CRP Aforestation Do Over, looking for tree suggestions

[mesquite buckeye]

Thanks for the encouragement, ET. Here, the biggest trees from the 1999 planting are about 15 feet. Very tough to get past the browse layer with our heavy deer population. If you clean around the trees to give them room to grow, they pull them up whole by the roots. I still have 15 year old trees that are less than 3 feet tall, and look like little round bushes from all the chomping. Once they get taller than 6 feet, they take off.

Now the Sericea lespedeza is moving in, but I am not sad. It makes it hard for the deer to get through and improves the soil. After the trees start to make some shade, it will go bye bye. ;D

[ET]

I purchased some deer repellant (was like white paint) and I used a brush and only touched top of the main leader. Took a second to do. I just rode on my garden tractor and hit every tree on my 20 ac reforestation and the deer would not touch them. I had to do it twice a year for at least 5 years. I feel it was worth my time. Got it from that same nursery in Minnesota. 

[mesquite buckeye]

We use large caliber rifles and pistols to reduce deer damage. ;D

[mesquite buckeye]

Started planting yesterday on the worst ground on the farm. Highly eroded clay loam subsoil, sticky and hard at the same time. All tough species: mulberry, hackberry, red cedar, redbud and elderberry.

  

 

Well, looks like the rain has quit. Better try to get back out there. Only had 3 ticks yesterday.

[mesquite buckeye]

I am feeding this thread into MO trees. There will be photos of the whole thing from nursery to completed planting. See you there. ;D

[chester_tree _farmah]

Yup. Turkeys are now thriving again in North Central Maine. Probably not a big deal to you southern boys but it's great to see them up here. Impressive birds.

That's a bummer on all the regs buckeye. Seems a bit of over kill. I am lucky. My town has super low tax rates so not being in our tax growth program is not a big deal to me. I am free to cut and manage as I please within the regular regs. Though the Maine program isn't that restrictive. 

[mesquite buckeye]

Well, it isn't all that bad. They just boss you around if you are in a government program and they give you some money to be in that. Taxes, at least in the 2 counties the farm sits in is  ;Donly total $120/year.

[wisconsitom]

Mesquite, a couple things in your tale reminded me of some of our work;  I initially started my afforestation via hand-planting.  This worked well but eventually, I wanted to stock the entire field all at once and get it done.  My plantation happens to be in Oconto County, Wisconsin, which just happens to be the place where tree seedlings were first planted-anywhere in the world-via "tree-planting machine" which is nothing more than a glorified cabbage planter.  There, our DNR first invented the modifications that then went on to be used all over the world.  Back in the 1930s this was.

Anyway we planted our mix of species via this machine and tractor all in one 2-day period.  We planted something like 6000 seedlings that weekend.  The year prior, that area had been planted to Roundup-Ready corn, which the forester said I would appreciate, for a clean field.  Well....Roundup, as you may know, has zero residual effect, and after our seedlings were in, a mass of lesser ragweed came up.  That was a wet year and I could not see any of my trees, the ragweed growing to chest-height.  I saw your reference to simazine...and that is what Forester wanted me to spray to prevent weediness.  But no way-I could not see my rows, no hope of that.  So...I did nothing that first year.

Here's where it gets interesting;  By the 2nd growing season, all...and I do mean all of that ragweed was gone.  Not one stem.  It had been replaced 100% by perennial forbs, things like Canada goldenrod, New England and other asters, etc.  Then, just a few years later, the fast-growing tree types we have planted there were able to grow above this "weed layer" and now they are off for the sun.  Once you've passed this weed layer, the trees are going to win.

Just thought I'd relate a bit about our efforts towards expanding the forest there.  BTW, in only 10 years, I'm already getting set to do some thinning.  Rapid growth.

Thanks,
tom

Ps...I did use squirts of glyphosate to keep weeds away from young trees in my early days...the ones we hand-planted.  But that went away completely once we ramped up production.  Now, no weed control, and none needed.  I will have to do a bit when I start my hybrid aspen nursery.  But that's different.  Those will be very special plants intended to eventually yield much propagative material.  It will make sense to baby just those first few clonal starts.  But more generally, I have found it largely unnecessary in my situation to do any weed control.  This was an ag field.

