Thinning

The thinning project is coming along nicely, its a good thing because even Jackson the dog (who would not move out of the frame while I snapped a picture) is embarrassed by the woods on this corner of the property.

The trees are dragged full length to a small landing area at the front of the picture before the Barko machine cuts the limbs off and measures each tree. The ones in this picture are not good enough to be sold at any of the mills and will be put into my pile for the firewood project after the limbs are off.

More than forty years ago, this area was an open meadow near the top of the hill with just a few of those grousy trees dotting the landscape. We used to push the herd of cows up the hill in the evening time so they would munch on the grass growing in the meadow. This filled two objectives by filling the hungry cows and reducing fuel in case of a fire. In the morning, the herd would come back down the hill for water. We would do this exercise a couple of times a week beginning in spring once the majority of the mud dried and well into the summer before the grass dried up.

The trail that we coaxed the animals up began as a nice, wide skid road. It petered off to  a smaller road after a couple of hairpin turns and then even more to just a wildlife/cattle trail going uphill the whole way. It was exhausting for us and for the cows. Thinking ahead to the fact that we would age and would not want to be pushing cows up a hill all of our lives, Mike went to work.

Mike logged the monster trees scattered around and used a disc pulled behind the dozer to break up the hard soil. We planted the area with Douglas Fir seedlings.  After 40 years of ignoring the area, we mow have a few 90 plus year old trees(that managed to survive the original logging, a fire on the hillside, and Mike’s logging over the years, some seedlings that were self generated from dropped cones, many transplanted seedlings that were dug from a few hundred feed away, and hundreds and hundreds of nursery stock trees.

We planted them too thick in an effort to outsmart the natural loss of trees over the first few years after transplanting. We did not loose many trees to die-off and now we find the trees struggling for space. These seedlings are now overgrown and crowding each other for space. The thinning being done here pulls individual trees out to make space for the others to grow.