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| I scratched up some bare dirt alongside my trail |
We have six white pine on our 65 acres in Nolalu and I would like to have more of these majestic trees.
Five of the trees have seeded-in naturally from one big tree growing on a ridge toward the western side of our land. Three of the young trees are growing in a line, about 50 yards apart, northeast of the mother tree. In other words, a southwest wind -- pretty much our prevailing wind -- carried the seeds in this direction.
I'm trying an experiment this spring to bring forth more Pinus strobus or perhaps I should say P. strobi which would be the plural, I think.
Nearly all of the seeds dropped by trees like the white pine don't grow because they don't land in a suitable spot. Seeds that lay upon moss or leaves or grass might germinate with moisture but will dry up and die before their tiny roots reach soil.
Seeds that land on bare dirt, on the other hand, start growing immediately. There is a term for creating areas of bare dirt in the forest industry. It is called scarification and foresters don't call it dirt but mineralized soil.
So this spring I went around some of the areas that I have created clearings by firewood cutting in the past and have pushed off the grass thatch with my tractor bucket to reveal mineralized soil. All these spots are to the east of the mother tree. Let's see if any white pine seedlings appear in the next couple of years.
I haven't tried this in the past because whitetail deer would have eaten every pine seedling. Following the enormous snowfall here in the spring of 2023, I estimate the current population of deer to be just 5-10 per cent of what it used to be. So there's a chance pine can get a head start and grow high enough to be out of the deer's reach before the population rebounds.
2 comments:
Wow, that snow really impacted the deer herd in your area but the good news is perhaps there will be less ticks. Curious why you like the white pines so much. The wood is soft so it's not good for fire places and the trees lose about 1/3 of the needles or more each year and make a big mess.
Mike S
White pines are our most majestic tree reaching heights over 100 feet and diameters of four feet or more. Nothing else comes close. All of our white pine were logged off a hundred years ago and never replanted. The tree gets a disease called white pine blister rust that kills the top whenever it is within a certain distance of Ribes plants, like currants or gooseberries. A few, like the ones on our land, seem resistant to the disease and I would like to keep them going to spread their genes. Then again, only the mature trees get sick and most of ours are still young. We do have the one big tree, the mother tree, which seems healthy.
The white pine is also Ontario's provincial tree and it is against the law to cut one down.
We are just about at the northern limit of this big tree species. They are common down in the northern states but are a rarity here.
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