Turpentine beetles A few problems in the forest. Looks like we have some turpentine beetles. As far as I can tell, only two trees are affected, but no reason to not to react quickly. I called Adam Smith from Virginia Dept of Forestry and we will go and inspect them tomorrow. The trees affected are in the SMZ with lots of hardwood around and some distance between them and other pine trees, so I think we can control the outbreak. Will see what Adam recommends.
Otherwise things are good on the farms. We will do brown and burn in fall and winter and then plant longleaf in the quarter acre openings we made last year. Right now they are full of brush, hence the brown and burn. I took some pictures.
Burning
We will also burn under the longleaf. This is their second burning. I noticed that there was a greater variety of flowers int the burn year. Hope to get that again.
My first picture is the beetle tree. Next is one of the 1/4 acre plots were will burn and plant this winter. Picture #3 is my prickly pear and rattlesnake master, more garden for me than forestry, but interesting. Next is the longleaf-loblolly border. I assert that the natural boundary of longleaf goes exactly through my land in Freeman at exactly that stop. It’s science.
For longleaf enthusiasts, notice that the longleaf are as tall or taller than the loblolly. They were all planted at the same time, i.e. 2012. Longleaf have more variety of sizes. Some are still small and some are tall, but it is a myth that longleaf all grow slower than lobolly. IMO, site prep is the key. That area was browned and burned prior to planting and then burned 4 years later. We will burn again this late year or early next.
Last shows the longleaf stand with a shiny sumac understory. They are getting big.
Update on the beetles Well, we confirmed that we have an infestation of black turpentine beetle. Only a few trees are affected. I don’t know how the bugs got here, but this is as far as they are gonna get. They infest only about six feet up, so I can get them. According to the experts, I need to spray the affected trees and any nearby pine. They gave me the particulars and I ordered the required stuff. We will then burn under the trees to knock out any residuals. We got them soon, so I think we can set them back. These beetle are endemic in Virginia. They probably would not kill too many trees, but if I can kill them first, I am content. First picture shows Adam Smith checking out the trees. Next are happier scenes – the bald cypress I planted this spring (I put in 200, not sure how many will survive) and some wildflowers near the new longleaf.
Update on treatment Went down to spray the trees today in hopes of stopping the turpentine beetles. I sprayed the affected trees and the nearby pine trees as precaution. The hardwoods are not susceptible to the pine beetles. I tried to limit the spraying. I want to kill the beetles but with as little collateral damage as possible. I didn’t want to do too much but I hope I did enough. I used Bifen XTS, one of the formulas recommend by DoF.
I used the blue dye (Liquid Harvest Lazer Blue Concentrated Spray Pattern Indicator) so that I could see what I did. According to what I read, you have to spray up only about six feet. The blueish trees are kind of pretty. The blue shows up more on the trees actually infested, because there is lighter color sap and sawdust on the surface. It was supposed to be a hot day, so I was not as enthusiastic about going, but it was not bad. I did almost all my work in the shade. It took about 4 hours to get it done. Had to drive 3 hours each way, so it was a long drive for a short work, but I wanted to get at it as soon as possible.
A beer in the hand I finished in the middle of the afternoon in time to have my cold beer and relax before heading home. As you can see from my picture, got a little bit of blue dye on my hand. Last is the view from my beer chair.
A few problems in the forest. Looks like we have some turpentine beetles. As far as I can tell, only two trees are affected, but no reason to not to react quickly. I called Adam Smith from Virginia Dept of Forestry and we will go and inspect them tomorrow. The trees affected are in the SMZ with lots of hardwood around and some distance between them and other pine trees, so I think we can control the outbreak. Will see what Adam recommends.
Otherwise things are good on the farms. We will do brown and burn in fall and winter and then plant longleaf in the quarter acre openings we made last year. Right now they are full of brush, hence the brown and burn. I took some pictures.
We will also burn under the longleaf. This is their second burning. I noticed that there was a greater variety of flowers int the burn year. Hope to get that again.
