What Our WOODS Tell Us — Ep. 025

one way to get to know the land you live on is to take a walk through the woods the land's trees can help you piece together its history and since about 70 of our land is forested we figured there is much for us to learn in order to help us read the forest through the trees so to speak we asked michael diman a local forester conservationist and adopted member of the seneca hawk clan to walk the land with us michael who is of both french english and seneca onodaga heritage has helped preserve thousands of acres of forest in the region and even shares a plaque at a local preserve with one of my longtime mentors tom eisner who passed away 10 years ago even though our forest has been logged and is relatively young as you'll find out there are always some surprises that are revealed do you know what kind of spruce trees these are because these were obviously planted here some of them are not doing so hot some of them are getting a little chlorotic we might have to take out a few he planted a lot of non-native stuff here because he was a horticulturist yeah they appeared to be white spruce yeah they're a softer one yeah we haven't seen any um i haven't seen any uh cones on this one but yeah it's a soft one it's not prickly this is your white ash yeah and it's gonna be all our ash are going yeah it's it's sad uh i would encourage you that there's no sign of the board yet on here no there's no blonding yet there's some down on the thing that are really bad like on the way up i saw some just down the road yeah no there's no uh activity yet in here so that's good so what is your uh take on it when there's no activity should you i know some people say cut it down so you can get the wood and then other people are like well keep it up well i'm a believer in that some trees will survive yeah and this whole this thing about cutting every ash that's there if you if you look back during the time of the chestnut plate there's no doubt that there were trees that were resistant they got cut down and that's tragic and so i think it's a bit premature so when i am uh doing my timber marking if i see a really superior ash then i i will leave it you know and uh with the hopes that it'll survive and you know as you may know that the insects and diseases be they on trees or humans or animals whatever the case may be is uh kind of density dependent so the more density you have of a given species the the greater the likelihood that they will be attacked you know and and so therefore my goal is is to uh is to eliminate the lightning bug i think yeah is to eliminate the proportion of ash like i think the elms in new york for instance got in trouble because they had planted rows of elms right and it's easy for the insects to go from one to the other oh yeah exactly and but if it's an ash in the middle of hickory and you know maple and spruce and everything then it's less likely to maybe hop over exactly and one of the the hallmarks of uh intelligent management is is species diversity by far if you keep a given ecosystem diverse it's far more resilient to insect and disease or other maladies you know and so well that's that's what we want to select for here is diversity and you know to really repair kind of what was wrong yeah with the forest here seneca this is kahadugo okay so in the forest nice yeah you have to go you guys looked out see here this is the swamp white oak yeah i think we have a plenty of small white oak on ours that's nice yeah real nice it's got some holes in it but i think it's all right i think it's woodpeckers we have lots of woodpeckers and they're like okay yeah it's sad suckers doing that yeah oh does that harm the tree or is that well it doesn't do any good but it doesn't harm it per se because it's it's like when you cut lumber you will see like um what they call bird peck will be like little dots in there but the tree grows right over it so but this is gypsum off egg mash right here oh okay should we take it off now yeah there you go i don't like those so here's our next-gen white pines yeah now the the pine you know what i'm looking at is all these you got the red maple here which are pretty grungy looking yeah and they have all been cut before you see multiple stems so that tells you they've been cut before and they sprouted back and so when they sprouted back what was formerly a much nicer form tree they sprouted back into these more inferior uh type situations and uh there's a lot of uh stump sprouts here yeah yeah when you see this yeah classic rectangular uh excavations that's that's the pellet woodpecker wow and after france in there you see the heart see this is heart rod inside there yeah okay and ants uh are major contributors to that there's a heart rot fungus but the ants are also doing their thing in there yeah so anyway the and this is actually fairly recent that we that this happened yeah yeah it could still smell applying yeah i got my fingers yeah serious stuff i look at them boy they're really you know what that's a lot of work to get after a couple of weeks we said oh my goodness that's crazy the amount of like it's in my the full hand like it yeah chiseled