[SwampDonkey]

The best results we have had up here on old fields was a 2 furrow plow and plant right on the cut line, where you have bare soil to one side and uprooted sod on the other. Never needed an ounce of herbicide. We found site prep with herbicide released the worse mess of weeds than was already established. I'd rather plant in wild strawberry and devil's paint brush and goldenrod than I would on sites of sweet scented bed straw and purple vetch. We found bed straw and/or vetch was a curse after spraying.

My cousin battles vetch every year in Christmas trees.

We tried plots of hybrid popple up here to. Moose just love it, like feeding the horse molasses. :D My experience if you escape the moose, you have about 30 years and then they can all die about the same time. But you have 20" popple to. Regular trembling aspen you have a 10" in 25 years, but it can live far longer and become 36" to. And large tooth aspen gives you 8-10" in 15 years on the best sites and grows tall quick. I have mostly shade tolerant hardwood and softwood on my land.

[nativewolf]

Well, it isn't all that bad. They just boss you around if you are in a government program and they give you some money to be in that. Taxes, at least in the 2 counties the farm sits in is  ;Donly total $120/year.

Ahh so this is the MO tree thread

[wisconsitom]

Swamp, I know that folks tend to lump similar-seeming things together, but the hybrid aspen-not poplar-that I will be trialing is a part of a very carefully-controlled line of research.  I'm not the brains of this agenda but the guy that is is making highly-controlled crosses of specific members and clones of aspen, not poplar.  We're very much well-informed on the hybrid poplar stuff too.....but that ain't what we're doing.

Poplars-trees like eastern cottonwood for one example, root readily from unrooted cuttings, but don't tend to develop any or very many root sprouts (root suckers) when harvested.  Aspens, on the other hand are fully-rhizomatous trees, meaning that when we see a patch on the landscape, what we're usually seeing is all one plant, but with many stems coming out of the ground-a clonal patch.  Thus-as you surely know-aspen stands can be regenerated almost indefinitely (until the climate no longer supports them!) on a site merely by harvesting.

We are testing hybrid aspens bred to have figured grain.  We are testing hybrid aspens bred to have up to 75% native genetics of the bigtooth aspen.  We are developing hybrid aspen clones that can be planted from these 12" or 14" "forestry cuttings".  Hence, the work with white poplar within our breeding program, and some others.  But I'm just in the A-G lines, the alba/grandidentata lines.  That is my area of interest in hybrid aspens.  None of the plants we are working with would correctly be labelled poplars.

Finally, even the guys growing hybrid poplar-not me or my partners-are doing so under very proscribed conditions and with a very set plan.  Thus, you see this material being grown only to short status, but in a tightly-packed bed, and blown into a trailer for biomass uses.....or growing a full-size tree in less than 100 years...for whatever purpose.  But nobody that is serious about that type of venture is growing hybrid poplars as though they were long-lived trees.  Everyone knows they are not.  At best, a one-hundred-year tree.

Thanks.
tom

[SwampDonkey]

Yup. Well I group any native tree of the genus Populous as a popple or poplar. That includes all natives that grow here in NB. And I understand that trembling aspen are not as easily rooted from cuttings as balsam poplar or black cottonwood. I have learned this myself experimenting 35 years ago with cuttings. Trembling aspen would not root by simply sticking it in the mud. Balsam poplar does. The DOT of highways learned that to, when they would stick balsam saplings cut in the fall by culverts to mark for next spring cleanout. If left alone, many of them suckered roots in spring and you had new leaves by June.