My first picture is the beetle tree. Next is one of the 1/4 acre plots were will burn and plant this winter. Picture #3 is my prickly pear and rattlesnake master, more garden for me than forestry, but interesting. Next is the longleaf-loblolly border. I assert that the natural boundary of longleaf goes exactly through my land in Freeman at exactly that stop. It’s science.
For longleaf enthusiasts, notice that the longleaf are as tall or taller than the loblolly. They were all planted at the same time, i.e. 2012. Longleaf have more variety of sizes. Some are still small and some are tall, but it is a myth that longleaf all grow slower than lobolly. IMO, site prep is the key. That area was browned and burned prior to planting and then burned 4 years later. We will burn again this late year or early next.
Last shows the longleaf stand with a shiny sumac understory. They are getting big.
Alex & I went down to the farms. Unfortunately, my cutter did not work. I tried all the mechanical skills at my disposal, i.e. I made sure there was gas and that nothing was obviously loose, and failed, so we had to spray instead of cut. That is easier physically, but less immediately satisfying. I also cannot use it everywhere. Don’t want to make my bald cypress or white oaks collateral damage, for example.
We also got to “inspect” more, and the pictures are from that.
The first picture is one of our big white oaks. I have been thinking about oak regeneration. I decided that I do not need to plant oaks. All I need do is identify patches and favor them. I started to do that by cutting the gum, poplar and red maples to allow the oaks more space and light.
When I was up at Aldo Leopold Foundation, I led a discussion on his essay “Axe in Hand,” and I have thought about it every time I make choices as the above. Leopold wrote – “I have read many definitions of what is a conservationist, and written not a few myself, but I suspect that the best one is written not with a pen but with an axe. It is a matter of what a man thinks about while chopping, or while deciding what to chop. A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke he is writing his signature on the face of his land.”
Next picture is our open pine forests at Brodnax. Alex is in the middle for perspective. He is standing among the unattractively named dog fennel. I am not much fond of dog fennel. It is not pollinated by pollinators and it does not smell good. But it does grow fast and six feet high in a couple months.
I heard bobwhite quail the whole time I was on the Freeman place. I really don’t care that much about bobwhite per se, although I do enjoy hearing them. I care about bobwhite as an indicator species. Their abundance indicates the our land management is working. The two pictures on the left show the open pine on Brodnax. Top is last year at this time. Bottom this year. Next shows more of the open pine on Freeman. The last picture is a flowery slope on Brodnax. We plan ted pollinator habitat various places on the farms. We planted none of what you see in the picture. All you really need to do it burn it. The seeds and roots persist in the soil and given the opening, they burst out.
Fire encourages flowers in the fields. I notice that our Freeman place has fewer flowers than it did the season after the fire. We have plenty of wildflowers, as you can see in my pictures, but some of the patches are those we planted for pollinators. Left alone, the fields come to be dominated by brambles and sumac. These are fine in themselves, but they form monocultures.
We will burn this winter in Freeman. I hope it will be fun.
I left home at about 4:30am, so I got to Freeman in the early (ish) morning. Lots of birds and I heard bobwhite quail all over the place. I am not managing FOR quail, but I consider quail a marker species for the type of environment I am working to (re) establish, so I am glad to see and hear them.
What I want is a patchwork diversity. We have thick mostly hardwood forest in the stream management zones. We have maybe 40 bald cypress in some of the damp lands and I planted 200 more anyplace my feet got wet. We are making pine savanna over the bulk of the Freeman and Brodnax places.
There is the story of the pond covered by lily pads. It seems to happen overnight. It happens in a month, but nobody notices at all until day 28. This is how exponential factors work, and this is how the Diamond Grove is going. “Suddenly” the canopies are close and the woods are dark.
Diamond Grove is ready to thin this winter. We had canopy close a couple years ago and now it is too dark, as you can see in the picture. This thick monoculture is a legitimate way of forest management, but I am not very fond of it. Diamond Grove features five wildlife/pollinator plots. My friends in the hunt club planted pollinator habitat last year, as you can see in the pictures.
