Pushing Back the Trees & Long-term Ecology

We made the decision to burn wood over two years ago. I work full-time as an educator and have summers "off". Most folks think teachers have it easy. The school day ends at 2:30 and we have summers off, right? Yes, there are some of us that work the clock but most of us are committed to our students, our curriculum and our school. This means that grading student work comes home with us and is scored after we eat with our family, that more than a few hours are spent on weekends doing what can't be completed during the week and that we spend some part of our summer thinking about what we will do differently and even creating material to use in the fall. Yup, that's me.

So, outside of my life as an educator, I have this passion for things outdoors. We have an organic garden that provides good veggies. We have a home garden and this year I've created a garden on our 50 acres (about 1 mile from where we reside). I'm experimenting with winter crops like potatoes, onions and squash. The soil is much richer than at our house and the plants show it! My 9 year old son is also very excited as his pumpkin plants there are HUGE! I'm hoping the critters don't find too much of what I've planted edible.

On our 50 acres, I'm slowly pushing back some of the fields that have been taken by trees over the last 100 years. The hardwood burns in our wood stove in winter. The soft woods are sold for pulp. I'm also dealing with poor logging practices.  Our acreage was logged a few times, about 12 years ago being the most recent. The memories of this are still there; deep ruts in softer soil and old oil cans strewn about. Some of the skidder trails are well placed and these I fix and turn into access trails for both walking, skiing and winter access for selective harvesting. This sounds like quite a bit of work (it is) but I take my strategy from Helen and Scott Nearing. It's a long-term plan with many interweaving components for successful land management. These components are designed to work together in one summer or over years of management.

Let me provide one example for areas where I am re-establishing open space.

Our forest is mid-stage succession. In this area of Maine, there are maple, oak, cherry, birch and beech but also pine and balsam fir. When I'm clearing, I have different things I do with the different parts of the trees. The hardwoods obviously are cut into burnable chunks, split and stacked to dry for winter fuel. The remainder is cut into "brush" and "poles". The brush is piled into a row on my access road and shredded with my field mower. Sometimes I leave this as it makes a nice base for a woods trail, sometimes I rake this up and use it elsewhere. The poles are stacked and can be either chipped or used as part of a "You Rot!" pile (read further).

Older softwoods are sustainably harvested for pulp. What little profit there is goes into tractor maintenance, chainsaw blades, diesel, gravel for the roads, etc. Branches from these are shredded and used as above. Sometimes the fir poles will be used for corduroy roads (another experiment). I leave wood standing until I am ready to use it. So, I may harvest the firewood one year and not harvest the fir until the next year.

When clearing, there is plenty of debris that is unusable. This includes half-rotten trees and wood too small to cut up for firewood. This material is stacked in rows into low spots on our property. When it reaches the level of contour I desire, I cover it with a layer of shredded brush (see above) that I have raked up. The idea is to create a moist environment for the organisms that feed on wood to thrive. I'm no soil biologist so my decay piles are each built differently to see what works best. I may eventually spread topsoil over the top and seed, but first I'll wait a year or two to see what nature brings.


We have a low area that will eventually make a nice pond. In this low spot, there is decent topsoil. In late August, early September when things are dry. I scoop out a good pile of soil and put it in a location where it can sit for a year. This way, the pile slowly dries and anything growing dies and decays. When I clear an area and the trees are gone,  I skim coat the surface with this top soil and seed with grass.

Stumps present their own issues.These are cut as low as possible

without running the saw blade into the dirt; then notched. Over a few years, the rainwater collects in the notches accelerating the decay process.  The freeze/thaw cycle over a few winters accelerates the process. The difference in longevity between notched and un-notched is remarkable; notched softwoods and hardwoods decay fairly rapidly.

In my "harvested soil", there are lots of rocks. These are raked out as the top soil is spread. The small rocks go into 5 gal buckets and the larger rocks are piled together. The small rocks are transported to a wet spot in a trail and used as fill, the larger rocks are moved to a pile that will be used to widen my main access road, build the next small bridge abutment or perhaps used in slipform construction to build a foundation for a cabin.

So, there is at least one option (usually more) for the output(s) of each process. Each output ties in with at least two ongoing projects. So, in theory anyway, as one process moves forward, the resources for another project become readily available. As new projects are completed, others are started. The most difficult part of the process is having a long-term vision and realizing that projects may take a few years to complete. In this way, what I am doing is more in line with what nature does when she "creates". It takes years for forest succession to take place so it makes sense (to me anyway) that small, human-engineered changes, should not be a rapid event either.

As I gain experience over the years and observe the outcome of my experiments, I gain understanding about how well certain ideas have worked. What and how I do things now is much different (and more efficient) than how I did things 5 years ago.