that hard yeah it's amazing i mean they're incredible yeah hard way to earn a lemon i'd say yeah absolutely now right there i just it just caught my eye you see the young white pine yeah you have all these other white pine here yeah okay those are field invaders okay they've yeah they've invaded this you know basically a field right okay this is the their offspring and the the field invaders tend to be really lemmy okay and uh and you also get uh uh white pine weevil yeah okay because the weevil is attracted see this tree's been weeviled a number of times like if you look up there do you see where it it j's out and then here yeah the j yeah yeah and then here at j here a bunch of them yeah here this is while this was growing this has been weeviled where it killed the top leader probably probably six seven times i've never heard weevil used as a verb before been weeviled yeah and so it's been beetle too it's been weeviled it's been it's been caterpillared yeah and so so this is a um uh example of you know grew in the sunlight and that's why yeah so this guy uh contrary to that it has no evil damage so we should promote this one oh yeah because this one and it's one stem exactly one stem and and because it has shade on it yeah it's from the trees yeah this this is the ideal situation for that young white pine because it's gonna it's it's got shade around it but not too heavy uh-huh um and you keep in mind too that the it's still got a lot of abundant sunlight on the south side right okay and then the rest of this is shaded so what happens is that it's going to just shoot right up through and and and rise above these trees it'll go right up through there so do we need to remove any of the ones around it eventually no no okay i wouldn't touch anything would they also act as protectors for this tree that maybe a insect would rather go to a tree like that and then leave this one yeah yeah they'll see once the the trees get above like uh 40 odd feet or so the weeble damage weevil tends to avoid them then they they prefer shorter trees and uh that's why if you see this one here yeah an example you're up to what 20 feet or so yeah then there's no more work no more yeah exactly so it's like too windy up there yeah yeah and i think it's in part because when a tree is younger and it's got this vigorous leader going up the sugar content is higher than because that's where the growth is right there and so the weevil is attracted to that and so just like aphids and things would be attracted to the growth tips and stuff and even when you're foraging you're going for the more yeah growing parts yeah exactly and then what's this guy right here who's growing to the right now the the three yeah that's a red maple that's a red maple as well but that one had been cut down and yeah you know sprouted back up yeah if you see multiple stem trees yeah then it's it's almost certain that it was cut before yeah yeah does that also include a deer eating it yeah when it's very young yeah it's very young then it can also perform this yeah because you'll see some of the trees they'll start putting out sprouts down below you know even with the honeysuckles that will take out yeah they'll start getting like bushier you know whatever this this right here oh look at that damage that's well this is actually an electric hanker right here this tree you'd want to cut down okay because this fungus bores will spread so should i uh spray it should i get out of the way so oh look at that look at that ah my first point oh you think so okay let's do that there you go now this one's got some two hands yeah two arms yeah it's pretty interesting because that's not as similar as like the multi this one's like it's growing low but yeah i can't explain why the tube yeah a lot of times when trees are under stress they'll put out sprouts but they probably should have been cut off really early on right to promote the main trunk yeah but you know the trouble is and i'll tell you this about trimming is that if you cut these for example okay the you have to be careful how you do it because if you cut too close down here then the rain will hit that and then fungi are attracted to moisture right that goes into the main trunk right so yeah so it's like i personally uh i just leave it alone yeah yeah well here's a nice find you know what this is this is great for wildlife now this tree i would definitely trim around this to give it more light okay you know what this is is this an ammo link here yes okay service berry yeah yeah i look hot yeah i love the four this is one of my favorite little treats we want i want to actually plant more amelienkier and uh cornice in this air in the area that's where the spruces are yeah because we'd like to see more native flowering trees for sure so then we want to clear this area what i would do is because you don't want branched rub or not yeah that's a branch yeah because that branch doesn't need to be there anyway exactly so i'm going to just just get that branch just to fly trim all these right around yeah this is a the hawthorne which is another good wildlife tree yeah it is you might just be because they're dangerous yeah