Regenerating EWP, Pinus strobus: a survey

[wdmn]

Hello all,

I'm doing an informal survey for my own purposes on the regeneration of white pine.

Thank you very much to anyone who participates:


Where are you located geographically?

Do you still plant white pine?

If not, when did you stop?

What were the reasons?

Are you more likely to plant white pine if you knew it was historically on the site (either recently, as in just harvested, or in the more distant past)?

Have you had success regenerating white pine using shelterwood?

Have you had success regenerating white pine using clear cutting?

Have you noticed an increase, decrease or little change in white pine planting in your area over the last decade? Two decades? Longer?



much appreciated,
wdmn

[Clark]

Have you considered aerial seeding?

Clark

[curdog]

I work in the foothills of nc. I've done a little white pine planting with marginal results. We don't have a good white pine market with only a limited amount of mills buying it. Our loblolly is far more competitive to white pine. Most of the white pine planting gets choked out by competition without doing some form of release. We are within the natural range,  but  the plantings are so-so at best. I've gone to either allowing natural hardwood regeneration or planting loblolly.

[wdmn]

Thanks curdog. I really appreciate the response.

Clark; does that mean you've had success with aerial seeding? Can you re-read my original post, I'd love to hear your answers!

[thecfarm]

I'm in Maine. Just a little history about the land. Family land,never logged until 1993-97. My Father and me started to cut white pine just using a tractor. We was cutting pine 70-80 years old. Slow,but happy with the money. Not much growing for new stuff. After we disturbed the ground the pine came in as thick as hair on a dogs back. My Father passed away and I built a house here in 2000. I have have it logged 3 times since than. The logger is just fasinated by the regen on my land. I have no reason to plant. In fact I should be doing a major thinning.We cut some area hard,maybe a ½ acre and some areas we only took a few trees out. The pine still came in just as thick.

[Ron Wenrich]

I'm in south central PA.  Very little planting of any plantations, and that goes for a good deal of the state.  You may see some planting of pine in the coal regions when they do strip mine reclamation.  The rest of the plantations start out as Christmas trees, then when they give up, you'll have a small stand of pine.

There were plantations planted back during the CCC days and into the '50s.  White pine got a bad name with weevil attacks.  Too much crook and too little demand.  Hardwoods are a better market, and they use natural regeneration on those stands.  Most cuts are "selective" cuts. 

There are areas that could be growing pine, but the markets are too thin to support it.  We had a thriving log home market for a while, but that seems to have dried up.  There are a few post and beamer operations, but not enough to support enough interest in new plantations.

[Clark]

I'll send you a PM about aerial seeding.

To answer your questions more specifically there is white pine planting that is going on. From the outside looking in, it seems that the counties plant very little, the state a little more and the forest service the most. The number of acres being planted in white pine is on the rise due to societal pressure, fear of white pine blister rust is decreasing and more foresters are seeing the advantage of putting it back onto sites where it belongs.

Certainly white pine belongs in northern MN but the extra cost of bud capping decreases the number of acres planted annually. Around here you can figure bud capping will need to happen for 5 years, minimum, after planting.

There is a great unpublished paper (which I can send to you) that shows the success of a shelterwood cutting and prescribed fire in these parts. The end result was 12K white pine seedlings/acre and 1K red pine/acre.

Clark

[beenthere]

Clark
Can you tell us more about bud capping?  Links to info would help too.

Sounds like what I did to my red oak seedlings to protect the terminal bud from the deer.

[Clark]

This site and the linked video cover it well:

http://www.dnr.state.mn.us/treecare/whitepine/tending.html

Clark

[SwampDonkey]

Not much success with white pine planting here. Weevils, rust, and moose pretty much ruin it. I planted 3500 at random on my land, and it's a target by all the above. Be lucky if I end up with 20 nice trees, and that's a stretch. :D There is some pine planted on mill or crown lands as it is mixed in with trays of spruce. One pine per thousand or something. Planting up this way is pretty much spruce. Christmas tree farms plant fir, and some Scots. Most silviculture up here is clearcutting and pre-commercial thinning, some shelterwood where there is more mature pines in the forest and usually seed in thick like Cfarm says. In my area mature w pine is very sparse on woodlots and mostly junk remnants left behind or passed over by everyone else. Other areas of NB have a lot more w pine.

[wdmn]

This is great stuff, thanks everyone!

[Forest Meister]

I'm in Upper Michigan and virtually nobody plants WP primarily due to weevil.  Red pine is king when it comes to planting.

WP seems to regenerate very well on our lighter soils either following a shelterwood or a clearcut but unless the aspen grows quickly in the CCs the weevil quickly turns the pines into little "cabbages".  On heavier soils the pine tends to not reseed itself very well but due to weevil nobody seems to care. 

[Phorester]

I'm in the northwest corner of VA.  I recommend planting white pine on exposed ridgelines here, since it seems to survive better there than any other pine, but everywhere else I recommend loblolly pine, or pitch-lob cross.  LLP is not native here but it has been planted here since CCC days in the late 30's and it does very well.

Here white pine is devastated by white pine weevil.  Even the few natural stands we have here have it in abundance, so getting a sawlog tree is about impossible.  The pulpwood cutters don't like it because of all those live limbs on the bottom they have to cut off (they don't break off when moving the cut tree around like other pines, and even pulling them through de-limbers will leave some on the trunk since some will just bend and not break off), and because it weighs less than LLP or VA pine, so they get less per truckload for it at the mill.

It's good for Christmas tree production on the right soils, but it has to be sprayed for the weevil and is susceptible to both Piteogenes bark beetle and Procerum root decline.

[ChrisIsThis]

I live in Indiana now, but I did live and work in northwest North Carolina for a while.

I don't plant white pine or try to regenerate it any more, but that is because it isn't a species native to my region. I did plant a lot of white pine in the mountains of NC, and my family land in Massachusetts has had some planting on it.

Yes, I would be more likely to plant white pine if I knew it was once part of the forests I was managing.

I've had good success with the pine planting I did in North Carolina. We tried not to plant it at an elevation that was low enough for another species. Which meant if we were below 2,400 feet (roughly) in elevation we'd plant shortleaf, below 1,500 feet loblolly would be considered. All of the planting happened in clearcuts. We used a spacing of 12 x 12 feet for 302 trees per acre. The reason for the wide spacing was sites were often steep, there wasn't a good pine pulpwood market, and mid rotation thinning wouldn't be an option. The seedlings we used were treated for Pales weevil and 1.5 generation improved. The planting on my family land in MA was done in 1996. It has been OK, but not great. The seedlings came from the State of NY and I don't know anything else about them. There is a lot of weevil damage in them and they were planted in a reclaimed gravel pit--so nutrients are a bit limiting.

There is a natural stand on the family land which was regenerated with a shelterwood in 1983 and it seems to have worked well. Little to no weevil damage, abundant regen, and the residual trees fared well. I only marked one shelterwood in NC and wasn't around long enough to see the results.