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Everything is dying?

Started by Outer Rondacker, December 12, 2015, 08:22:58 AM

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Outer Rondacker

I do not own much but I still love it. (15 acre) I think its young woods. Very thick and everything looks to be dying off. I am looking to thin the woods. How would you go about doing this? Would you take the larger sick/bad looking trees or would you take out all the stuff under 6" to start and open it up? Today I will be going out and just dropping the 100 or so dead standing hemlock,spruce,fur, and pine.

Note- almost all the (spruce I think) is starting to die. Hard maple is standing dead and falling. Beech is doing ok but not great. Lots of pecker wholes and peckers flying around. Ash is all dead but one small one 4". Even my cherry is starting to go.

Any help would be great.

John Mc

I would be taking out the diseased or malformed trees, and open things up for whatever healthy stock you have.  I do like to leave a few snags (standing dead trees) per acres for wildlife. Especially large snags that may end up being den trees.
If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.   - Abraham Maslow

Outer Rondacker

Thank you for the reply John. Since it is so warm and nice out I will spend the next week doing just that. Thanks again.

John Mc

There's a lot more to this that what I just said, but it's a place to start.

Where in the SE Adirondaks are you? I'm probably not too far away (Champlain Valley of Vermont).
If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.   - Abraham Maslow

Outer Rondacker

Half hour west of Lake George in the hill sides of a small town called Day.

Ianab

If as you say the forest is relatively young do you have a situation where it has overcrowded and "stagnated" No trees where able to achieve dominance and out-compete the weaker ones, so they all end up suppressed and sickly.  Then when a tree is stressed, it can't fight off bugs, which eventually kill it, and attract the woodpeckers as well.

Unless there is something else going on, then thinning out the junk is probably your best plan. Choose the best and healthiest trees you can, and give them a bit of breathing space (light / water / nutrients) and see if they continue to grow. If a tree is already stressed and in decline, then chances are that releasing it is a waste of time, it probably wont recover or respond properly, where a smaller but healthy tree nearby can take advantage of the space you open up.
Weekend warrior, Peterson JP test pilot, Dolmar 7900 and Stihl MS310 saws and  the usual collection of power tools :)

CJennings

You mentioned spruce, but do you also have the balsam fir normally associated with it in the northeast dominating the mix and less spruce, and is the spruce white, red or black spruce? Balsam fir is notoriously problematic with pests and such. Spruce-fir will also grow so dense when young nothing really grows well, and it will begin to self-thin through mortality. But this self-thinning is very inefficient and doesn't necessarily result in a good stand. You can be left with poor selection of the trees to keep (poor form, quality, or balsam over spruce) and patchy stocking. Suppressed red spruce will respond to release after decades of suppression even so it's worth attempting to thin healthy red spruce to release it. If you have fir and spruce I'd cut out fir in favor of healthy spruce.

Hardwoods are more demanding on soil than the softwoods. The soil may or may not be good enough for the sugar maple and cherry (and on that note black cherry is not known for reaching its best quality in the Adirondacks or at my Vermont woodlot though you may still find some nice ones). Even on my little 10 acre woodlot in Vermont you can see the forest cover correlating to the soil types if you look at a soils map. The nice hardwoods have the better soils while the poor soils have the spruce, fir and pine growing on them. I'd try to pull up the USDA soils data on your property at the web soil survey.

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