trim some lower limbs yeah like this one's straight at my eye yeah yeah hawthorne wants some light yeah so you might consider uh cutting this down here's another service berry right here yeah nice which that will benefit from that yeah yeah so that's good this guy put out lots of sprouts oh my god yes yeah given the size of that that was a sawtimer tree so he must have uh had the logging done yeah and you know told me to cut whatever well what is the history not to take you off the trees but what is the history of this area do you know like was there a lot of people who moved in here that kind of wanted a farm and then you know packed up and said hey this is not good farming potential and then sold all their trees or there's been a convoluted history where people came into our it went back to the time of the revolutionary war yeah okay where um washington and the government after the war uh like the houdini sony the iroquois in what became new york state and in northern pennsylvania too but satan stick to new york state they during the revolutionary war they really had no way to pay a lot of the soldiers so they basically gave promissory notes about uh we'll pay with land and so and and they say okay where are we going to get the land and that's where washington sent solvent up here in clinton and to get rid of the indians so they could uh give the soldiers the land and also you had major land speculators get their grubby fingers out and they they were basically in cahoots with the generals and stuff and see it's like the soldiers got maybe maybe 160 acre tracks and a lot of the soldiers end up never even wanting to land they just sold it to speculators or whatever and and so uh the speculators nellie picked up those parcels but they also uh like the generals were given huge parcels like maybe 3 000 acres or 10 000 acres or whatever 20 000 acres and so and so the speculators in concert with the generals and everything because generals didn't want the land they had no use for it uh they uh they started doing major sell-offs that they just basically would start selling that again and that was from set of soldiers more european settlers you know who bought it and like you go up by cycle lake and watkins what's called the watkins flint purchase there's an enormous area up through there or that was in turn sold off and and so if you look on an old map from uh late 1700's early 1800's you'll see these like all these little um very uniform parcels yeah you know and uh they did it in part so the dispossessed the indians but also when the sellers got here and of course they had no ecological knowledge or con concerns they just um when they and came into an area especially lucrative was the um commercial stands of white pine because literally the east was built on white pine which is your sacred tree yeah yeah exactly so the irony of you know the symbol of the hodino sony yeah is the white pine and that was the tree most sought after by the settlers and speculators to law so they saw these places white pine and and you know like hilltops like these around here uh and down in the schwung valley uh they were famous for the the white pine stands and the quality of it and so you know they just went after it with vengeance and so the the thing with the white pine is that uh they first came in on settler's property and the settlers would use some of the smaller ones for the cabins and everything but all the nice white pine that was sold so that they could uh pay for farm implements or livestock and things like that so that's how they did it and uh and this lumber or logs which became lumber um was in turn used to build the towns and everything you know so yeah so and um and i might tell you this that the majority of land around here not only was it wastefully cleared but it was also cut for firewood because everybody burned firewood back then and it's it's phenomenal how much when you figure every family if they needed say ten cords of wood because that's main fuel everything they did with it if you had a thousand families that's ten thousand cords of wood yeah and and that takes one half a lot of land to produce ten thousand cores and that's each year you know and there was a whole vastly a lot more than ten thousand fam or a thousand families there you know and so it the the forests were cleared very very quickly one thing i'm working on is a indian history map of the finger lakes region oh that would be tremendous yeah so i'm doing all these things like we're you know sold and what yeah where some former indians villages and settlements were um like where red jacket lived or was born you know just anything i can think of and then on the borders uh i have on there uh it's one of my many projects but and it's like halfway you know halfway done yeah and and so it's like on the borders i have on there like um because half the finger lakes region was seneca yeah territory yeah and so i said well then seneca's and then a strip of cuga and the strip of onondaga and maybe a tiny corner up an ida you know and so i just said well uh half the border will be devoted to uh like seneca so for example so i'm gonna put uh like a hawk