My theme is that we should not talk about making our ecological footprint smaller, but rather make it much bigger, since what we do improves the land, soils and water conditions for biotic and human communities depending on them. I hate this whole “footprint” concept. It is defeatist. It says that you can never move forward, but only limit the damage you do. It is like the original sin, but worse since there is no redemption. I think we can – and we do better.

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Moment of Zen

Part of the beech forest on our tree farm on Diamond Grove. It is a beautiful spot in one of our stream management zones. The video catches the moment better than a still photo, since you can look around and hear the sound of the stream.

The video lasts 57 seconds. Don’t click if you have a very slow connection, but if you are on WiFi, enjoy a minute of peace and beauty.