About thirty years after we (Susan and I) planted this little patch of timber I am now doing a much needed thinning. Can you bring yourself to drop trees you planted with your own hands? Sure you can! If you don't, your plantation will stagnate, and trees will drop out one by one from overcrowding. Thin it yourself and you choose the best ones to finish out. Now you just have to live long enough to send them to the mill. Let's see, these trees need another thirty years; I am almost 72 right now. Piece of cake. I just have to keep on with clean living and break that statistical ceiling!
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If you are going to grow trees, you must be a man of fortitude. Maybe I once was, not so much anymore. For example, I can no longer hunt deer. Though they are a plague on the environment, it's the killing not the dying as they say.
In 1986, when I bought my farm, I was determined to plant conifers. I'm not sure why anymore. Maybe from hiking in a tall cathedraled woods. The beauty of snow on hanging bows. I don't know. I started clearing reverting cow pasture. Mowing, hacking, cutting. The first year I planted 3000 seedlings. Mostly Norway Spruce. Little tiny 3-4" things because I couldn't afford anything more than 2:0 seedlings. That was an eyeopener. The planting continued every year although the number started dropping. I was going to grow Christmas trees so the species changed. So I planted Doug. fir, balsams and frasers and Canaan, white pine, austrian and scotch pine. Reality hit big time. Drought, exploding deer population, disease and pests, winter kill by mice girdling, pruning, herbicides, nail one with the mower, oops. So we shifted to selling to wholesale nurseries. I couldn't kill my own trees after all that work. But they're a crop, uh, no. Fortitude slipping. Digging and selling was thinning the plantations but leaving a mess of partial filled holes and ruts. I wasn't doing the digging.
In retrospect, I wish I had planted more hardwoods before the deer population got out of hand. Now it is too much of a battle just to grow a garden and forest regeneration is poor.
I've got some of my cathedraled woods now. And snow covered hanging bows. There's a Pin oak I planted in 1993 at 24"DBH. Wish I had more oak planted. Bad drought the one year I put in a quantity. And the trees are still dying from this that and the other thing. A needlecast is killing mature Doug and Grand fir. I was in the woods yesterday and the effects of EAB are now grossly obvious here. Falling trees and more light to the forest floor. Should help the deer even more if not too many invasives move in so it's the dying that's tough to watch.
But I keep planting. It's what I do. Though I wont see that forested church with most. I've run out of empty fields too except for some leased cropland so I inter plant. Do I have what it takes to be a tree grower? Yikes, that's a loaded question. As my bumper sticker says, "Trees are the answer."
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