How bout some pics for the fun of it? I spend a few days after hunting and before feet of snow arrive to broadcast sun with my chainsaw. Been at it three years, and I'm convinced now more than ever it's the right thing. Lots found at my place.
I used to spend hundreds of dollars each year and precious cool spring habitat days planting non-native and poor site-matched conifers. I have hundreds of native and natural balsam firs per acre that are anywhere from 4 inches to 6 feet tall. It's amazing how they begin to pump out dense growth as soon as they get some sun.
If you can see all those pink flags in the center of the picture, I found a thicket of chokecherry when spring scouting for blooming soft mast species. I was hoping for apples and juneberry, but mostly have chokecherry in abundance. I have 4 (yes only 4) juneberry that I've found, but they are under close supervision and in the sun now. Thankfully, they're tall enough to avoid tip browsing.
I knocked out the overstory that same weekend and these things pumped out good fruit that same season.
I have bur oak up the wazoo. Most of my bur oak is mature, and I would guess at risk of starting to come down. I also have thousands of foot tall trees, but likely hundreds of trees that are 6-12' tall now. So far I haven't had to target them for liberation, I just keep getting them as a co-product of thinning work to create bedding.
Planted dogwood does not survive browsing. I've tried multiple times. Only way to keep it alive is to put it in a cage. However, knock down an acre, and leave those trunks and tops scattered about, and the native dogwoods are surviving. My hope is if I keep opening up a couple acres each year, I'll get ahead of the deer in terms of browse pressure.
One of my liberated bur oaks leafed out after being in full sun for the first season.
This was pure luck. This is an arrowood viburnum thicket that was in the way of my bow stand. It had red osier dogwood mixed in that I wanted to protect, so I hinged all the AVb with my silky at about waist height to keep the deer back. At the time,
I didn't know it was AVb. It never pushed out a single fruit. After I cut the pi$$ out of it, it started kicking out fruit like I'd never seen.
This is one of my very first spots I cut. It was small because I wanted to test the idea on my land and see how it'd respond. This was mid summer the first growing season since being cut open.
There were black spruce in there that also pushed huge growth with some radiation.
That's how I plant trees.
#Sunlight. Jeffery Epstein didn't kill himself.