on there and i'll say gotchitos or something like that and uh or i'll put um the um wolf which is the different for the different clans yeah yeah yeah something like that yeah and then and then maybe some other um things like the headdress would be gustola you know so just a few things that would be culturally important but also have the indian name who are you working with on that just me yeah you need somebody else to get the fire under your bum they like get it finished i'm building the house plus i'm writing a book about the forest and the psychology oh my gosh that's illustrated oh my goodness how you do hard work yeah by the way look at how nice that pine is that is magnesium that is a beautiful plant right there we want that straight as an arrow that's a perfect example of how pine grow in this one two phase you know the first one is lemmy gets then these guys grow in the shade and look how fine they are yeah see that's that's that'll be a monarch someday yeah there's another service how how long will it take to be a monarch [Laughter] let's see like how old do you think these are like when were can you tell from not cutting them i would say they're probably 50 years old 50 okay and then yeah these big ones yeah and then because we're wondering like how how long does it take to become a monarch because they become tall very quickly yeah but the question is well see every species has its own strategy i mean little plants big plants animals and so what it is here is that these guys their strategy is to go tall as fast as possible to get above the canopy and we we can tell that this tree is well on its way to being above the canopy probably in a few years yeah i see some evidence that it did get weevil yeah i see here and i see that one too see that one that goes like a bubble so yeah when you get closer you can see that bowing out yeah but the uh but weevil damage is not going to kill it oh no no in fact uh it's like like this guy here yeah the these these guys here because they may be growing a little even more shade on them they have less likelihood of getting weeviled right okay i'll tell you something here this is very important this this right here this like duff layer yeah and in our language that's called orinda orenda yes i love that name it's one of my favorite words i love it anorexia and orenda those are my two of my favorite words yeah yeah and so the rinda is what's called the the mystery the mystic potents because they knew back then you know that that the all the life in the forest and the forest was their world came from here and everything in the forest returned to there so it was so a cycle so that was the res the place of great recycling right here and so and so the like the woodpecker was revered because it was a major component of that breaking things down and into the arenda again yeah so so this and you can see when you're in a a really old forest that the orinda is really thick yeah and and so this um nothing's more important to growing the forest than than the healthy horrendous yeah yeah that's what's really critical and so maple is a good soil builder especially sugar maple there's a lot of calcium in the sleeves but this is a good soil builder and it just takes generations for this duff layer to to um to for the orinda to build up again yeah and uh and so because the deficit here is that you're countering the um the high clay content so it's kind of basically a waterlogged soil yeah and so the orinda can offset that yeah with like almost like the native natural compost exactly yeah exactly now this i'll just tell you something from a timber standpoint yeah okay if i saw this tree it's not the most thrifty tree okay but it's um it's like when it's all you've got then then you you know and you enjoy it so uh in a in a in a setting like the logging job i'm marking now i would debate whether to mark it or not because of there's too many dead limbs on it yeah and that's all we got yeah when it's got too many dead limbs yeah that's imitation for decay to set in right okay but um when you're assessing whether something is uh suitable for it has to be 12 inches in diameter at the small end which means you know you never include the bottom it's always what's up here because that's where you saw straight through okay and so so the um it has to be in order to be a saw log it has to be 12 inches in diameter so so in other words where's 12 inches on this guy so you'd step back and say okay i could get out of this just you see that one dead limb right there yeah that's about 12 inches right across there okay okay so i can get a 16-foot log out of it yeah this tree okay and so so i'd say yeah okay good so so it would be cut cut down um and hauled out in the top portion there the last six feet or whatever would end up for firewood then that we'd leave the top here right yeah but for us because we don't have as many ash in this oh you keep up we keep it and we don't need it for wood yeah you know keep as long as possible for a seed just hope the board doesn't find that yeah i don't see any uh damage yet no but if you i guess when we walk down we'll be able to see more damage and my