by Gene Logsdon
The commercial Christmas tree market is usually in oversupply, but it is always fairly easy to sell a few trees a year from. locally grown groves to local people. This is especially true when the rage for professionally clipped and shaped pine trees has subsided, and customers want a more naturally shaped tree with space between the branches for all the ornaments they feel compelled to buy. Most spruces and some firs grow in this fashion with little or no trimming, thus saving the labor that takes most of the potential profit out of the Christmas tree business. This is something else I got "too soon old and too late smart" about, although I am now planting a few blue and green spruces every year for retirement income.
Growing Christmas trees is a good instance of how cottagers should approach advice on woodland management, which is to say in the same cautious way they should view advice on grain crop production. Don't take literally everything the foresters tell you. Their advice is usually geared to the mainstream silviculture business economy, which I am hoping you will be wise enough to avoid. You want just a bit of extra income, maybe as few as fifty Christmas trees a year at $20 each. Your principle goal is not all the profit the land will bear, but enjoyment, living in a grove of trees.
Whatever you decide to do with trees, do something. With us contrary farmers rests a holy possibility. Our so-called "economy" has no place in it for enterprises that will pay off only twenty, forty, or sixty years from now, or not at all. Only those who have found a way to extricate their lives, or at least a little part of their lives, from the enslavement of that economy can "afford" to plant groves of trees instead of corn and cotton.
Managing Your Woodlot
This bears repeating: Much of advice that you will read or are told as the proper way to manage forests is given with an eye to making the top dollar. That means also spending the top dollar in overhead, with the price of borrowed money determined by a banker who does not know the difference between a cord of hickory and a cord of poplar (about 10 million BTUs of difference), channeled through wholesaler and retailer, both tacking on their profit margin, and above all, with salaries and wages added in all along the route to market.
If you thin and prune the way your forester decrees, you may bring trees to harvest a few years sooner, or you may add a few dollars more to the value of each tree. Then again you may thin out one sapling in favor of another and then have the favored sapling die as happened to me once. If you follow industrial-inspired advice, you will spend time and hard work pruning low branches from saplings that in two more years will prune themselves-lower branches die because branches higher up the trunk deprive them of sunlight. The forest will, in almost every case, take care of itself quite well, as it did for millennia. I divided my home tree grove into two sections and maintained one under the forester's directions. The other I left alone. After fifteen years, I can't tell the difference: if anything, the dominant trees in the part left alone are larger than those in the section where I worked hard at pruning and thinning.
Rarely will you have to plant trees in an old established grove. The old trees and the birds and squirrels will do the planting. All you have to do is stand back and watch, and perhaps occasionally cut down less desirable or overpopulated species adjacent to the more desirable or desired species-"releasing" the latter to the sun, as foresters would say.
You can make more money by not allowing any trees to grow old, selling every tree as soon as it reaches harvestable age, with young trees coming along promptly to take the place of those removed. But followed slavishly, that rule will mean no hollow tree homes for owls, one of the most beneficial of wild birds, or wood ducks or woodpeckers or nuthatches, or flickers or squirrels or bees.
There is much clashing and clattering in the debate over clear-cutting vs. selective cutting. I suppose I should side with the selective cutters, and I do if the alternative is to clear-cut whole mountainsides, as greed has often dictated. However, on a small scale, such as a thirty-acre woodlot, you should try to practice a harmony between the two methods. (In all environmental debates, the truth almost always lies somewhere in the middle.) If you cut just one tree out of, say, every 10,000 square feet, a hardwood forest will inevitably fill up with shade-loving trees such as maple because the absence of that one harvested tree (unless it is a huge tree) does not let in enough sunlight to encourage sun loving trees such as oak, hickory, ash, and walnut. So whenever possible, select three or four trees together to harvest, then move perhaps eight hundred feet away and take another cluster of three or four trees: a sort of tiny-scale form of clearcutting, done selectively.
