Woodlot Tour

- Hi everyone, Sanford Smith here, Extension Specialist with Penn State Extension.

- And I'm David Jackson, Forestry Educator with Penn State Extension.

- Unfortunately, you could not be here with us this year at Ag Progress Days, so we decided to produce a virtual woodlot tour for you to learn about what we're still working on here at the university.

- So before we get started, let me tell you a little bit about the woodlot.

So the woodlot itself is about 150 acres in size and within it we try to do many different kinds of practices, everything from timber harvesting to wildlife management habitat practices, to water quality protection and recreation, many things that we can teach folks about, and we can demonstrate here in the woods.

So with that, let's go ahead and get started.

- Okay, on this first stop, we're going to be talking about something that's very important, painting your boundaries.

Sometimes new forest landowners, or people who have owned forest land for just a short amount of time, say, "What's the most important thing "I can do on my property right away?" Well, I'd say painting your boundaries and making your boundaries very clear.

Now there's many reasons why you'd want to do this.

One has to do with liability, so that everyone knows which property is which.

Also so that you can prevent any kind of timber trespass, that means people stealing trees on your side of the line.

It's just a good thing to delineate what you own and where it is.

Now traditionally, people have used white paint to mark the boundaries, in particular, after the boundary has been surveyed, and that's still a great way to do it, but that only signifies where the property begins and where someone else's ends.

Today, and this year a new law has come into effect, and I say today, because now we have a new chance to get two sort of things done at the same time.

If you wanted to post your property in the past, you had to put signs up that indicated your intent of no trespassing, no hunting like that.

Well, now you can just use the simple purple paint that is under a new law in Pennsylvania, passed by the house, Bill Number 1772.

You can Google that, and you'll find out all about the details of the law, but essentially it says that purple stripes like this, which are at least an inch wide and eight inches long, and the bottom has to be over three feet off the ground, and it can't be more than five feet off the ground, so the bottom can't be more than five feet high.

If you put stripes on trees like this, it not only signifies your boundary and your boundary line, but it also signifies no trespassing.

This type of purple paint is used in several other states, about 10 other states in fact, and it's sort of becoming a universal thing that the purple paint stripe on trees or fence posts means no trespassing.

- So here we are at the next stop on our woodlot tour.

At this stop, we're gonna talk about invasive plants.

So let's start with a definition, so invasive plants are plants that aren't native to the ecosystem under consideration.

So they're not native to the area that you're finding them in.

They're also can harm the environment or cause harm to human health or harm to the economy, our forest native plants.

We take typically think of them as being harmful to the environment, so they're not native to those areas.

And what they do is, they can crowd out our native plants and basically reduce plant biodiversity, and by reducing that plant biodiversity, they're reducing the ability for wildlife to find the kinds of things that they need.

So they're also very poor food producers, we don't typically see our wildlife feeding on the foliage.

They don't feed on the fruits and berries that invasive plants produce, and they don't provide insects.

So insects feed on our native plants, but we don't find a lot of insects feeding on invasive plants.

And why is that important?

Because insects are the foundation for the food web, and if we don't have that foundation, if we don't have those insects, we don't have the basis for the food web, which is very important for our song bird species, which raise their young by feeding them insects.

So this area is predominantly composed of two invasive plants that has taken over this forest understory.

So we see a lot of Multiflora Rose and Japanese Barberry in this area.

Japanese Barberry is very shade tolerant and invades forest understories quite commonly across Pennsylvania.

So what are we gonna do about these plants?

So we're gonna take you to another stop where I've implemented some control measures there, and we're gonna talk about how you control these invasive plants to keep them from taking over your woodlots.

All right, so at this stop, we're gonna talk about invasive plant control.

So there's many different ways that we can try to control invasive plants, and typically we think about it as an integrated approach.

That means we're gonna use many different practices in concert with each other, including mechanical controls, like pulling and cutting, and if we have biological control means from insects or diseases that impact these plants, we're certainly gonna use those as well.

But most oftentimes we land on chemical control, which means the use of herbicides.