question is if you see a lot of damage do you just take it out remove this one no no i would point out something very important uh you see the loose bark yeah this is a very important source of food for like chickadees and such oh because insects hide under that yeah okay and uh because it's warm they think they're protected yeah and while they're overwintering the chickadees will explore under this loose bark to to uh look for bugs well i we love our chickadees so oh yeah we'll keep that yeah and so i always tell people don't cut a tree down for firewood uh if it has a lot of loose bark on it until the bark's gone then then cut it because it has no use to the bird set now this one i would cut because it has cankers in it so i'll take that out this aspen right here okay is this the big tooth or yeah um arm let's see they see more likely the big tubes i don't know if you can find it we find a leaf that hasn't decomposed this is an aspen leaf right yeah but i don't know if it's from this tree pretty likely it's hard to find yeah yeah for wildlife about the most important tree you can have that's a cool dead one right there knobs on it that's neat that could be like a sculpture yeah and then here's some more of our ash yeah i'm really quite surprised if these have not been that's if you have to that tells you hold up you hear the resonance in there that's why oh yeah transfer of shocks yeah that's why ash was so sought after for baseball bats and tool handles we were banging on one with the uh uh jamin the basket weaver in the area oh yeah yeah [Music] yeah and then these hickories just look great oh they're great yeah they are so important for the wildlife and the ecology of the forest this one's used different look at the flaky bark on this that's an iron wood that's another iron one okay yeah yeah okay that's not the muscle with this iron yeah different so basically when you're walking through this forest you would really only thin out you wouldn't thin just to thin you'd thin out the trees that are dying or disease especially when you're looking at it from a conservation and optimizing the health of the forest perspective right so it would be a light touch essentially oh yeah and what i would do is any really desirable tree say this hickory or whatever now i'd look around it and say okay what's the assessment so to speak one is it's getting plenty of light from the south so it's it's very happy there okay and the aspen on the back side of that they're struggling you know they're they'll start dying off gradually here and that's fine you know it's like a gradual process here you want to imitate what nature is doing that's that's one of the primary things i do in in my forestry is when i mark trees for cutting it's because i'm imitating what nature does like i mark out a tree that's diseased or defective that's what nature's gonna take out any tree that's got a narrow crotch like that i mark out because those are gonna split and nature will take those out any tree that's leaning uh signs of uprooting anything like that that i think nature's gonna take out i'll take them off a tree that's the top is dying on it too many dead branches i'll take that out and so so you you focus in on where your best trees what can i do to enhance them you know and certainly one way is to get rid of any uh diseases in your in your forest and and what what are your thoughts also like this is a pretty clear walking area uh yeah it's very open wood so you know is it is it beneficial as we start to move the deer fence back to start trying to enrichment plant or do some huggle mounds or to build some more interest down below to have like not just tall layers but you know actually uh like some lower shrub layers i think you've got a severe deer browsing problem here yeah which is why we want to extend the deer heads into what makes you notice that because it's too open the understory here and i've been observing deer poop yeah there's a lot of black beans around the area yeah i mean and so because of that i say okay you know that's um this soil it may sound counterproductive but it benefits from some disturbance so if you do you have a tractor not yet we have an at utv and that's about it right now okay yeah because what i would do is every so often in here yeah just disturb the soil right and do that especially near uh some hickories uh any tree that's desirable because seedlings love a bear seed bed right and that and actually this prevents seedlings the the stuff could like is prevents things from growing up right sometimes so you need to and so if you go back to the way the forest was uh before people screwed it up so back then you had large herbivores in the forest elk and buffalo right running around uh animals rooting i mean bears were so common back then always digging up things um and they were disturbing the soil all over the place and so so we have to do that that's why when i'm doing a logging job and my guys are they're cut we cut the trees and they're dragging the logs through the soil that's music to my ears because they're creating bare seed beds all through the forest and in this soil disturbance you go back there