We’ve been regularly working in the woods this winter. Daniel and Adoniram especially enjoy going to the woods after finishing their lessons. Lately they’ve been practising their squirrel skills. They climb a small sapling and lean out to make it bend over so they can land on the ground again. This doesn’t work when carrying firewood!

The first part of this winter we finished cutting trails through the main areas of the forest. We’ve been working at that since we first bought this property. The new roads will finally allow us to access all areas of our woodland so we can better manage it.

However, we’ll still have some levelling to do with the tractor next summer to make some of the roads passable.

Our plan has been to first of all thin out the dense patches so the sun can shine in. This allows the trees to be healthier and grow faster. We want them to catch as much sunlight energy as possible, because this is what drives everything. More sunlight means more firewood, more valuable lumber, more maple syrup and richer soil.

So for the last month we’ve been going through the areas along the trails, and cutting out low value trees that are hogging the space. These are mostly stands of balsam firs and poplars that are overshadowing young hardwoods which we want to save. We favour the maples, oaks, pines, hemlocks, tamaracks, beeches, ash, elm and any rare trees.

The broken, leaning and bent trees have to be taken out to avoid accidents. Where two trees are rubbing each other we cut one of them out so the other tree doesn’t get damaged.

We’ve been cutting a lot of firewood, but we also harvest poplar, spruce and fir logs which we mill into boards with our old band sawmill.

As an extra benefit of this thinning, there will be patches of grass growing in forest glades. This will be useful for occasional grazing during a dry summer when the pastures aren’t growing much.

Wildlife

A healthy, managed forest has more species of wildlife. This is because there are more species of plants which means food for a wider variety of animals. And again, the more overall growth we can encourage, the more sustenance there will be off that land.

Since we cut out balsam firs and favour hardwoods such as beech, maple and oak which produce nuts and seeds, there is more food for the wildlife.

A possible downside to this more open forest management might be less habitat for some types of wildlife. However, we leave some old trees and stumps, brush piles, and small thickets for habitat. In the end our plan is to maintain a varied patchwork—tight thickets and park-like glades, wetlands and open hardwood stands.

A growing forest stores carbon for healthy soil

A fast-growing, healthy forest harvests much more carbon from the atmosphere than a crowded, stagnant forest. When trees and leaves rot down this carbon is stored in the soil as organic matter.

To add to the organic matter from the trees, grass grown between the trees also harvests sunlight and carbon, which is added to the soil in the grazing animals’ manures. Therefore, when we manage a forest to grow as much as possible by making the most of the available sunlight, we are building soil at a faster rate.

Why do we manage woodlands?

Our forestry actions are guided by the principle that we humans are to be stewards of the land, that a forest or farm is more ordered when we manage it. If a farm or forest is left to itself, chaos results. There will soon be a thick tangled mass of early colonizer plants such as blackberries and multi-flora rose taking over open areas. In the mature wooded areas there will be lots of dead branches and over-growth. After a hurricane those over-mature parts end up with wind blown patches of total disorder; and a fire can make an ugly mess as well. When we took over these woods, we saw chaos everywhere, especially in the far corners where there had been no management for many years.

When left to themselves, thick stands of young saplings do naturally thin out gradually—the weaker trees eventually begin to die out. But without some help this is usually a jumbled mess. When we proactively cut out extra growth and thin out dense clumps and thickets, we speed up the process, so the selected tree won’t end up stunted from having to compete with all the others.

Where there’s a clump of young maple saplings coming up around an old stump or a dying tree, we cut back all but the best and healthiest. This allows the chosen tree to grow faster and limb out more.

According to natural history research, the early people of North America maintained a beautiful and productive savanna in many areas.

For example, some areas of South America have a large percentage of fruit and nut trees around the areas where people were evidently living.

When eastern US explorers travelled west they described beautiful semi-open areas. Some of them believed they only had to get rid of the native people and then forever enjoy the land’s bounty. However, time has shown otherwise. When they took over—without the forest management practices that many native Americans used—the wildlife numbers gradually dropped, the forests filled in with dead wood, soils were depleted and finally wildfires began to be common. The abundance that the new settlers first saw did not continue without management.

Native Americans often used fire carefully to maintain areas of open woodland. They did this often enough to reduce “ladder fuels” which are dead branches on the lower parts of tree trunks which allow fires to move higher and burn down entire forests. When light burns were done regularly, the fires didn’t get very hot, and stayed close to the ground. This cleared out dead wood and brush but saved the larger trees.

Nova Scotia was probably maintained to some extent by the Mi’kmaq, although not nearly as much as the lands further south, probably because there were less people living here.

Our forest management accomplishes the same things as fire, but it doesn’t burn up organic matter and it’s obviously much less damaging to the forest. Besides, we get firewood and lumber as a by-product of our cleanup.

Nut trees

Our plan is to eventually turn our pastures into a sort of savanna as well. We could easily graze cows and poultry between widely spaced rows of nut trees. Trees provide shade for the animals, they help hold soil and moisture, and they store carbon. If we grow nut trees we can eventually harvest nuts and they can make valuable lumber.

We planted two dozen mixed nut trees three years ago.

This spring we’re getting one hundred hazelnut trees and 50 chestnut trees to add to those which we already have growing. These are blight tolerant selections bred/selected by Mark Shepard of Wisconsin. Mark is famous for his STUN principle as taught in his book, Restoration Agriculture. STUN originally stood for Sheer Total Utter Neglect, which means he simply planted thousands of nut trees and left them to fend for themselves. Those that survived the cold Wisconsin winters and the filbert blight and chestnut blight were his seed producers for the next generation. He later changed the term to “Strategic” Total Utter Neglect as he recognized that some management and planning was necessary on his part.

Our new trees will have to be protected from the livestock with electric fences. We’ll mulch them and if we have a dry spell in the summer, we will have to water them. Thankfully, we have a water line close to where the tree rows will be, where we get water for the cattle and poultry. It will be easy to give them a shot as needed.

We’re excited to see if we can successfully harvest nuts from the “Bounty” woods.

Maple Syrup

We’ve been tapping a few maple trees every spring since we bought the property. The trees in the thick parts of the woods are not giving much sap and it’s not very sweet either. Usually, the reason for this is that the tree isn’t able to photosynthesize much. For that process to happen, of course, trees need to have sunshine hitting their leaves. Trees with lots of branches and therefore lots of leaves give sweeter sap. I use a brix refractometer to test sugar levels in plants, and my tests almost always show the spreading trees in clearings and open areas to be higher in sugar, sometimes two or three times as high as crowded trees.

Some years ago, I thinned an overgrown maple woodlot from which I was making maple syrup. During the eight years I tapped the trees, the amount of sugar in the sap increased from year to year until it was twice as much as at first.

Now, as we give our best trees more space, I fully expect them to react the same.

In a few more years, we hope to be able to tap most of our maples and begin selling syrup.

In the meantime, we’re easily able to use the few litres we make every year. In fact, Amanda is making pancakes right now to go with the syrup we just finished off this morning. I can’t wait!

Maple syrup, lumber, firewood; healthy trees, healthy wildlife, healthy soil; pasture for livestock, recreation for boys, nuts for people and squirrels; we expect all these things and more from our managed forest.