Thinning oak stand

[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?

[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.

[openspaceman]

It looks like a good start, that little beech will look after itself if the squirrels don't get it.

 

One of the good things about oak is they respond well to being given room for a free crown at virtually any age. The ash would normally be a short term crop on any but the best brown earth sites and given ash dieback even more so now, so simply do not favour an ash over a decent oak.

 

At this stage I wouldn't over worry about a few bends but the straight ones should be the champion trees.