The sun rules the forest. All the trees are in mortal combat to grab sunlight away from each other. A tree will reach out with an extra long branch if there is a ray of sunshine out there not being used. Or it will bend or twist beyond what you think its trunk strength can endure to get away from the shade of a bigger tree. If it can't get to light, it dies. Lower branches die because upper branches block the sun. Eventually brush dies out on the forest floor because the tall treetops allow no light to finger through the canopy. Therefore, when a big old tree has reached its maturity, and you can see a few dead limbs appearing in the top, you might as well harvest it, because in holding on to the grand old dying patriarch, you are ruining or delaying the new patriarchs to come.
But I can't make myself follow that advice. I consented to selling four big veneer white oaks last winter, all of them about one hundred and sixty to two hundred years old, only because there are other twohundred-year-old trees nearby, unsuited for veneer. These will remain until they die-that's my compromise. Not in my day will I own trees like these again. Nor will my children or their children.
Actually there is a more practical reason to resist an unquestioning obedience to "proper" forestry procedure, except maybe in cases of veneer quality trees which are rare and too valuable to "waste." (I always put the word "waste" in quotes when talking about forests because nature wastes nothing. Dead trees rot into humus.) We have learned that allowing a tree to mature and die before harvesting it does not necessarily mean much wood is lost, despite what the forestry handbooks say. In most cases, hardwood trees first begin to rot high in the crown and/or at the base of the trunk. Invariably, the wind will blow them down when most of the trunk is still good lumber and most of the branches are still good stove wood. (Hickories and white elm are exceptions. After they die, they rot very fast even if they remain standing.) A timber buyer will turn his nose up at trees that are partially rotted, but good logs can be salvaged and sawn into lumber to be sold or used for one's own purposes. We hire the services of a custom bandsawyer who brings his rig right into our woods and charges reasonable prices. This way we avoid the cost and hassle of loading and hauling logs to the sawmill. More importantly we avoid the always dangerous task of cutting down big trees.
In caring for a tree grove, one has the option of mowing between the big trees in an effort to make the grove look like a park. Most suburbanites who buy a little woodlot out in the country to build a house in, do this. Better a park-like grove than no grove at all, I suppose, but how much wiser it would be to allow some seedlings to start growing to take the place of the big trees when they die.
Sheep will turn a woodlot into a neat park much more effortlessly than you and your mower. But wait until late June, after the spring wildflowers have matured so that grazing won't harm the next year's production of flowers. To make sure the grove sustains itself, fence off little areas with circles of woven wire fence (about fifty feet in diameter) where volunteer tree seedlings and brush can grow up inside, safe from the sheep. In about five years the seedlings will be tall enough so that the sheep can't destroy them. Then move your circles of fence to other areas. If you use a fence twelve feet tall, deer won't be able to get to the seedlings either.
The forestry handbooks say that pasturing woodland is not good for the trees. Done in the above way, sustainability is insured. As far as pasturing hurting trees for lumber and especially veneer, as the
handbooks maintain, I suppose that is true if you put a large herd of cows or horses into a small woods where the animals may trample around the trees and harm roots. But sheep certainly, and a small number of small cows, do not hurt trees in my experience, if sensibly managed. My best proof is that the grove from which I recently sold veneer trees was pastured for at least half a century.
A second proof is that I have observed many times that trees out in pasture fields, under which sheep stand on hot days to take advantage of shade, grow very well indeed. The trampling over the root zone of the tree keeps competing grass from growing there and the heavy manuring invigorates the soil. If you want to maintain a really healthy, heavyyielding apple tree, for example, plant a standard tree (not one with dwarfing rootstocks that grow weakly and provide little shade) in a pasture field, and after it grows up allow a flock of sheep to enjoy its shade.
In addition to fertilizing the tree, the sheep will eat all dropped fruit and that helps keep the trees healthy. The sheep eat the worms in the fruit too so the worms can't continue their life cycles. Nor can diseases overwinter on old fruit if there is no old fruit. I can't state it as a universal law-are there any universal laws?-but such apple trees produce fruit about 70 percent free of insect and disease damage, without spraying.
