Our First Harvest of Old Field Pine

We had planned to remove some of our old field pine this past winter. In our neck of the woods, forest products are pretty big. The downturn in the economy caused the mills in our area to slow down and subsequently the bottom fell out of the softwood pulp market. So, our plans for harvesting this winter came to an abrupt halt.

Our neighbor and part-time logger flagged me down about two weeks ago and said that the market had opened up a bit and that his hauler could take a load a week out of our woods. We decided to start at the back field and remove all the field pine on one side. There is a nice slope here and I thought it might be a good spot to eventually plant some blueberries. At the bottom of the slope, there is a hollow that may eventually become a small pond.

A brief aside about field pine. Field pine is white pine that has naturally colonized on old farm field areas. On our property, in most cases, this pine has been attacked by weevils. Pine weevils destroy the tip of the tree (the apical meristem for you biology types). Without a leader, one of the side shoots (which would normally become a branch) takes over as lead and you get a jog in an otherwise straight tree. Weevils will continue to attack these trees and you can end up with pine trees with multiple trunks and multiple jogs. Needless to say, there is no straight board that can be cut from these trees. They are usually not very healthy and at between 15 and 20 years, they begin to die and fall down or get blown over.

Harvesting field pine doesn't put much change in the landowner's pocket by the time your logger has taken his cut for taking the trees down and cutting them up and the person loading and hauling your twisted trees to the mill gets his. But, it will help put a few more loads of gravel on our road at least.

It's truly amazing to watch a skilled logger take down trees and cut them up. As just one person with a chainsaw and tractor with an old logging winch, ours is a one-man marvel. I am very pleased that there is so very little damage to the ground where the trees have been taken from and to where they have been dragged. In my opinon, there is little need for the type of heavy equipment that has been created to support the logging industry if you use selective cutting with small equipment. Yes, it's hard work. But, it is good work made easier by the use of a tractor which does minimal damage to the forest floor.

What's left when the wood has been taken? Therein lies the rub. Some folks would burn the branches, others would leave them to decay. If I had a large industrial chipper, it would be easy to just pitch in the remains and watch the chips come out the other end. But, I don't have an industrial chipper, just the one that attaches to my tractor. Running whole pine branches full of pine needles full of pine pitch doesn't work well as the pitch gets all over everything inside and the exhaust chute continuously clogs with needles. So, I will slog my way through all the brush, cutting the small branches off from the larger. The smaller branches with pine needles will get piled and run over with my field mower, the larger pine-needle less branches will get chipped. Yup, it's pretty tedious. However, the remains are fully usable as mulch and this mulch also decays much more rapidly than the larger branches due to the smaller pieces. Much will be spread over the cleared area and left to decay naturally adding to the tilth of the soil.

What will be left? A nicely sloping hillside populated with red maple and wild apple trees. The thin, smaller maples will be removed, the clumps of larger maples thinned and what remains will be a nice partially shaded hillside.

Next, we will move on to some selective cutting. We have a nice 7 acre strip of white pine that runs from one side of our property to the other. Some of this pine is in fairly decent shape, some is not. This thinning will open up the pine stand allowing the better trees to stay and perhaps allowing us to plant some pine seedlings next spring.