Author: JohnMatel

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Clear cutting

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.

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Stream management zones

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.

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August 23, 2016 forest visit

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.

 

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Big trees in Williamsburg

There are lots of big trees in Williamsburg, more than you would probably find in a similar area of a natural forest. People protect these trees. In my first picture, you can see the cable of a lightning rod that protects the large sycamore from lighting. My shadow in included to show reference.

There are also lots of very large catalpa trees around town. Catalpa is widely planted around the U.S. but is not native to Virginia, so strictly speaking this is not an authentic Williamsburg tree. But it grows very well. My other pictures show a live oak and some sycamores.

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Colonial Williamsburg

Colonial Williamsburg gives an idea of life in Virginia a few centuries ago. It is a pleasant place with lots of period buildings and big trees. But it is more pleasant in our modern contemplation than it was to live in those times.

The English were not prepared for Virginia. It was deadly to many of them and you can understand why. We live in a tamed Virginia today. Back in those days, there were all sorts of dangers ranging from unusual diseases, to very hot and humid weather to hostile natives. We do not really live in nature as they had to do.

They built as they did in England. You can see examples in the photos. These houses are adapted England’s generally cool wet climate. In pre-airconditioned Virginia, these neat, buttoned-up houses must have been stifling. Of course, people spent a lot of time outside.

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Busch Gardens

Went to Busch Garden with the whole family and rode of the various roller coasters. The new one – Tempesto – is fun, but Apollo’s Chariot remains my favorite. It was a very hot, but fun day.

The best thing about Busch Gardens is not the rides, but the grounds. It is a pretty place, very well-planned. It is a good place to test out and see urban planning and crowd management.

The park is 383 acres, with villages themed to England, France, Germany, Italy, Scotland and Ireland. 383 acres is not that big and the villages are very close to each other. But they do a good job of making them seem separated and distinct. They are separated by bridges or arches, which create transitions. It would be good if we deployed these techniques more often in our non-theme part communities.

There is a good classic on this subject called “A Pattern Language.” (https://www.amazon.com/Pattern-Language-Build…/…/ref=sr_1_1…) The authors studied patterns of landscape and architecture and discovered ones that people of a variety of cultures find pleasing. People tend to like things like winding paths. transition zones and clusters. This makes intuitive sense and the patterns tend to be present in our most beloved places, usually the ones that grew organically over generations. We can use these patterns in our plans and subdivisions.
Theme parks are good places to test some of these ideas.

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American traditions: National Guard & Post Office

Alex and I went downtown to see the Postal Museum and the National Guard Monument nearby. Both near Union Station.
 
The exhibits at both were good, but better was that they provoked some thoughts about America and how we built our country. Both the Post Office and the National Guard have deep roots and were essential to making American what it became. Both go back to the beginning.

Virginia National Guard
The National Guard is obvious. It is the descendant of the famous Minute Men and the tradition of citizen soldiers has been tightly entwined with the American character from before the Revolution to today. Serving as a citizen soldier is both a duty and a right of an American citizen. These are the guys who extended and protected our frontiers.
 
And they fought in all our major wars. Alex’s unit – 116th Infantry Regiment from the 29th Infantry Division from Maryland, DC and Virginia – landed on Omaha Beech on D-Day. A Company from Bedford, Virginia proportionally had the highest D-Day losses. More recently, the Virginia Guard has served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of course, Alex recently returned from his deployment in Qatar.
 
The Post Office
Like the National Guard, the Post Office predates the American Revolution. Ben Franklin was a postmaster.
 
The Federal footprint was small in the early republic and the Post Office was often the part of Union average citizens saw most often. The letters people wrote helped bind our nation together and the letter immigrants wrote back to friends and family in the old country brought in more waves of immigrants.
 
It is easy to forget how important connection through the post were before our age of easy communications. Divided by time and distance, people were bound in epistolary relationships. These could be as dense and were often deeper than those we enjoy today. People took time to compose their thoughts and share them. Much of our historical writing is based on letters. Letters between John & Abigail Adams, or between John Adams & Thomas Jefferson are worthy of being called literature.

W/o a reasonably effective Post Office, American would never have developed into the great country we are today. Today it is fashionable to ridicule the Post Office. “Going postal” is a way of describing crazy. This is likely unfair today and it certainly was not appropriate in the past. Besides the connections mentioned above, careers in the Post Office were instrumental in helping generations of poor and immigrants to pull themselves into the middle class.

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Tree farm visit – August 2016

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.
 

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National Arboretum

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.

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Book review: Nova's Fire Wars

NOVA: Fire WarsI got  Nova’s “Fire Wars” video as part of my study of fire science.  It is a great complement to the many books and magazine article.  To actually see the flames and the firefighters at work, and hearing them speak adds greatly to understanding.   If a picture is worth a thousand words, the video and explanation is worth even more.  Seeing an example of the fire-ball that comes from a fire blow-up is much more impressive than reading about it.  The video also includes computer graphics that shows in detail how the winds and topography interact.   I read the classic “Young Men and Fire” about the fire in Mann Gulch that killed thirteen smoke jumpers in 1949, but could not picture and really understand the event until I saw the actual topography and the graphics that showed the fire’s progress.
Nova does an excellent job of explaining the dynamics of firefighting and how wildfire has become an increasingly urgent issue.  This program was made in 2002.  If anything, the problem has become even more urgent.  Knowing that adds to the tension you feel watching the fires.
The video does an adequate job of explaining how we got into this situation.  A lot of it came as a result of the Big Burn in 1910.  This was disastrous fire that burned thousands of acres in three states and killed 78 firefighters.  The Forest Service reacted to this by making fire the enemy, treating fighting fire as the equivalent of war and bringing in air and ground forces similar to an army at war.   They won … sort of.  For a half century the Forest Service excluded fire.
Yesterday’s solutions are today’s problems, especially when they are based on wrong information.  Fire is a necessary part of many ecologies.   Many biotic communities are not only adapted to fire; they require it.  Foresters first noticed the problem in the among the sequoias in California.  Fire exclusion allowed the growth of a lot of brush and for many decades there were no baby sequoias.   Fire was reintroduced and things improved.  But it is not that easy.
In the half century plus when there the Forest Service quickly extinguished fire, the woods have grown thick with trees.   In the ponderosa pine ecosystem in the Rocky Mountains, for example, there used to be only about forty trees per acre.   Today there are more than 700 in some places.  None of these trees gets enough water and nutrients.   Many die.  In the old days, fires came frequently but they were small.  In the new regime, they come rarely but they are big, big enough to kill the big old trees and hot enough to burn the soils, turning them into a hard type of pottery that cannot even take the seeds.  But reintroducing fire is a problem given all the extra trees.   We will have to do some mechanical thinning and harvesting and then introduce fire.  But these procedures are controversial among some environmentalists, who fear and/or oppose profitable forestry activities such as thinning.
Most of the video, however, was the story of fire crews and their challenges.  Methods are described in detail as are lessons learned in this always hard and sometimes dangerous work.   The video goes into some depth describing the fatal fires at Mann’s Gulch (thirteen killed) and Storm King Mountain (fourteen killed).   (At the time the video was made, the 1913 Yarnell fire in Arizona that killed nineteen, was still in the future.)
I recommend this video very highly.   For someone (like me) who is studying the subject by reading books, this video makes it easier to visualize a fire in the woods.  For those just more casually interesting in the subject, this video is interesting and informative.