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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I was talking to a couple people about building with wood. They acknowledged wood’s advantages, but asked if we would run out of wood. I told the unequivocally that we will NOT run out of timber in America. The United States is the world’s biggest wood producer, yet we have more wood growing today than in any other time in more than a century. I am not sure they believed me. I can mention statistics, but my certainty comes from my own observations. And I thought that I might be more persuasive if I shared that experience. Fortunately, I have photos. All the pictures are those I took of my own land, so I am confident in their veracity.
Above is a clearcut a few months after the loggers are gone. It looks very desolate, doesn’t it? Below is a few months later. Nature is reslient.
Let’s start with cutover land, i.e. land right after a clear cut. A clear cut must be done if you want to grow sun-loving trees, like pines. Since we grow pines, we do clear cut. If we were growing maples, we would cut selectively. If we were growing oaks, we would clear in patches. It all depends on the type of ecology you are working with. When I learned ecology in the 1970s, clear cuts were considered terrible things. They talked about climax forests that were supposed to be normal working toward this one goal. We have since learned that there is no one goal and we understand that MOST forest types are disturbance dependent. We need new forests, middle aged ones and old growth forests. That implies disturbance. The top photo I took on my land exactly one year after it was clear cut. You cannot see them, but there are 21,000 little trees planted there. There will be a young forest in a few years. In the meantime, this acreage provides wonderful habitat for bobwhite quail & deer. And I think it is beautiful.
Within a few years, you can see the little trees popping up through the brush. The picture above shows one of my plantations of longleaf pine. They are six-years old, which means that this is a clear cut after seven years. They soon will be be entering a stage of very rapid growth. On a side note, longleaf pine requires – REQUIRES – fire. Fire can be very destructive, but it is also part of the ecology in many systems. It is a mistake to exclude fire in many places. You can see a photo below of our burning. Don’t worry. It’s all good. I started the fire and I would not do it if I though it would destroy those trees I love. The longleaf ecology is the most diverse in North America because of the under story and the variety of plants on the ground, all of it enabled by regular fire.
In about fifteen years, loblolly pine in southern Virginia will be ready to thin. We MUST thin the trees to allow proper growth and avoid pests. It is like thinning flowers in a garden. If they are too close together, none of them grow right. The photo above shows fifteen-year-old pines thinned a couple weeks before. We removed 2/3 of the of the trees, which became pulp to make cardboard. Follow this link to see where they went. Below is what they look liked like five years later. There are fewer much healthier trees and more total growing wood than there would have been had we not thinned. These trees are twenty-years-old. We will soon thin them a second time, removing about half the total number of trees. Five years after that, there will be as much total standing timber, maybe a little more, since the thinning will allow the trees to grow that much faster and stronger. Healthy forest require thinning.
Below here are loblolly pines thirty-years-old. You notice that they are bigger than the twenty-year-old trees, but not that much. Trees continue to grow their entire lives, but they start to grow a lot more slowly after they are mature. In the case of loblolly pine, the slow a lot after they are thirty and it is almost time to harvest and start over.
One bonus section. One of the criticism of forestry is that we plant mono-culture, i.e. only one sort of tree. This is potentially a problem. We plant a lot of loblolly pine in the South, but we also are planting other sorts of trees. I am restoring longleaf pine on my farms, for example. We also have significant diversity in areas around the streams and wetlands. We protect water by not cutting near streams and lakes. This means that there are a lot of old, mixed forests. Besides protecting water, these zones provide corridors and shelter for wildlife. And they are just beautiful and peaceful places. Below are pictures of our stream management zones. You can see that these are open, mature forests.
And finally, forest owners are usually forest lovers. This is a picture of what I call “Old Virginia” since it features the mix of oak, shortleaf pine and others that made up a typical mixed forest of the past. This will not be harvested. We just enjoy them.
Anyway, will we have enough timber in the future? Yes we will. Wood is 100% renewable resource. We know how to grow timber sustainably in the U.S. and we are doing it. Wood is the most environmentally benign building material throughout its full life cycle. We should build more with wood. Posted also on LinkedIn
Clean water is a forest product. A forest slows runoff and filters the water. I was reminded of that looking at our stream management zones. These are areas near streams that we mostly leave in natural forest to protect water quality.
Went down to the farms today, along with Alex & his friend Colin. We walked around on the Brodnax farm. I rarely do the full circuit. Showing them the farms gave me a chance to get in touch a little more myself. You can in the photos that the SMZs are doing okay.
The first picture is a big shortleaf pine with me to show scale. Shortleaf pine grow slowly. I do not know the precise age of the trees in the big shortleaf in the grove, but I am guessing that they are at least 70 years old, which indicates that this land has not been cleared at least since the 1940s, before I was born anyway. Shortleaf pine can live more than 300 years. Unlike most pines, they tend to persist in mixed hardwood forests, often in association with oaks as you see here. Notice the unique bark on the shortleaf. It is one of the easiest ways to identify them. It is kind of like alligator skin, as you see in picture #2. Next shows toad eggs in an ephemeral pond. Colin told me that they were toad, not frog eggs because they are in that kind of chain. I don’t know about that. I do know that amphibians need these sorts of temporary ponds to reproduce and that such ponds are getting harder for them to find, as people make sure their yards are neat, without mud puddles. The pond must be permanent enough (at least a couple months) to let the amphibians develop and move out, but not so permanent for a resident fish population that eats the eggs or tadpoles. This pond is fed by a seepage from the woods above. Below it runs into the creek, so I think this will fit the bill.
The other two photos show water in the creeks. It looks clean to me, so our woods are doing their job to protect water quality. We are part of the Chowan watershed via the Meherrin River in Brunswick County. The water eventually ends up in Albemarle Sound in North Carolina.
Went to visit the burn plus one month. It is looking desolate still, but a few green shoots are coming up. By next month, we will see growth bursting out all over. I checked for the terminal buds on the longleaf and they were intact on those I checked. I am not 100% confident in the loblolly, but I think they will be okay too.
If the loblolly are okay, I am going to use fire more in the new stands. I spent most of the rest of the day hacking away at vines in the 2003 loblolly. Running fire through them every couple years would control these things. I cannot use fire in the 2003 loblolly yet, since the vines and trapped branches currently caught up in them would likely carry the fire into the canopy, but if I do it with the 2015 loblolly starting in 2020 I can prevent that situation in the first place.
All that said, I do enjoy cutting vines because it gets me into the woods with something to do, but I recognize that my efforts are not very effective and the vines are hurting my trees. Better to control them with better means. Beyond all that, I am getting a little old for this work and it is unlikely to get any easier. I am always stiff after a day of vine fighting. This time I even managed to hurt myself with my saw. I hit my knee and made five evenly spaced holes. Lucky it was just a hand saw. There was a lot of blood, although not much pain. This morning, however, it is stiffer than usual.
One more thing, a good one – look at the longleaf plantation. Since we did a good job of site prep, there was not much brush. I spent many hours knocking down volunteer loblolly and hardwood. The fire get more of that job done and it looks like we will have a superb stand of longleaf.
