When I started my ten year plan to return my forest back to a woodland savanna, I was intending to go the traditional route to get there. The traditional route circa 2021 would have been to hire a forestry consultant who would come evaluate my land. This person would write a management plant to show the direction I wanted to go and the steps to get me there. In my case, with a high basal area, suppressed oak pine forest, this would require me to remove a large portion of the basal area, and most of the under and mid story, to get sun on the ground. The way to do that to quickly reach my goals, and get paid for the timber and other forestry products removed, would be to hire a logger with a wood chipper. That way all the debris from the harvest would be chipped up and hauled off, leaving the woods clean and parklike after just a few weeks of work.

There were some negatives to this plan, but also a bunch of positives. The positives were that I would get paid, the transformation would happen quickly and I would have a very open woodland but still keep the trees that I selected to stay. The negatives basically were all related to having heavy equipment on the land. Skidder trails and creek crossings, logging decks and damaged trees from dragging logs throughout the forest.

In my case, this is exactly what my consultant recommended. I had heartburn about the negatives but decided to move forward. Unfortunately (or fortunately), this was not to occur. My timing was pretty bad. Diesel fuel went to more that $6 gallon and stimulus checks were landing in every ones mailboxes. So our ability to find a logger that could an would do the work vanished.

I decided pretty quickly and against my consultants best advice to begin manually thinning of the forest by a manual, individual tree herbicide application. The way you introduce herbicide to the trees is to break the bark layer to the cambium and spray in some concentrated herbicide into the breach, Ideally when this is done, the tree will die soon and fall naturally over time. The way that I chose to do this is with Hack and Squirt.

Hack and Squirt is a process where you chop into the bark at a downward angle with a hatchet and squirt in a herbicide using a hand spray bottle. It can be done solo, which was a big plus to me as I usually would not have help. It is a laborius process, and there are many thousands of trees to be treated, but it turns out that I really like the process. I have been doing this for two years intermittently, and am making very nice progress. The trees take anywhere from 3 months to 2 years to die, depending on the size and species. But it provides me with a reason to wander the woods, looking at the individual trees and how they relate to one another, and making choices about whether they live or die. Its like painting with a very small brush, where having a logger would have been like using a really big roller to paint a small room.

So most days that I am not working, I spend 1-3 hours doing this in the woods. Some seasons are better than others with summer being the best as the trees are most susceptible to the effects of the herbicide during the growing season. And the leaves are on the trees so it is easy to identify tree species. Winter is also ok, but spring is the worst time. When sap is actively rising, the poison gets pushed out of the wounds and is not as effective.

I was able to get cost share through EQiP approved. The practice is called crop tree release, but basically in my situation I am using it to decrease basal area, midstory and understory. Fire compliments it well by killing much of the understory and removing some of the debris. So that was an added bonus that will in a small way make up for revenue lost from a timber harvest that will never happen.

So I’ll talk more in future about the strongly contrarian path I have chosen. And why I am loving the choice. I just made the decision to do the same with the new land I bought which I had originally planned to clearcut and replant in longleaf.