Planning for the Forestry Future
We have big plans for my little piece of forest. I say “we” because the planning has grown beyond my expertise. Yesterday, Alex & I met with Eric Goodman from Kapstone, Frank Meyer from Gasburg Forestry and Katie Martin, a wildlife biologist to talk about plans for the Freeman property. The local hunt club also has a stake in all this, so I have to bring them in too. As I described before, the woods have been thinned to different densities, to see which ones produce the best harvests. We will also use different management regimes to test for different outcomes. Some parts will be biosolids; others will be burned or treated chemically.
One of the more interesting parts of the plan is longleaf pine planting. We plan to mix longleaf with loblolly. Frank looked at the dirt and told us that we needed to plant to longleaf farther down the slope, where the soil had more sand and less clay and where the microclimate would be a little more moderate. That is the kind of knowlege you can get only from experience and that is why I need the help of all these people who know local conditions so well. If things go as planned, we can harvest the loblolly in fifteen years leaving a stand of longleaf. Longleaf pine used to be very common in the south, but have lost ground, since they require specific conditions; most important is burning to get them started. In other words, longleaf pine is a fire dependent species that didn’t do as well when fires became less common.
Katie will come up with recommendations for wildlife habitat under the power lines. We can plant warm season grasses and a mix of wildflowers, she says. It won't cost me very much, since we probably can get some cost shares from Dominion Power (it is under their lines and our activities will save them the worry of cutting as well as provide a little "green PR") These plantings will help restore something like the habitat common in this part of Virginia hundreds of years ago. It will also give us a chance to see how well these habitats respond under local conditions.
The grass and forbs will mature this year and a few years from now they will form a working ecology. I have reasonable confidence that I will be around to see that. The trees belong to the next generation. Understanding that fills me with an exquisite mixture of sadness and joy. I am glad that something will be around after I'm gone, but it reminds me that I will be gone.
The picture up top shows some longleaf seedlings near the Virginia-North Carolina border. They are just coming out of the "grass stage", called that because it is really hard to tell the little pines from the grass around them. You would not be able to see them during the summer, since they would be covered by and the same color as the grass. The grassy vegetation has to be controlled. In the natural run of things, a fire would do that, allowing the pines time to grow above the grass. I was told that this was an old farm field, so the trees got a head start before the grasses came in. Some of the bigger ones in this stand have done that, as you can see in the picture.