years later that's where that's where the things are regenerating right and also i'll tell you another thing is what you do here is that there's a great lack of large biomass on the floor here first floor so i highly encourage you to do some thinning like let's say for example like this tree here you cut it down and leave it just bam leave it yeah so let that decay back into the soil yeah okay and uh so you have an ideal situation here beautiful ash yeah beautiful red maple yeah here give me your paint here okay yeah do something get on up here i'll show you what i'm gonna do [Music] yeah they did some serious cutting here for uh i don't know firewood and also timber bolts look at the bottom of that now that is cool that is really neat isn't that neat [Music] we're moving this fence away from these trees and obviously some of the trees gobbled up the fence yeah what's the best way to free the trees in a way i don't know if you can if it's been really on there yeah then you yeah like you can see the barbed wire in there yeah you're not gonna get it out yeah but the tree is okay still oh yeah okay but i am getting a good sense as to how you're reading the forest a bit more i'm definitely that's in my book ball i'll i would love to show you guys what i'm working on with it but it's like everything practical from soup to nuts yeah oh but if you ever want somebody to review your book oh yeah yeah i've written three books myself so yeah i i know the process and it's always nice to have other people read it oh yeah provide feedback because you're so close to the text you oh often need a yeah helping hand that is cool that's a neat that's a neat i think it's probably just uh concrete and stuff looks like they probably something yeah it's like concrete and stone now this is a shell bark hickory this is a shell bark yeah how do you know because the bark is much tighter than on the shank so this is is this shag and this is shell yeah and is this shag that's a shag okay so we do have another hickory yeah okay you got an oak over there yeah very nice cause we know how important the oaks are in the forest oh yeah for diversity yeah sorry that's my last name so i always i always remind them how important oaks are your last name is oak oaks yeah very interesting this hickory here not the easiest thing to cut down but trouble is when you cut this you're gonna go right towards that oak so this basswood could stay definitely it looks like it has a nice animal basswood stays for the wildlife okay that's perfect yeah that's a premier wildlife trailer and the smell and the smell of the of the and also it's a good tea first one we've seen it's true yeah yeah so so that alone says you keep it this is magnificent really nice yeah the form of it very healthy crown it's an ideal tree this is a problem because it might split and fall yeah and it would fall right on that yeah so here again i would girdle it girdle okay now can you explain the girdling a bit more what do you exactly do you're going to cut in to through the sap wood okay this is gonna have probably that thick a sapwood and that's like the softer part that's still kind of growing in a line yeah that's the live part harder part in the middle and you're stopping the flow of the juices right so this dies and just gradually decays away okay and the hard part in the inside will keep it up and then it just yeah and and it's um because unless i mean the ideal is if you unless you're really good at filling the tree the tree if you girdle it at least it gives you some borrowed time yeah because hickory though decays very easily uh you will invite decay starting in pretty quick right so so that's that's a trade-off there i would say this there must be goldenrod nearby here there's a lot of goldenrod yeah because these have died most likely from ash dieback which is goldenrod is the secondary host for it oh so so we're closer to roads and everything yeah ash tend to do best when they're more remote there's an old ironwood here and here we have some of the uh trout lilies coming mm-hmm we saw them the other day there is a magnificent hickory okay that is magnificent this hickory yeah this is what you want right that is a beauty although he's got a little stem on the other side yeah the form everything is perfect down the street that's what you want well that's quite a treat right there yeah it's not in perfect shape no but for a couple hundred years old i guess a couple hundred oh yeah it's unbelievable yeah this tree's up this tree's all by itself for many many years you know well that's a that's a real monarch here what i would do is yeah look at this this is where a major limb was up it came off and it tried healing itself wow that is a beauty that's something to be proud of i know we are oh man we wish we had more of them oh yeah good god yeah is this like smith woods material i don't know well it's always i'm sure it's old as trees like that [Music] it also has like things growing on it yeah you know oh it's it's it's ecosystem into itself i'll tell you a little story it's like the reason why they survived uh all these years was because that it was useless except for maybe a