TreeTopics « Serving small woodland owners and managers in the Willamette Valley and northwest Oregon

Planting trees is a central part of woodland ownership. For many folks, planting was the first thing they had to do upon buying cut-over land. For others, it is part of leaving things better than they found them, of leaving a legacy or creating opportunities for the next generation.

Planting is a critical step towards growing a new forest, whether you are reforesting a harvested unit, or converting pasture or other farm ground to a riparian buffer. But it is not the first step in the process. That began a year or more ago with a look at the ground to decide what to plant and how to prepare the site. It continued with the work done to be ready to plant, and will go on a few more years after the seedlings are in the ground. At each step, in each season, success comes from focusing on the task at hand.

I was reminded of this when I was out visiting Bob Feldman last month. Bob and his family tend about 350 acres of conifers, oak woodlands and Christmas trees in the Eola Hills northwest of Salem in Polk County.

We walked down the hill to a 6 acre clear cut he harvested last summer. Before the logger left with his equipment, Bob had him deck some logs for firewood and pile the excess slash for burning. The site looks great, ready to plant.

So now Bob is ready to go with his ground ready, 2-0 seedlings ordered and planting crew lined up. After picking them up from the nursery, he will store his seedlings in a local cooler, pulling out a day’s-worth at a time to keep them in the best condition possible.

Bob stressed the importance of lining up a good contractor, someone with experience and a record of success they can demonstrate. Be sure to oversee their work, establish accountability and to make sure they do a good job. How? Get out there with them. Spend a good part of the first day with them, and a little time each day after that. Make sure you have explained how you want the job done, and to show that you care that it is done right. Check to see that things are being planted at the agreed spacing. Dig up a few seedlings to see that they are planted correctly, snug, at the right depth and not J-rooted. Check across the planting crew, and bring concerns to the crew leader. When finished, go out and look to see if you got what you asked for.

Good advice. But what if you are the leader, and the crew is your family? Bob has lots of experience there too, and says if they are new to it, then you have to teach them how to do it right. Stay with them and supervise until they get the hang of it. If adults, they should be as interested is getting it done right as you. If kids, their interests are a bit more complicated. Be patient with kids. As important as it is, you are teaching them more than “green side up, brown side down.” You are teaching them how to grow a new forest.

Brad Withrow-Robinson

Brad Withrow-Robinson, Forestry & Natural Resources Extension Agent for Benton, Linn and Polk Counties.

Let me begin by saying that I am a Luddite. I am not the first among my family or peers to embrace new technologies. I was deeply suspicious of computers, even while my brother carried around stacks of punch cards in high school. I am nostalgic for analog cell phones, laying quietly in a bag in the car, unable to play music, but able to beam a call from way up the Santiam canyon, or pick one up anywhere along Hwy 99 in Polk County! I could probably have direct dialed the Space Station.

My cell phone is dumb. I don’t tweet on Twitter, and I know where all my friends live.

But even a reluctant old dog can learn new tricks. So when Amy and I were talking about finding ways to work together more, she suggested I contribute to the blog. So I signed up for a test drive.

Expect to see articles from me from time to time. I’ll cover a range of topics as well as touching on a couple recurring themes, like “Growing a New Forest”. I hope to bring you wisdom from some experienced woodland owners and foresters in our area, while covering some of the new science or past discoveries that are the underpinnings of forest management.

But I just thought I ought to set the record straight now. I am bound to leave the blinker on (or at least the blog-equivalent), so when it happens, you’ll know who is at the wheel.

The holidays are winding down; gifts given and received, time spent with friends and family; Christmas trees soon will be un-decorated (and some will be repurposed for the fish).

Our rain gauge, officially known as OR-CB-16

This year I bought our Extension office a holiday gift: a CoCoRaHS rain gauge. CoCoRaHS stands for Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network. It is a national network of citizens who collect and report precipitation data using a standardized system. Having data collection points dispersed all across a region helps scientists understand localized weather patterns. In Oregon, the CoCoRaHS project is supported by the Oregon Climate Service, which is housed at OSU.

We set up our rain gauge a few weeks ago in a clearing outside our office. We put the data recording form on the fridge in kitchen. The first willing person goes out and checks the gauge in the morning. And now our data shows up on the CoCoRaHS map!

Based on our few weeks’ experience, participating in CoCoRaHS has been fun, easy, and educational. If you want to get in on it, the CoCoRaHS website has all the information you need to get started. We also plan to do some local workshops next year for Master Gardeners and woodland owners to help populate the map with more data points. Stay tuned for the dates and details.

