BETTER WOODLOTS 2024 76 Promotional Supplement Better Woodlots | October 2024 We were cleaning up a big pile of apple orchard prunings and dead elm trees that were around our house site and on field borders. We have learned that woodlot-grown straight trees are much easier to split. In our early years on the farm, we not only planted crops and seeded down fields to hay and pasture, but we also planted trees. There were several areas of the farm that had been plowed previously but had not been planted recently because they were wet or had limited access. We planted one of these areas to black walnut and white pines, and the other to a mixture of hardwoods and conifers. We also planted poplars and spruce along the border of our orchard and our house site. What a positive difference that has made to the wind chill on our home and our winter comfort, as those trees have matured and broken the winter winds. We built a passive solar home in the mid 1970’s and decided that we would have wood as our backup heat source. It was a good decision. With a bit of fossil fuel for our chainsaws, we have been providing our home heating fuel for nearly 50 years and tidying up dead trees and tops while leaving plenty of wood to return to the forest floor carbon cycle. I have come to appreciate that our woodlot, our cattail marsh, our municipal drain, our fence rows, and roadside are actually areas of biodiversity which support the complex web of life that help maintain the health of our soil and the ecosystem of which our farm activities are a part. By letting areas on the farm that are inconvenient to work with equipment, naturalize, we can provide habitat and food for birds, wildlife, and beneficial insects. By letting these areas be covered with perennial growing plants, we are also sequestering carbon in the soil. Our woodlot and the areas where we have planted trees or let them naturalize can provide shade and shelter for our livestock. We manage our temporary fencing to allow the animals to graze around the trees we are trying to establish, or limit their access to the edge of our woodlot. The livestock can help maintain the boundary between field and forest while letting the animals benefit from nutrient rich browse, along with shelter from wind and weather. Our woodlot also contributes to our Mother’s Day plant sale since we use soil from the woodlot as part of the soil mix to ensure that there is a rich fungal component in our potting soil each spring. We have now completed three commercial cuts in our woodlot without diminishing its size or health. When we did a marginal reaction test on our various farm enterprises, the woodlot returned the most dollars per hour because all we really do is harvest the marketable wood. The woodlot is a self sustaining, carbon sequestering joy to have on our farm. Which brings me to a further value of our woodlot to our farm and family. It enriches our life in so many additional ways. We enjoy walks to see the trilliums, the trout lilies, and marsh marigolds as part of our celebration that spring is on the way. We also enjoy light foraging in the woodlot for wild leaks, fiddleheads, and morels. We have developed a small campsite in a corner of the woodlot where we can gather as a family or offer friends a chance to get away or a quiet walk. We enjoy watching the birds and hearing the pileated woodpeckers as they pound away searching for insects. The fall colours are beautiful, and a reminder that we need to get serious about the winter wood supply. And that winter wood supply is part of the ‘current carbon cycle’ rather than the ‘fossil carbon flow.’ This is a distinction we need to understand when we are talking about atmospheric CO2 and the challenge of climate change. Our winter warmth is renewable and contributes to soil sequestration through the roots, leaves and the tops that return to the forest floor. Our woodlot also contributes to carbon sequestration in the durable lumber and building materials that it produces. Our woodlot also contributes in a smaller way than the Amazonian Rainforest, to both the local and global water cycle through its evapotranspiration, and through its water absorption and retention. Another commercial activity associated with our woodlot is winter sleigh rides through the fields and woods. Some additional ways that a woodlot can contribute to a farm is through collecting the woodlot prunings and chipping them for a source of livestock mineral or offering ‘forest bathing’ to urbanites. Woodlots, fencerows, wetlands, and roadsides are becoming ever more important to the health of our farm ecosystems. I am glad we have a woodlot on our farm!
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc0MDI3