An interesting permutation on Diamond Grove is that the roads are covered with lespedeza. Lespedeza (this variety called Chinese bunch clover) was introduced by government scientists in the 1950s. These days, some people say it is invasive and want to extirpate it. I don’t know about that. Lespedeza grows where other things will not, on the forest road, for example. Quail are fond of lespedeza. It is just right for the baby quail to hide under. Lespedeza is a nitrogen fixer and it does an excellent job of holding soil. I am glad to have it on my road, but I did not plant it. The story is that one of hunt club guys was moving the brush on the road right after he came back from mowing a field of lespedeza. The seems and stems came off and rooted. As I said, I am glad to have it. Nothing else has ever been able to stabilize that road. Not native? Who the heck cares? It fills a proper niche. Given time, it will be “native.”
My friend Adam Smith just sent some pictures of our Freeman place. We are experimenting with longleaf pine restoration. To do this, we thinned all the trees to 50 basal area and then made 1/4 acre clearings in each acre. We are planting in longleaf, creating an uneven aged stand.
It would be too much to say that it is based on the Stoddard-Neel approach – we cannot do that in Virginia at this time – but that was my inspiration. We will try to create the pine grassland ecosystem, once common in Virginia.
Philosophy of Stoddard-Neel Rather than a formal silvicultural system, the SNA is as much a philosophy of how a forest ecosystem — in its entirety — should be managed and nurtured while still deriving economic benefit. Inherent in a landowner or manager’s decision to practice ecological forestry is a strong land ethic and an appreciation of the multiple values of the forest ecosystem.
Logger Kathryn-Kirk McAden did a good job, as you see in the photo. I understand that the request was unusual.
Mike Raney and the hunt club might be interested to see what they are walking across.
You can never win the battle against brush & brambles, but you can hold them at bay and try to establish competing system that you think are more appropriate
Open pinelands In my pinelands, I have two options of appropriate, and lots of other choices. The two appropriate ones are closed canopy, where they trees are so close together than nothing much grows on the ground and open woodland with grass forbs and some bushes. My preference is for the latter because I think it more ecologically balanced. Getting there is a fight.
Landscape painted by fire
In “nature” open pinelands are maintained by fire and this is ultimately how I want to manage mine. But fire is a dangerous tool. I am not competent to use it as much as I think I should. In the meantime, I depend on chemical and mechanical tools. I spent all of yesterday and a very long day last week cutting with my brush tool and accomplished not very much. It is physically difficult work and there is more to be done than I can do. I think I will hire someone to spray the Japanese honeysuckle. They use helicopters and can get at all those parts I cannot.
My goal is to get at an open forest, as I mentioned. My longleaf experimental patch is doing well in that respect. An interesting development is sumac.
Sumac Wrote elsewhere that sumac is nearly fireproof. It burns to the ground and comes back stronger. You can see in the first picture, we have a thicket developing. We have both shinny (winged) and staghorn sumac. The shinny are the ones making the thickets. The pines are up on top, so I don’t think they will be harmed. The sumac shades out brambles, which is good. Having patches of sumac could be good for wildlife I want to encourage, like bobwhite quail. And sumac are attractive in the fall (beautiful red) is good for bees and provides food for wildlife.What’s not to love.
Prickly pear and the rattlesnake masters My prickly pear and rattlesnake master are thriving, as you see it the next picture. Both these are native to Virginia pinelands, but I have never seen any. Chrissy got them for me and I am trying them out.
Bald cypress I also did some work cutting around the bald cypress in the marshy area long side the longleaf. My friend Eric Goodman planted them at the same time (2012) as the longleaf. The biggest are around 10 feet high, but some are only about four feet. They were sandwiched under some unthinned loblolly. When we harvested the loblolly last year, they started to get a lot more sun and are doing well, but so is the competition. I helped them out but cutting back the gum and poplar. There are maybe 30 of them. Some/most are okay. They can survive with their feet wet and most others cannot.
