Thursday, May 29, 2008
Why convert the field to forest?
Bill Cochran
Recent mail
BILL:
I am sorry to hear that yet another field in Virginia is being changed to forest (see last week’s Cochran Column). We are losing so many species that depend on field habitat.
I hope you won’t mind me asking, but why did you feel that yet more forest on your land is better than keeping the field? And did you make use of the CREP program for this?
Marlene Condon
Author, “The Nature-Friendly Garden”
Crozet
MARLENE:
Fields are important, but so are family woodlands. The field I wrote about is going to revert to forest one way or another. It is 2.5 hour drive from where we live and once you are there it is a 2-mile logging-road drive off the hard road to reach it. That makes it impracticable to maintain it as a field.
Left alone, it rapidly would become a thicket of hawthorns, locusts, blackberries and similar early succession species. By planting trees we have better control of the quality of species, which is an important economic factor to us. We have done a number of things on the property the past three decades to benefit wildlife and enhance timber production.
No public funds were used in the planting that I wrote about.
BILL
