Thinning oak stand

[Big J]

10 hours ago, devon TWiG said:

Are there grey squirrels in Sweden and the rest of Europe ?    ....also nurse / sacrificial crops can help with growing more high value hardwoods ..eg Sycamore , theory is the Greys attack them in preference to Oak ..

 

No. Just reds here. I don't recall ever having seen greys in France or Germany either. 

 

No bark stripping here either. Where mature oak grow, sapling oaks dominate like weeds. They don't even seem to get browsed much by deer. 

 

It's interesting coming to a country where the forest biome is fairly close to what it would have been. It really highlights just how much our Victorian forebears have to answer for in the UK, filling our country with non-native plants and animals. 

 

All the UK grant schemes that have been and are in place to control all sorts of invasive species (greys, rhododendron, Himalayan balsam, Japanese knotweed etc) - with the benefit of hindsight, all avoidable.

[Big J]

2 minutes ago, Peasgood said:

As things are right now, if a stand of oak was managed very carefully for a few hundred years I wouldn't be very confident you would even be allowed to harvest it at maturity.

It would be a playground for dogs and town dwellers, there would be uproar.

 

I don't think that Oak is needed now - certainly not in any great quantity. As a milling timber, if can produce building boards, but structurally, you're better off with larch and douglas fir. More consistent, easier to grade, easier to dry and the production cycle is 1/4 of the length. 

 

There will still be a place for it for niche furniture and building, but beyond that, I can't see the point. There are plenty of hardwoods that are (in my opinion) more attractive and nearly all of them are easier to get to the stage of mature sawlog then oak. And there is the drying of oak, which is also a pain from the point of view of a sawmiller.

[MattyF]

1 hour ago, Big J said:

 

No. Just reds here. I don't recall ever having seen greys in France or Germany either. 

 

No bark stripping here either. Where mature oak grow, sapling oaks dominate like weeds. They don't even seem to get browsed much by deer. 

 

 

I think that’s because the Germans and French and Europeans know how to manage there woodlands and pests , I saw my last red here in 2015 and it was dead , there was a big move to cull greys in the area but as likely there where idiots who would not let there woods be culled , the result was the culls where a waste of time and all the young trees they planted themselves are knackered, I can’t actually bring myself to talk to this one person/family and ignore any calls or messages as I just can’t be bothered to deal with people like that in regard to there tree management… last time I went on one of there sites I was trying to show and explain the squirrel damage on a belt of trees and I might as well of talked to my dog .. even the obvious maple and snapped sycamore branches with stripped bark over our heads was not enough evidence. 

[Stere]

Quote

Where mature oak grow, sapling oaks dominate like weeds.

 

Rackham reckons American oak mildew is now preventing natural oak regen within woodland.

[openspaceman]

10 minutes ago, Stere said:

 

Rackham reckons American oak mildew is now preventing natural oak regen within woodland.

It seems to only affect robur and even then the oak seedling understorey is dense in the secondary woodland (less then 100 years old) opposite here, even though I see it on all the regrowth before autumn.

[ABtrees]

18 hours ago, devon TWiG said:

Are there grey squirrels in Sweden and the rest of Europe ?    ....also nurse / sacrificial crops can help with growing more high value hardwoods ..eg Sycamore , theory is the Greys attack them in preference to Oak ..

 

We have far fewer squirrels where we are in the middle of France - but all of them are Red.  (As far as I can make out, apart from a few very isolated colonies in the Paris suburbs, there are no greys in France.)

The lack of squirrels in general is almost certainly down to there being a lot of 'Fouine'   These are a top predatory omnivore - a cousin of the Pine Martin only a much heftier beast - officially up to 54cms and up to 2.3kg !  I'm not sure that I've seen them that size but Tufty is certainly always going to be the loser !!!

Consequently tree/ sapling damage is much reduced, all of my bit of woodland is self regen and has been for the last 30+years - roe deer are the only real headache !

[Stubby]

9 hours ago, MattyF said:

I think that’s because the Germans and French and Europeans know how to manage there woodlands and pests , I saw my last red here in 2015 and it was dead , there was a big move to cull greys in the area but as likely there where idiots who would not let there woods be culled , the result was the culls where a waste of time and all the young trees they planted themselves are knackered, I can’t actually bring myself to talk to this one person/family and ignore any calls or messages as I just can’t be bothered to deal with people like that in regard to there tree management… last time I went on one of there sites I was trying to show and explain the squirrel damage on a belt of trees and I might as well of talked to my dog .. even the obvious maple and snapped sycamore branches with stripped bark over our heads was not enough evidence. 

That knob Herbrand Russel ( The 11th duke of Bedford ) introduced the grey from the USA together with the Glis glis asround 1876 . (  I saw him do it )  Wanker !

[Spruce Pirate]

17 hours ago, Macpherson said:

 

Aye, I believe that each of Henry 8's fleet needed around 10 ha or 1,000 trees of  'managed' for hundreds of years Oak woodland, leading on to Nelson's ships needing more than 4 times that per boat.

 

I did read that the stunted rotting unmanaged oak woodlands around the Loch Lomond area were planted just after Henry's and pre Nelson's era with a nod to the future of shipbuilding... and then came the industrial rev, and people forgot to care.

 

To put it in perspective, had the above mentioned wood been managed properly they would still have 2 or 3 hundred years to go before harvesting... changed days eh !

 

It kind of points to the completely different mindset of past times where folk didn't just rip out nature without any foresight but had worked with it for millennia.... thinking about this while I type I guess that the stripping out of nearly all of the mature ancient Oak woodlands to build Men o' war must have been the biggest change to this country since the ice melted, and once the resource was used up it was essentially gone for ever,  cheers.

