2021 Logging - Part 1

After three years of searching for a logger we've finally been able to pull it off.  A thinning of the forest we planted more than a couple of decades ago.       

We planted more than 40,000 trees on marginal farmland over the course of 1998 and 1999. The trees pictured here were planted in June of 1998. They were one and two year-old bare root stock making them about the size of a pencil. It's a mixed bag of native Wisconsin hardwoods and conifers.         

Machine planted in alternate rows it was the job of the bushier softwood conifers to 'train' the hardwoods to grow with nice straight trunks.

It is a successful planting - so successful that the forest had become virtually impenetrable and over-stocked with the conifers beginning to crowd-out and compete with the more valuable hardwoods for space and resources such as water and sunlight.    

It was time for them to go.     

This management technique (called a pre-commercial thinning) removes most (but not all) of the conifers so as to 'release' the hardwoods.  I blogged about this process more than a couple of years ago.     

Without having to compete with other trees we expect the oaks to literally WHOOSH with a flush of new growth. And in the years to come any scrawny less desirable hardwoods can be dropped for firewood or other similar uses allowing the dominant specimens even more room to grow.   

By then this planting will have become an acorn factory providing food and cover for the local critters.         

And, of course, there remain enough conifers to serve in the role of 'seed trees' so that natural forest regeneration will continue in the decades to come long after this old man is pushing-up daffodils.       

And so it begins.....