Tree Planting

Planting a hard mast species is a great way to add beauty to your property and improve its value for wildlife. And in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, it can be a welcome diversion to get your hands in the dirt and establish new plant life in your backyard.

One of the most important components of the reforestation plan is selecting the appropriate site preparation technique.

This article appeared in the National Association of Conservation Districts' newsletter.

Indiana’s LaPorte County Soil and Water Conservation District (SWCD) is partnering with Women4theLand to focus on female landowner needs through periodic Women’s Conservation Learning Circles.

Trees provide shelter and food to the wildlife that live on your land, they hold the soil and protect it from erosion, they provide the air we all breathe, products you use everyday come from tree, and they provide us a place to walk, enjoy the peace and quiet we find in nature.  However trees take decades to grow tall and strong.  Are you preparing your woods for the next generation of trees?  Are your woods healthy?  Learn about how to evaluate your woods. 

Then make your woods healthier with these activities:

An unwelcome present arrived under some Oregonian Christmas trees.

The Oregon Department of Forestry discovered that Christmas trees shipped to big box stores such as Walmart were infected by the elongate hemlock scale. This pest feeds on the underside of needles and leaves behind a waxy residue that diminishes the tree's health. If the scale spreads into the natural forest, it could have a devastating impact on fir, spruce, and iconic Douglas fir trees. 

Guest Post provided by Eli Roberts of the Pinchot Institute for Conservation

Forests are always changing. Most trees grow larger each year; some die. Seeds spread in many ways, and they become new trees, or food for other creatures. Weather changes across days, seasons, and years. It has always made sense to keep these changes in mind as you consider how to best manage your woods. But climate change complicates this variability, even as it makes managing forests more important.

by Kate MacFarland, US Forest Service, Assistant Agroforester

 

The Prairie States Forestry Project was an innovative approach to conservation initiated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 with the goal of creating a “Great Wall of Trees” across the Great Plains. But windbreaks are still an important part of agricultural conservation and community wellbeing across the US, and around the country there is increasing interest in establishing and renovating windbreaks for a wide variety of purposes.

The Okefenokee wildlife refuge wildfire is a good reminder that wildfires can happen anytime, anywhere. Normally spring rains keep the soils, plants and trees moist in this portion of northern Florida and southern Georgia. This year the springs rain did not come and the lack of precipitation allowed the woods to dry out. This, in turn, made the woods more prone to fire caused by a lightning strike.

A special provision allows you to deduct up to $10,000 in reforestation expenditures per tax year, per qualified timber property.

Have you “dug around” to find out more about the soils that hold the roots and provide nutrients for the plants on your property?

Leila Pinchot, Women and Their Woods graduate and PA landowner, writes about her family's property in Milford, PA where she and her father are working to reintroduce the American Chestnut to the Milford Experimental Forest.

Friday afternoon, April 20, significantly the weekend of Earth Day 2012, twelve women landowners from Pennsylvania and New York gathered in the home of Nancy Baker for the Women and Their Woods spring workshop.  The Women and Their Woods program brings women landowners together to provide them with valuable education and educational resources and to cultivate long range support groups who are able to properly steward their lands and seek help in caring for their lands should they need it.