Thursday, May 22, 2008
Planting trees is something you do for your grandchildren
Bill Cochran
Recent columns
On a recent, bright spring day, my wife, Katherine, and I planted just over 300 trees on our mountain farm. I know: when a guy reaches age 70 it is getting late to plant trees. But my way of thinking says the best time to plant a tree is anytime you can.
Our farm mostly is wooded, with a rutted road running through the interior, but there is this one 12-acre field that has been kept open through the years, looking like a missing piece of a puzzle amid the woodlands around it. Green in the summer and white when the deep snow falls in the winter, the field is about as level as land can be in this hill country at an elevation of 3,000 feet.
My great-great grandpa John purchased it in 1838. According to the county history book, he paid for it with “50 venison saddles.” I guess you could say the blood of a market hunter flows through my veins.
He raised 10 kids in a log house on the farm, and I am going to guess they are the ones who picked the rocks off the field we planted. There is a heap of gray stones, some shrouded in lichen, at one edge of the field. Sometimes we haul them off to chunk them into the ruts of our road, and I always get an uneasy feeling that our ancestors are a great cloud of witnesses surrounding us and giving a critical eye as we undo the hard labor they accomplished.
The name on the deed to this property was changed to ours 29 years ago, and I sat down then and wrote a management plan. It seems just like yesterday, and it reminds me that ownership of family land is a fleeting thing, a baton thrust into your hand that you run with for a brief period, hoping to do well, at least to do your part to keep up the pace, maybe even do better than the one who ran before you.
We have planted thousands of trees through the years, most of them white pine seedlings, bearing green tops, black roots and the pungent aroma of Christmas morning. Some now tower skyward, canopying the sun and rendering the under story a park-like atmosphere that offers the pleasures of shade and beauty.
We have used the 12-acre field as a Christmas tree plantation for many years, planting firs, pines and spruce, mowing the grass, shaping the trees, dealing with disease and insects, cutting and hauling trees to the Roanoke Valley where we ran a tree lot. We gave that up several years ago, with plans to return the field to the forest that it was a 100 years or so earlier.
Of course, we won’t be around to see much of that, which is why we call it Kalei’s woods. She is our beloved 5-year-old granddaughter.
Few things remind you of your fallibility more than planting trees. You realize that some day soon you will become the ancestor, but right now you are the overseer, the Johnny Appleseed. In tree planting, faith is as important as a strong back.
Last summer, we cleared the gnarly, leftover Christmas trees from a strip of the field, laid out rows 10 feet apart and treated them with Roundup to kill the grass. A few weeks later we brought the tractor in and ran a subsoiler along the rows to loosen the soil. The freezes and thaws of winter softened the soil even more. Come spring, the field was ready to plant.
Planting trees is hard work. It is like doing knee bends all day. You are certain to be sore the next day. But it is rewarding labor. You face one way and see an open field, and you look back over your shoulder and you see a young forest taking shape.
White pines no longer work for us, due to blister rust disease and hungry deer. So I acquired some PitchXLobs from Meade Westvaco and we interspersed them with five hardwood species: black walnut, tulip poplar, white ash, wild cherry. These have a similar growth and yield quality timber. The theory is that the hardwoods will compete with the pines and all will grow fast, tall and straight.
In order to protect them from the deer, we had to put the hardwoods into 5-foot tubes, which increased the labor and cost of the project.
We added a few Sawtooth Gobbler oaks to the mix, a native to China, Japan and Korea introduced to America in 1962. The species has been widely promoted by the National Wild Turkey Federation as a quick producer of a large volume of mast for wildlife food.
This should make the deer, turkeys, bear, squirrels and grouse happy. Their names may not be on the property deed, and they’ve never offered to help pay the taxes, but let me tell you they own the land as much as we do.