A prairie ecosystem with trees Next picture shows the milkweed/butterfly bush. I am trying to encourage plants like this under the pines. Next is how that goal is coming along. Last are just pretty flowers. I think they are black eyed Susan.
As a gentleman landowner, I am unaccustomed to actual work. Today was a lot of actual work in the forest.
I had some success and some not success. I cleared a couple acres of sweet gum and poplar in order to give oaks a better chance. This took two tanks of gas on my machine, i.e. a little over three hours of cutting and another hours of pilings and pulling. I think it will work.
Next I went after the gum and popular in my 2016 pine plantation. Here I ran into Japanese honeysuckle. This is a beautiful plants with a wonderful fragrance. It is also a horrible invasive. It can overwhelm, cover and kill small trees.My machine did not work well against them – too many stems, too close the ground and the vines move when you cut at them. I worked hard but accomplished little of value.
The only viable option is chemical warfare. I am going to have to spray them or maybe get someone to do it for me with a helicopter. I have around 30 acres of this 2016 pine. Not all is inundated with honeysuckle, but a lot of it is. I am not sure I can take it all on with my backpack sprayer. Actually, I am sure that I cannot. I will need to call in air support. Also checked out the burning. The winter burn is looking good. I don’t think we lost any pines. We will need to burn a couple more times to establish a nice grass and forbs layer. The burn from May of last year killed a couple dozen trees. It got too hot. I was very depressed when I saw it, but now with the passage of time it has become a kind of science project. I planted some longleaf under the dead trees and I am using this as one of my oak regeneration experiments.
Biochar is one of the parts of the science experiment. I have long been interested in “terra preta” in the Amazon. This is anthropogenic soil created by the natives by mixing charcoal with soil. It holds water better and produces a lot more plant life. We created some terra preta by accident. When the fire looked like it might escape, DoF pushed a line and trapped lots of wood in with dirt. It burned slowly and turned to charcoal and dirt, i.e. biochar. I will watch how it does.
My first picture shows the honeysuckle. Next shows the dead trees from the May burning, follow by the biochar heap. Picture # 4 shows the winter fire result – live trees and quick recovery. Maybe too quick. It did not burn enough. Last is some of my oak preference. I knocked down the gum, red maple, popular and sycamore anywhere near an oak. All the time I was working out there today, I was thinking of the Aldo Leopold essay “Axe in Hand.” – “When some remote ancestor of ours invented the shovel, he became a giver; he could plant a tree. And when the axe was invented, he became a taker; he could chop it down. Whoever owns land has thus assumed, whether he knows it or not, the divine functions of creating and destroying plants.”
Feeling overwhelmed today. Visiting the farms. So much to do. I have an idea what I want, but there is so much land and so little me.
I know this happens to me every spring and I will get over it very soon. But just now I am down. I also picked off two ticks. Generally my Repel works to keep those little nasty things off, but it seems a season of numerous ticks. Maybe all the rain.
Some of my wildflower/pollinator flowers are coming up. My plan was/is to plant patches in hopes they will spread. The seeds are very expensive and I could not cover all the territory even if seeds were free. Give it a month.
I am staying down south tonight. Tomorrow I will use my power tool to clear around some white oaks, so that I can help with oak regeneration on the Brodnax place. I identified the places last time and now I have to do the work. I dis like the power tool because it makes so much noise, but it sure is faster. I can clean off several acres with the tool. With my hand tools I can maybe do 10%.
My first picture is one of my “wildflower nodes”. I don’t know what flowers those are, but the are nice. I planted the seeds in handfuls of dirt. It seems to have worked. I have lots of those pods around. Hope they proliferate. Next shows the problem with longleaf. One is a longleaf in the grass stage. The other is actually grass. It is hard to tell the difference visually. If you touch them, they feel very different, but it is hard to find your new longleaf. Picture #4 are the longleaf now in going into their 7th year. The new growth is nice. Last is my prickly pear and rattlesnake master. They are growing.
What was your life like when you were fifty? The most significant thing that happened in my 50th year was that we bought our first tree farm. I have discussed the details of that purchase elsewhere, so let me talk here about the long thinking that went into that moment of spontaneity.