Orchards are tree groves, to be sure, but what I'm about to say now I wish someone would have told me years ago. If you are in the business of growing fruit, then of course soldierly-ranked blocks of fruit trees you must have. On the other hand, if you are a cottage farmer wishing to have fruit for your family and your animals, and plenty for juice, and maybe even a choice few bushels to sell, you may want to consider allowing your trees to bivouac anywhere there's ample sunlight.
For example, grow sun-loving fruit trees as forest-edge trees. In nature that:s where the fruit-bearing trees are. They grow on forest edges and will not survive the shade of the deeper woods. Another advantage of forest edges is that the forest ameliorates the temperature on frosty nights a little, perhaps that one or two degrees that spell the difference between fruit buds freezing and not freezing.
Fruit trees, by the same token, are excellent trees to grow in fencerows where in addition to plenty of light, the grazing animals are handy for eating up the drops and surplus fruit.
But the main reason for scattering fruit trees out along forest edges and fencerows is that these trees are, in my experience, harmed less by insect predation than the ones clustered in the more formal orchard. Even in the latter case, I now have a great mixture of trees, nuts and fruits together, plum and walnut, pear and hickory, mulberry and hazelnut, and apple and peach and even mulberry and Juneberry. Rarely do two of the same kind stand next to each other. As apple trees that I planted first, following conventional advice, die from scab because of not spraying them, I replace them with scab-immune varieties. There are about six varieties now on the market, and Liberty is very good. The apple trees in the fencerows and along the woods are all seedlings or wildlings that have demonstrated some resistance to disease and insects or they wouldn't have survived since Johnny Appleseed days. If I were to live long enough, I think that on a twenty-acre place like mine I could find spots for about a hundred standard-sized fruit trees that would produce a 50 percent marketable crop (say five bushels per tree at $5 a bushel or $2500, not bad pocket money). The other 50 percent would be for home eating, cider, pies, sauce, and lots for the animals. A glass of cider a day is a wonderful aid to bowel health.
Starting a Grove of Trees
If new woodlands, much needed in some parts of the country, are to flourish, cottage farmers will have to establish them. No one else believes they can afford to wait forty to sixty years, if ever, to get a financial return. To start a tree grove where only grass or cultivated crops existed before is easier than you think. You do not even have to plant trees if there are woodlands nearby, although I will try to explain, below, why I think you should plant a few. If you just stand back and wait patiently, you can watch nature stage a play in about six acts that is alone worth the price of letting the land "go back to nature." (Why does no one ever say, "go forward to nature?") You will die before the play is over, of course, but that is true of the whole drama of nature. The final curtain call never comes.
Act One is the Takeover of the Tall Weeds. Queen Anne's lace, thistles, dock, ragweed, milkweed, ironweed, and many others will shade out the grass, or grow in riotous density where a year earlier corn might have stood in its marching-band rows. This world of weeds is paradise for many birds: mourning doves in search of weed seeds, goldfinches after thistle seed and down, and a whole choir of songbirds after pokeberries. To neatnik humans, the field has turned into a terrible mess. To wildlife and artist it has become feast for stomach and eye.
Within two or three years, Act Two finds the fruit-bearing brambles and thorn trees coming on stage, sprouting from seeds brought to the field by birds and animals. The brambles and brush soon shade out the weeds. Most of the plant actors in this scene have the ability to spread not only by seed but by root. Vines, especially poison ivy, Virginia creeper, bittersweet, and wild grape also slip into the scenery, winding and twisting through the brush. Grain farmers with a Prussian reverence for neatness found Act One annoying and Act Two unspeakably repul sive. If this is one of their hillsides too steep to plow, they will mow the "mess" into the submission of grass even though they have no animals to graze. They thus commit themselves to a lifetime of such mowing, whereas, if they were patient, the "mess" would eventually turn into a grove of trees. Cottage farmers, however, delighted with the theater of nature, only brush-cut pathways through the brush jungle so that they can have a front-row view to all the action. These alleys become the logging roads of the future and should be laid out with that thought in mind.