Herbicides are a very productive approach to control invasive plants with limited budgets, limited time, limited manpower.

They're gonna be by far your most productive approach.

They're also very effective in the sense that we know how to control these plants.

We've had a tremendous amount of research done looking at what products to use, what time of year to use them at, and what rates to actually apply them at, so we can be very effective and very targeted in our approach.

Lastly, we think about them as being very safe, so today's herbicides are very safe for you, the user, and very safe for the environment.

So I feel very comfortable when I recommend to go about controlling invasive plants using herbicides.

Now, typically landowners are gonna invest in some equipment.

You're gonna need a backpack sprayer.

You're gonna need the right nozzles to use, and you're gonna need the correct products, and we can get you that kind of information.

I typically also invest in the Shoulder Saver Harness with the belt that goes around your waist, so it's more like a backpack sprayer.

You'll see what I am standing in right here.

I used that very equipment just a year ago to control these invasive plants here.

This is primarily Japanese Barberry mixed with Multiflora Rose, Autumn Olive, some Oriental Bittersweet and a handful of other invasive plants here.

So what I would recommend for you to do to get started, is learn to identify these plants, invest in some of the equipment that you're gonna need to be able to effectively and very, very selectively go out and apply these herbicides in a very safe manner, in a very targeted approach, where you're just spot treating these individual plants.

This is gonna be something that's gonna help to bring back the native plants.

I know it seems very counterintuitive to think you can go out there and use a herbicide.

But these plants are so competitive, they're so noxious, that they're crowding out those native plants, and so by doing these control measures, even using herbicides, we're gonna see a big difference, particularly in just a year or two, where the native plants are gonna come back and grow.

So get out in your woodlots, be very vigilant in your approach, learn to identify these plants, and begin some control measures.

- Okay, at this stop, we're going to talk about valuing or the value of standing timber.

When I say standing timber, I mean trees that are still connected to the stump, right.

They're growing in the woods.

Sometimes we call this the value of stumpage, and that means when a tree is cut down, it's everything above the stump.

But you know, in life, most of us never have a chance to really work with the marketing or the valuing of timber, and yet there's many things that we do know the value of.

For example, if you buy a can of beans, and these happen to be French-style green beans, we all know roughly what they're worth.

Now, this is a brand name, and if you were sittin' there thinking right now, maybe you'd say, "Oh, 50 cents or so, "50 cents to a dollar anyway," and you'd be very close.

These were about 85 cents.

Buying a book, here's a tree ID book, if you go out and buy a real good quality tree ID book, most of you would know that you're gonna spend maybe $20 or $30.

Well, in fact, it says right back here, $29, okay.

So we know the rough value of things that we work with on a daily basis.

Even real estate, we can always get the appraisal from a realtor, and we can get the opinion of neighbors and others, other sales in the area, and we get a sense for what something's worth.

Likewise with a car, we can look it up online the year, the model, the condition, and such, and come very close to what the value is.

Well with timber, it's a completely different game.

Timber is highly valuable in Pennsylvania because our hardwoods are used for very valuable purposes, but there are many factors that influence the value of timber.

And one of them has to do with the species.

Another has to do with the quality or the size of the tree, and the quality of the tree in regards to defect or other things like that.

Also it has to do with the market for the trees in the area, or the market that the person who wants to buy those streets has.

It's very difficult to determine the value of timber, and one of the key things you need to have done is an appraisal of your timber.

And most people are just not able to do this.

A professional forester is trained to do this very quickly, and they can determine the volume of trees, the volume of timber in the woods by species and by grade and such, by the quality of the trees, and that's very useful for when you put it up for sale.

And then the next thing that's critical is have competitive bidding on that.

This is how you determine the value of timber.

You have to know what you're selling, the types of trees or the quantity of those trees, the quality you have to know.

The site even sometimes can influence the quality, how it's growing or where it's growing can be very important, but then you put it up for competitive bidding because that's where the particular markets come to play on your timber, so or on the trees that you're trying to sell.