Forest people versus cabin people I cannot remember a time when I did not love trees, but I never gave serious thought to owning a forest because it just seemed unrealistic. Who owns a forest? I was a city boy. I knew people who owned maybe a few acres. Chrissy’s parents were farmers and there was a lot of land on her side of the family, but they inherited those places. Just buying rural land was completely outside my experience.
At first, we were thinking “cabin.” Lots of people we knew had second homes in the woods. That seemed doable. We thought of West Virginia. The guy in the office next to me, Jeff, had a place in West Virginia. In fact, he had bought rural land several times. The more I talked to him, however, the more I came to know that that his experience would be more useful as a lesson on what to avoid rather than an example to follow. He had lots of experience buying rural land, but not much success keeping it.
Good neighbors Jeff had trouble with his neighbors wherever he went. He warned me that rural people were “different.” Jeff was an FS classmate. I knew him well enough to suspect that the constant in all his bad neighborly relationships was him. Another classmate, Mark, had successfully bought – and kept – rural land near Appomattox. He loved his rural neighbors and they were helpful to him. We both knew Jeff and at lunch Mark told me that Jeff’s problem was that he did not meet his neighbors on their ground, figuratively as well at literally.
Jeff’s daughter fervently believed in animal rights. Evidently when Jeff bought land, he succumbed to his daughter’s entreaties and banned hunting on his land. This is not a smart idea in long established rural communities. Worse, he made his feelings clear to his neighbors, and his feelings were that they were not the friends of nature that he and his family were.
Funny, we diplomats know that we should treat foreigners with respect even when they disagree with us, but we often fail to understand we might want to show similar respect to our fellow Americans.
But Jeff’s advice was good in other ways. I don’t think I would have had the gumption to go through with my land purchase w/o Jeff. He did know how to buy land. It was Jeff who made me see that I was not a “cabin person.” I was a forest person. Cabin people like to fix things in the cabin. I do not. I don’t care at all about cabins, only the forest that surround them. I went looking for land where I could grow trees and do some real forestry. That was not West Virginia, BTW. It is too hilly. There are lots of trees in West Virginia, but not that much timber. Southside Virginia was the place to get timber.
Make haste slowly I would like to claim that I was decisive, but I made haste slowly. The idea of buying land really came to me in earnest when we lived in New Hampshire, and I had been thinking about it years before that. I read about land going cheap after forest fires. So, the forest land purchase gestated for years w/o issue. It just got realistic around 2003. There were other factors involved. I was a little worried about my career. (ALL foreign service officers worry about their careers all the time. Keeps us on our toes.) I thought that there was a good chance that the FS would kick me out, i.e. not promote me to senior FS. I wanted an alternative, and forest owner/manager seemed like something I could be proud of being.
Scared the shit out of me. Buying the forest was our biggest investment besides our house, and a foray into a lot less familiar territory. I figured the numbers. I did the due diligence. I went down and checked the land records. I looked at the soils and the trees, walked the boundaries. I checked the location of the mills. And after all that logic, I made an emotional decision and bought 178 acres of cut over land in Brunswick County because I really wanted to.
One of the things that made me more confident in the purchase was that the sellers didn’t seem to care about selling. When we looked at cabins in West Virginia, sellers wanted us to make a decision that same minute. Some even offered to take credit card for the down payment. Not so with this land purchase. When I called the guy in Brunswick to make an offer, he said that was good and that he would forward the paper work next week, since he was going fishing.
The dog that finally catches the car I couldn’t believe I really had the land, and so much of it, too much to handle with my machete and shovel I took the kids down to see “their” new land. It was a very hot day and they were not as enthusiastic as I was to walk the length & breadth of the place, but they did it. I was lucky to have a hunt club using the land. Their “rent” pays the property taxes, but more importantly they provide a local connection. I got lots of good advice from hunt club members. They knew lots of things I wanted to know. Unlike Jeff’s experience, I found my neighbors exceedingly friendly and helpful.