Of action there is plenty because in Act Two there appears the greatest variety of the fruit and seed-loving birds that reforestation will ever bring. The raccoons and opossums are plentiful now, too, because they love blackberries. So do box turtles. Groundhogs, rabbits, and foxes go on population binges. Dominating all are the deer, nipping on the new shoots of the brushy growth and finding places to hide where no human and few dogs will follow.
In a few more years the curtain rises on Act Three. The jungle of thorny brush and hush starts to wane in a way that seems puzzling to those who have not yet learned the power of the sun. Tree seedlings are starting to push up through the bramble brush and shade out the lower growth. Wild cherry is the darling of the theater at this time, usually managing to upstage box-elder, elm, red maple, sassafras, ash, mulberry, and eventually that terrible villain, white thorn. Wind moves the seed of ash, box-elder, elm, maple. Birds bring cherry, sassafras, and mulberry. Deer and raccoons plus birds spread the wild haw fruit of the white thorn which is a villain, after all, only to humans and their livestock pastures. Its thorny boughs are favorite nesting sites and perches for many birds.
In small stream valleys returning to woodland, floodwaters carry black walnuts and sycamore seedballs from existing trees to lodge on the floodplains and sprout. Groundhogs, deer, and sheep eat the sweet pods of honey locust and after the seeds pass through their bodies they sprout readily. Squirrels and bluejays and chipmunks accidentally drop nuts and acorns or bury them and forget, and more trees are born.
Theater-goers whose favorite stars are the meadow birds find Act Three disappointing because the meadowlark and bobolink and blue bird disappear now, unless there is a pasture field nearby. The fruit-loving birds diminish a little, too, as the raspberry, blackberry, and elderberry bushes begin to be shaded out by the growing trees.
In Act Four, twenty years from the beginning of natural reforestation, the native hardwood trees have fought their way above the brush and thorn trees and begun the slow, patient work of shading out all the brushy growth beneath them, even the scourge of multiflora rose and the plague of autumn olive (the former once championed by the agricultural college experts as "living fences" and good habitat
for wildlife, and the second still championed, unfortunately). The white thorns and wild plums will put up a good fight, but inevitably they dwindle too. The pathways don't need to be mowed anymore because the shade of the trees keeps them open.
By Act Five, in the grove's thirtieth year, the plants and animals of the early brush years have moved to the woodlot's edges where the bramble berries and haws and wild plums and bittersweet that the wildlife once fed on in abundance still find enough sunlight to grow food for a few. In the lighter shade just a bit further into the forest from the edge, the thrushes make homes in young tree forks, and the nuthatches and downy woodpeckers hollow out rotted knotholes for nests, while both peruse woodland and woodland edge for food. Also now, in spring and fall, you will see greater concentrations of the migrating warblers, the little jewels of orange, red, yellow, gold, blue, chestnut, white, and black that are my spring delight.
By Act Six the grove is fifty years old and though not completely matured to its climax of oak and hickory (that can take two hundred years), it is well on its way. The wild cherry trees have almost matured and except on the most favored, protected northern slopes will soon begin to lose vigor or blow down. Except on the deepest loams, the walnuts are reaching their limit of vigorous growth, too. Deep in the grove, the primeval silence of the ancient forest begins to return. The only bird chattering comes from high in the canopy where the jays and crows and squirrels and scarlet tanagers and hawks live in their own edge to the sun. Lower down, the owls and bats reign, keepers of the dark, owing no allegiance to the sun. On the grove floor grow fungi, some to eat, like morels, and some to awe the night-time wanderer with their phospho rescent luminosity. Wildflowers bloom in the spring sun before the trees fully leaf out or, like the mysterious Indian pipe, grow in the deep shade without chlorophyll.