Now, if you just have a few trees, it's very difficult to sell that, but if you have a large area, it's, you know, much more money that we're talking about here, and you really need to do it right.

So getting competitive bidding is very important.

If I was to say, how much is this 20 acres of timber worth?

Most people would have no idea.

In fact, most professional foresters wouldn't be able to tell you exactly because if they don't have an inventory, if it's not been measured and marked and laid out for sale and such, you don't know, and they don't know what it's gonna cost to get in there and such, but once they figure it up with an inventory, you're gonna be ready to go, to put it up for competitive bidding.

So it's the competitive bidding process on a known quantity with all those other knowns addressed, that brings about the true value of timber.

So I hope this is a interesting stop for you.

It's perhaps not something that any of you are gonna do.

Maybe you don't plan to market or sell timber, but if you are thinking about doing this someday, remember that you need to have a professional forester who's independent of the sale too, someone who's not gonna be purchasing that timber.

You need to have someone there helping you to do an inventory, to put it up for competitive bidding and get a good market price.

- Okay, here we are at the next stop on our tour.

I'm standing in the middle of what we call forest regeneration.

Let me define that for you.

Regeneration is the regrowth of a forest from seedlings, from sprouts that come from seed and stump sprouts.

This new young forest is a result of a timber harvest that we did about eight years ago.

The area was harvested as a result of a salvage cut that, when we had Hemlock Woolly Adelgid attacking our hemlock trees here, we decided to go ahead and salvage them.

Those trees were all cut out of here.

This was a two stage cut, and in that initial cut, what we left were the best trees that we could find on this site.

Those trees are gonna provide a little bit of shelter, a little bit of shade to protect the site, so it doesn't get too hot and too dry.

But they're also, and more importantly, are gonna drop seed on this area, and that seed is gonna help us grow that new young forest back.

A couple of things that we need to address when we're tryin' to get forest to regenerate is competing vegetation and deer.

This area has an eight foot high woven wire deer exclosure placed around it because deer and their browsing can inhibit forest from regenerating.

Deer are preferential browsers, and unfortunately, they like to browse the same trees that we're tryin' to grow.

In particular on this site, we're tryin' to regenerate some oak on this site, and if we didn't put that fence up, it's likely that we wouldn't get any oak to grow here.

The other thing that we had to treat on this site before we did the salvage harvest was to address some of the fern competition on this site.

So there were very dense areas of fern in this area, and they can be very competitive and inhibit regeneration from coming up.

So they were treated prior to the harvest with a herbicide application.

So it's been about eight years since that first cut was taken place, and we're very happy with the results at this stage.

And we're ready to take those remaining overstory trees off, those trees that have been sheltering this regeneration, so that's gonna be a timber sale process that we'll undertake this winter.

Those trees will all be marked.

Those trees will all be appraised, so that we know what species we have, how much of it we have, what size they are.

We'll put that up for a bid sale, and the loggers will come in and take those trees out that we're selling.

Now, not every tree will be removed from those large overstory trees that are remaining.

We will keep some special wildlife trees, some good food producing trees on site, trees that might have cavities in them or nesting sites, perch trees, dead standing trees, very important trees to leave even as well.

So once that harvest is completed, this new young regenerating forest will be released.

It'll be free to grow, and it'll really allow this site to continue growing.

So, I'll leave you with this point is that forests are sustainable.

We see that they regenerate themselves just from natural processes.

We don't have to plant anything out here, and someone else will be able to come in here and harvest this stand again in the future.

So sustainable forest management is what we practiced here.

We hope you enjoy today's woodlot tour everyone.

If you'd like to learn more about any of the topics that we talked about, be sure to check out the Penn State Extension website.

There are lots of resources there, including articles, publications, videos, webinars, you name it, so be sure to check it out - And we hope to see you next year.

And if you've never attended one of our woodlot tours, please sign up to do so.

They're every day during Ag Progress Days, so we'll see you in 2021.

Thank you for joining us today, though.

- Thank you everyone.