The word aspen is often a regional common name or mostly adopted by the profession. Up here all the mills call it all popple or poplar, no exception except some woods folks call Balsam poplar,  Balm of Gilead. I don't know of anyone that walks up to a trembling aspen or a balsam, and names it other than a popple tree unless it is a professor, some foresters and loggers cutting balm. They are similar because their flowering habits, morphology and genes say so. Balsam poplar (balsamifera ssp. balsamifera) and black cottonwood (balsamifera spp. trichocarpa) root sucker as much as any trembling aspen. They are a mix of suckered stems on most harvested sites where the parent trees were removed. And can be up to 300 feet from the parent stump, either species. Black cottonwood grows ginormous compared to eastern cottonwood (lives 3 x as long to) or any aspen. 24" dbh ain't noth'n. Balsam poplar grows as big as "aspen" and the bark gets deep furrows and turns orange in the furrows or where outer bark is chipped to reveal orange. Doesn't tend to get canker diseases as easily as trembling aspen. In fact, if a site grows back to a lot of trembling aspen we don't thin it. If it grows to large tooth, then it is approved for pre-commercial thinning as the cankers are not as prolific. But balsam never is because it is usually on wet sites, but not always wet sites. I have some that grew and later suckered like crazy into a surrounding field here behind the house. I interplanted yellow birch among the suckers and made a border of yellow birch to control the root suckers. It's just a small controlled patch, not an acre or anything. But might well have been if left to do there own thing. The parent trees are only 6 or so in number, around 40 years old by now.

I have dabbled a bit in tree genetics and breeding during college years as course work at the undergraduate level and summer work with Forestry Canada. By no means an expert but I have seen these aspen/popple experimental things come and go. The economics never worked for us. We have all kinds of such material for harvest with far less effort and cost.

[wisconsitom]

Swamp,

Agree with many of your points and yes, we are talking about trees in the genus Populus-the poplars and aspens.  "Popple" is the usual term in WI for any aspen.  I don't think many foresters here would look at a cottonwood however, and say "popple".  There is a known distinction.

I have balsam poplar on my land.  It is in fact an "aspen", not a  poplar, just as "white poplar" is also actually a type of aspen.  Semantics get in the way if you let them!  There are differences in rooting ability from cuttings across this range of species, from P. balsamea rooting well, to as you mention, trembling aspen rarely rooting at all.

Keep in mind-if you're at all interested-there are at this point perhaps 1000 different entities that someone somewhere would describe as "hybrid poplar".  Simply not all the same thing.  And some of what you are looking at and may be thinking is simply native aspen....is likely already hybridized with pollen from one or more other closely-related tree types, especially in places like Maine, UP of Michigan, probably NB, etc...where large-scale plantations have been the norm for decades.  Numerous aspen stands have been found to contain genes from such species as white poplar, etc.  So this is already going on, in uncontrolled fashion.

Just within the PMG hybrid aspens my partners are developing, there must be several hundred different clones being evaluated.  They all behave differently, from rooting ability to leaf shape to stem quality to disease resistance to figured grain, to......right around twenty more criteria that are being evaluated.  I know you know a lot but there is much going on in this realm.  Much going on....not a little bit.  The several hundred attendees at 2018's International Short Rotation Woody crop conference in Rhinelander WI are by and large, busy people who are actively engaged in their agendas.

My costs to date?  Attendance at that conference.  That's it. Planting stock costs are nil-we are after all starting from 14" unrooted cuttings.  All efforts in the Open4st agenda are geared towards the lowest-cost solutions possible.  My labor is free.  And at the end of it all, we are giving this to the world, not keeping it for ourselves.  It may be hard to envision, but some day, both in my larch work, and in this aspen agenda, the fruits of our labors could become far more visible on the landscape over time.  Oh, and there's this little company called Weyerheuaser that is using some of this technology.

One thing rings clear in each message-you and I live in a similar forest type.  You're always talking about the very same tree types that are in my woods....or in the region where my land is.  And this "mixed-wood" forest type is definitely my favorite, although I love all forest types.

Thanks,
tom

[SwampDonkey]

But when we look economically, some of you overlook 'opportunity costs'. Meaning, even if you think labour to do this is free, you could have been working somewhere else for a wage as income for those hours. :D

No, when aspen grows so freely here and prolific, there is no demand for such work. We currently grow more than can be cut to supply the current capacity of mills. Just cut wood and get paid for it. And we don't need to loose any decent farm land to do it. If it is marginal land, leave it alone and there will be more aspen/poplar than you can count in 10 years. ;) Mills here want spruce and want to improve it, that is where the breeding and seed orchards are concentrating. Pretty much nothing done with hardwood except cut it, leave it to nature, same for aspen. Very little volume of hardwood cut to lumber or veneer up here, and seasonal at best. Aspen veneer was never more than pulp price or so little more that the loggers said the sort and bucking took the extra profits, so don't bother.