I think a lot of the Loch Lomond oak woods, certainly on the east side, date back a long while for charcoal making for tanning and then smelting.  You can still see a lot of overgrown coppice stools if you wander through them.  Ship builders of old seem to be either hailed as guardians of the forest, making sure enough was left to maintain their future needs or as total rapists, destroying everything in sight to build a navy.  Depends who you speak to.  Certainly changed days in terms of how woods are managed though.

 

 

12 hours ago, Big J said:

It's interesting coming to a country where the forest biome is fairly close to what it would have been. It really highlights just how much our Victorian forebears have to answer for in the UK, filling our country with non-native plants and animals. 

 

12 hours ago, Big J said:

 

I don't think that Oak is needed now - certainly not in any great quantity. As a milling timber, if can produce building boards, but structurally, you're better off with larch and douglas fir. More consistent, easier to grade, easier to dry and the production cycle is 1/4 of the length. 

 

There will still be a place for it for niche furniture and building, but beyond that, I can't see the point. There are plenty of hardwoods that are (in my opinion) more attractive and nearly all of them are easier to get to the stage of mature sawlog then oak. And there is the drying of oak, which is also a pain from the point of view of a sawmiller.

 

Sorry J, I'm really not trying to pick a fight.  😂

 

What you've said in the two posts above is very much the crux of the matter.  If we want to protect the natural environment then we should be looking to native species.  Oak, for example, as we're talking about it, support a huge variety of species in addition to producing timber - this is the trade off for growing slowly and being difficult to dry out.  It's a problem of having a very limited number of native species, and probably why we've been introducing things since at least Roman times.  I'm not disagreeing that a lot of Victorian introductions have been disastrous (although Doug fir is a bit of a success at least).  Of course, if climate change really does bite then we have to look at the long term prospects for all species - oak could be out altogether and we could be growing gum trees? cedars? Corsican pine could make a big leap in the productive species league tables

 

Again, out of curiosity, are there many non-natives in Swedish forestry?  I always imagine it dominated by Scots, Norway and birch, but that could easily be wrong.  What's the average rotation age?

[Big J]

9 hours ago, Spruce Pirate said:

I think a lot of the Loch Lomond oak woods, certainly on the east side, date back a long while for charcoal making for tanning and then smelting.  You can still see a lot of overgrown coppice stools if you wander through them.  Ship builders of old seem to be either hailed as guardians of the forest, making sure enough was left to maintain their future needs or as total rapists, destroying everything in sight to build a navy.  Depends who you speak to.  Certainly changed days in terms of how woods are managed though.

 

 

 

 

Sorry J, I'm really not trying to pick a fight.  😂

 

What you've said in the two posts above is very much the crux of the matter.  If we want to protect the natural environment then we should be looking to native species.  Oak, for example, as we're talking about it, support a huge variety of species in addition to producing timber - this is the trade off for growing slowly and being difficult to dry out.  It's a problem of having a very limited number of native species, and probably why we've been introducing things since at least Roman times.  I'm not disagreeing that a lot of Victorian introductions have been disastrous (although Doug fir is a bit of a success at least).  Of course, if climate change really does bite then we have to look at the long term prospects for all species - oak could be out altogether and we could be growing gum trees? cedars? Corsican pine could make a big leap in the productive species league tables

 

Again, out of curiosity, are there many non-natives in Swedish forestry?  I always imagine it dominated by Scots, Norway and birch, but that could easily be wrong.  What's the average rotation age?

 

It's OK Wallis - you are forgiven! 😁

 

I would say that neither douglas fir or larch aren't especially invasive. And larch came before the Victorians. Point taken though.

 

Native hardwoods, as nice as they are, don't produce commercially useful timber. Even in an ideal world, devoid of grey squirrels, their slow growth, high maintenance input requirements and harvesting difficulty (ie, not by harvester) means that they aren't commercially viable (well certainly not as a replacement for conifer).

 

But then add grey squirrels, invasive weed growth (requiring extensive spraying) and other invasive species and I cannot see the economic case.

 

You make a valid point about climate change too. As you know, I'm responsible for quite a lot of eucalyptus woodland, and it's something I think the UK will see more and more of. With 40c summers, it's unavoidable. 

 

There are odd blocks of douglas and sitka, though I've yet to see any personally. Larch is reasonably common, though at least 90% of conifer is pine or spruce. Birch tends to make it into the matrix and is often maintained throughout the cycle to give some product diversity. There are a lot of different products, even from harvesting sites. The site I did in August had: 

 

• Timber - both pine and spruce, separated out and marked with a red dot on the end by the harvester 3.1-5.5m, mixed length in stacks
• Klentimber (not sure of translation) - smaller timber 12-18cm, both pine and spruce, separated out, blue dotted. 3.1-5.5m mixed.
• Massaved - chip/pulpwood. 3-4.9m. Pine and spruce separated out.
• Massaved - birch
• Energived - dead standing spruce/pine. Marked with both a red and blue dot.

That's 8 different stacks from one thinnings site. It was still surprisingly productive though. The generally longer product length helps.

 

Production cycle here is around 70 years I believe. Less when you're further south and west and more further north. Right in the north of Sweden, it's 125-150 years.

Edited January 9, 2023 by Big J

[organic guy]

A couple of pictures of my little wood. Mixture of oak and ash but unfortunately in groups rather than mixed.(I was trying to be cleaver and write my childrens initials which would be visible from the air!)

Comments on how to proceed gratefully accepted.