Besides marrying Chrissy & having the kids, buying the forest land was absolutely, positively the best life decision I ever made.
Fulfilling the life’s dream Becoming a forest landowner was the culmination of a life’s dream that I was not fully-aware I had. Forestry defines my values. I am never sure how much I am reading the past into the present. For example, did I “rediscover” my values in Aldo Leopold, or did I just think I did. I can look back at my life through the lens of conservation, but is this just hindsight bias? Since I know then end, am I recalling the events that “led up to it”? I don’t know and never will know for sure. What I know for sure is that interacting with my land changed me. I feel responsible and connected nature in way I never did when before and it has given me a much deeper feeling for communities of all kinds, how they exist in both time and space. In the Aldo Leopold method, I can think, do, reflect and do something new based on what I learned. I have feeling of being of nature, not just a sojourner in it. Maybe I am fooling myself, but I feel it. I am reading all sorts of books and articles about land ethics, but I am also learning and connecting with the land itself and the biotic communities on it. It is a consuming passion in a good way.
Lots of things to do, even more to learn We bought our first forest land in 2005. Got more in 2008, and more still in 2012. I have managed four harvests, planted more than 40,000 trees, got NRCS grants to plant pollinator habitat, contracted with hunt clubs, applied biosolids, thinned, burned, sprayed and protected stream management zones. People ask me if forest land is a good investment. It depends. All the things I did above, the actual work and the general contracting, I have wanted to do and enjoyed doing. Forest investment pays dividends in the joy of doing those things and being part of the land ethic. If you do not want to do that, it is not a good idea to own forests. It is like being a “cabin person” who doesn’t like to do fix-it. The payoff in joy is amazing but the payoff in money is paltry. I figure that I will “break even” about ten years after I am dead, but all that forestry has meant to me sure it worth a lot more. It connects me to the past and the future in a way I can more easily feel than explain. Best investment ever.
Had I never “invested” in forest land I sure would have more disposable income. Instead of tossing rocks, chopping vines and planting trees, I could be laying on a beach at some expensive resort, drinking margaritas and eating the best steaks. What a wasteful and boring life that would be.
Pictures are from the early years of our forest adventure. First is Espen on the back of the truck on the way to throw rip-rap. Next is our first forest when we got it. Cut over. Picture #3 shows Espen and Alex after spraying vines. Next is our beech woods. I think they are very beautiful. Last is completely different. He is an indigenous forester from the Amazon. We talked to him about planting trees. We were so separated in space and culture, but our feelings about trees and forests were remarkably similar.
One of the things we lobbied Congress about yesterday was landscape initiatives like the White Oak Initiative. I told them that it was important and good for landowners to do. I figured I should take my own advice, so I looked around my land today and found lots of white oaks. I can encourage them simply by clearing out some of the sweet gum and poplar.
White oaks are still common in Virginia, but the problem is age. There are lots of old growth trees, but not that many successful next generations. Oaks needs disturbance. They like to grow in patches with decent soil and dappled shade. Fortunately, giving them these conditions is not rocket science. All you need is a few big oaks for acorns and some sunlight. I can do that.
I also found that the recent fire did good things for the little oaks. I think I can help grow those white oaks for the next generation of bourbon drinkers. I have been extolling the virtues of bourbon and white oak to anybody who wants to listen, and even many who do not. Most of bourbon’s flavor and all of its color comes from white oak. A drink of bourbon is to task 50 years of forest.
Checked out the burning on the Brodnax place. We burned part exactly a year ago and the other part a few months ago, i.e. a growing season burn and a winter one. The growing season burn got a little too hot a killed a couple dozen trees. There are lots of sweet gum growing under those now. The winter burn is still developing. There was a lot of oak regen. It did not seem to kill many hardwoods and looks like none of the pines. There are a lot of ferns, however. First picture is the winter burn. Next two are the summer burn, #3 showing the dead trees. Picture #4 shows some of the firms on the winter burn and finally is oak rege on the winter burn.