As thoughts turn to the New Year, I’m pleased to announce that we will have a new contributor to this blog in 2013. Brad Withrow-Robinson, Forestry & Natural Resources Extension Agent for Linn, Benton and Polk Counties will be sharing the writing with me and sharing his insights on woodland management with all of you. You can share, too. Pass TreeTopics along to a friend, and pass your article suggestions on to us.

With warm wishes for a happy 2013,

Amy Grotta

I’m starting a new series of posts for those of you, like me, that (for better or worse) are smartphone and tablet users. More often than not these days, there are a few participants in my Extension workshops taking notes on their iPads*. And smartphones…well, with nearly half of all U.S. adults owning a smartphone, they are a fact of life.

There’s an app for just about everything, including forestry and natural resources. I thought I’d share some of the apps that I’ve found useful, starting with this post. A caveat – I have an iPhone 4 (sorry Android users) so can’t download some recent app versions only compatible with Androids or iPhone 5, or other devices.

With much of western Oregon under a flood watch today, let’s look at a couple of apps that allow you to monitor your local river levels. The one that I like is FloodWatch. It pulls in real-time data from USGS stream gages, including stream height, rainfall totals, and allows the user to compare to flood stages.

Continue reading →

Lately I’ve been immersed in the subject of forest management planning. From developing a website that helps landowners navigate the process of creating a forest management plan; to collaborating on a revised set of management planning guidelines for Oregon; to teaching Mentored Management Planning workshops; this has been a major theme of my work over the past year.

So I was interested to come across a recent article about management planning in the Oregonian. The article described the management plan that is in place for the city of Forest Grove’s 4,200 acre forested watershed, and the positive impacts that having the plan has had on the land. Though this forest is much bigger than those that most small woodland owners manage, the article demonstrated many of the same principles of forest management planning that I use in my courses.

Management planning starts with identifying goals for the site. The number one goal in the case of Forest Grove’s watershed is, not surprisingly, protecting drinking water quality. Biodiversity and sustainable timber management are secondary goals. These goals drive all of the actions called for in the plan – such as road rehabilitation, erosion control, and carefully planned timber harvests.

Forest management planning has evolved over time. In the 1970’s and ’80’s, most forest management plans were concise timber management plans – laying out succinct timelines for planting, weed control, thinning and clearcut harvest to optimize wood production. Nowadays we take a much more holistic approach. Today’s plans consider all the different resources on a given piece of land – timber, of course; but also recreational resources, streams, fish and wildlife, roads, aesthetics, soils, and much more. We recognize that most landowners value many other aspects of their property as least as much as the timber resource. Well-constructed plans reflect the suite of values of the landowner and place emphasis on them appropriately.

The other important management planning principle that I took note of in the article was the fact that the plan is being updated, ten years after it was originally written. It is a good idea to revisit one’s plan after a time, both to check that the goals are still relevant and to recognize the progress that has been made towards achieving them.

One of the guiding principles of the Extension Service is to be a source of research-based information. Research-based? Meaning that the information we provide is not supposed to be based on rumor or anecdotes, but is supported by science.

University researchers are obviously an important source of our research-based information. Nonetheless I believe that “research” and “science” come in many forms and on many scales. Many woodland owners like to experiment on their own forests to come up with management techniques that work for them.

I’ve found this especially to be the case when it comes to preventing deer and elk damage to western redcedar seedlings: from painting seedlings blue to scare tactics, I think I may have heard it all. Are these experiments “research”? Maybe – it depends on how they are set up and measured.

Western redcedar and Sitka spruce in the same planting hole. Photo by Glenn Ahrens

Recently a forest owner wrote to ask about one such browse deterrent method whereby a cedar and a spruce seedling are planted together (see photo). (The hypothesis: the animals are deterred by the sharp spruce needles; the spruce thereby protects the cedar; eventually, when the cedar has grown above browsing height, the spruce is carefully cut away.) The individual wanted some specific guidance on how to do this, and wanted to see a demonstration site. Although we know that people have tried this method, to our knowledge none of these plantings were carried out in a scientifically valid way. We can provide a hypothesis on how things might turn out, but to date we do not have research-based information to provide. Instead, we can only rely on anecdotal evidence.

I’m a strong advocate for woodland owners contributing to our collective knowledge of woodland management by trying out different techniques on their own properties. However, there are several important design factors to keep in mind if you want to call your experiments “research”:

Have a control. Suppose you planted 100 cedar/spruce in the same hole, but did not plant any cedar without spruce. If the cedar are not browsed, it is not possible to know whether the spruce had any effect. It might just be that the deer were not hungry that year. In a controlled experiment, you leave a portion of the area untreated, or without the variable whose effect you are trying to test.
Have a large enough sample size. Suppose you only plant five spruce/cedar combinations, and of them, two cedars are browsed and three are unbrowsed. It is hard to draw a conclusion from five seedlings. Was the treatment 60% effective, or did the two browsed trees happen to be unluckily planted right along a deer trail? If you had planted 50 spruce/cedar combos, and only two were browsed, then it is easier to say that the technique is effective.
Replicate. What works on a north slope in Columbia County may not be effective on a south slope in the Willamette Valley; what works in a dry year may not work in a wet year. By repeating the entire experiment in more than one year or on more than one site, you can draw conclusions that have more power. This is probably the hardest one for small woodland owners to pull off individually. However, collectively there are a lot of experimenters out there. What if we could compile the results from everyone’s scientifically valid experiments? Then we might have some real research-based information (and some real value to all you frustrated cedar growers).

Here are a couple of upcoming events for small acreage owners, or for those who have multiple activities (farm, livestock, forest) on their land. Click on the program headers for more information.

Small Farms School – Sept. 8th – at Clackamas Community College. An all-day event for beginning farmers and small acreage landowners. Field and classroom workshops will address small farm topics such as crop and livestock production, direct marketing, small-scale equipment, and soil and water conservation.

Rural Living Field Day – Oct. 13 – Echo Glen Farms, North Plains. A fun event for rural landowners with educational topics including wildlife and pollinator habitat, invasive weeds, small scale agriculture, woodland management, livestock and pasture management, and more. Sponsored by West Multnomah, Tualatin and Columbia Soil and Water Conservation Districts.

And also, a bit further afield but sounds like a fun and interesting program…

Family Forest Fair and BBQ – Sept. 15th – near Brownsville. The Oregon Woodland Cooperative invites you to celebrate the Co-op’s recent accomplishments and learn about their latest projects to help small woodland owners diversify their income. Free! Hands-on demonstrations including bundled firewood, specialty milling, medicinals, truffles, figured wood, walking tours and more.

Submitted by Glenn Ahrens, OSU Extension Forester, Clackamas, Marion & Hood River Counties

Alder flea beetles are particularly active this summer as they go about their business of skeletonizing leaves on red alder trees. I have seen this come and go over the years, and generally flea beetles are not a serious threat. Flea beetle flare-ups in the forest usually run their course after 2-3 years, after which their population crashes – similar to western tent caterpillar infestations. Healthy alder trees with good vigor are usually not seriously affected. Stressed alder trees – particularly those in dense thickets – may die after 2-3 consecutive years of flea beetle infestation. If you like your red alder trees and want to promote “good vigor” the best way is to 1) avoid growing alder on poor alder sites and 2) keep trees well-spaced to ensure large healthy crowns.

That is the question we asked concert goers in downtown Portland last week. The nonprofit organization Ecotrust hosted the music and invited groups to attend with educational booths related to the theme “Treasuring Forests.” At the OSU Extension table, we talked to members of the crowd about the Hopkins Demonstration Forest, the Women Owning Woodlands Network, and the important role that the 70,000 Oregon family forest owners play in our state.

As a conversation starter, we put up a flipchart and invited people to give us their definition of sustainable forestry. A few brave souls took on the challenge.

(Click on the photo to enlarge)

This led to some interesting interactions.

My own view is that sustainable forestry is a much larger and more nuanced concept than anything captured on the flipchart. But I think it’s always instructive to hear what non-forest owners perceive and understand about forestry.

So, what does sustainable forestry mean to you? And, more importantly, two follow up questions: Are you able to implement your vision of sustainable forestry on your land? If not, what is standing in the way?

I invite you to write your thoughts on the virtual flipchart, a.k.a. the comments section of this post.

TreeTopics

Serving small woodland owners and managers in the Willamette Valley and northwest Oregon

Growing a New Forest #1

Another Author…

Looking ahead to 2013

There’s an App for that #1: River monitoring

Forest management planning in the Forest Grove Watershed

Experiments by Design

Events to kick off Fall

Flea beetles skeletonize red alder leaves

What does sustainable forestry mean to you?

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