boundary tree or something like that but its main way it survived was it was useless and there was a chinese philosopher named mencius a confucius and and he was taking his pupils through the land escaping china and they saw the army down below in the valley and so one of the the students said how can i survive to an old age like you and he said you have to become useless and he goes what do you mean he says you see the army down below he says all those soldiers have a use and he said probably none of them will live to an old age like me and uh and he says you see this old old old tree here he says it survived because there's you can't cut any boards out of it because there's no it's not straight you know and he says it and it's too big now to be able to cut down and so he says so it'll survive because it's useless yeah and it's it's very true the old the majority of old growth in the east is um because of uh it's principally beech and hemlock which had very little use you know and so and so the rarest of the rare is finding like old growth or virgin white pie because that was so sought after yeah you know and that's why well i've seen i've been to an old growth hemlock forest in pennsylvania there's a small one that's close to where my father lives but i've never seen them grow to the diameter of something like this exactly yeah this this was a pasture tree that grew all by itself yeah for probably well over a hundred years i feel sorry for it because it fall here by itself all the time no but it's a testimony to its endurance yeah i mean this is a real sacred tree so i'm wondering if we should extend the deer fence well i i took it over in here i would do whatever i could to see that this regenerates somehow in so many centuries here what a mark my god i know it just it just brightens my day i mean this is a real real gem and you keep in mind that see this tree grew in the open so there's no competition right so it can grow faster than the tree which you know is crowded yeah and so like the white pine and everything uh oh there there's some real monarchs there real real big ones well i i'm wondering now to kind of um focus on this tree and to make it like a real focal point in this area yeah maybe possibly extending the deer fence i would put something around this yeah or or actually to create a fence around it its own fence so that it could leave more white oak seeds and then my question is these are all small but do we take any of the trees away from it around yeah i'm just about looking at that because you see like this here yeah that's going right up into the crowd right so so let's do some tree marking here this tree became established before see deer were decimated from this area yeah so this tree became established before deer became came back here and became common again yeah otherwise it wouldn't be here so how old do you think it is like that one yeah probably 75 years old or better wow yeah this is a black birch yep um we'll leave it they kind of die they don't live that long right no but sometimes they do but we'll give that these events as a doubt here okay because you don't have hardly any so yeah yeah that's one heck of a tree right there boy magnificent well i'm glad we got a chance to show it to you oh my god it might have been worth the effort of coming out it certainly was quite a tree look at the crowd on that thing i know thank god what a monarch yeah yeah that's really something else that's a good one let's just see there's a nice red oak right there yeah that one right there though going up yeah that's a beauty yeah good that's real good so it's not all bad oh no no you got some good stuff it's forest it's trying to heal itself but you see that ash in the distance right on the road yeah oh yeah that's not good is that the borer or do you think that's something else yeah boy that's real classic right there the boar yeah so isn't it strange that they have much more bore out here but not in the woods yeah yeah it's pretty pretty amazing so we should get rid of that or should we just let it be well until it falls they're in there yeah still i'd get rid of it so how do you get rid of it though that so it doesn't the bores don't like come out and feast on our other ashes that are in there burn it yeah okay yeah burn it as firewood or burn it just to burn it i'd burn it right away okay and these two i think are are starting to get it on the outside here so you cut it down and then throw it in a pile and burn it yeah yeah cut it up and throw it in the palm yeah yeah these guys be on the open yeah yeah i see if they're further off yeah i'm further up and then this one too yeah so i think like my fear is that it spreads more deeply into the woods yeah yeah right here you can see it yeah there see right there it's going after the ones that are most exposed yeah so i think that's clear of what we want to do we want to really select for some of those statement trees like that white oak and then just see anything that's growing up in her crown to give her some space yeah to uh even consider uh extending the fence so that the white oak seedlings don't become forage for the the whitetail deer yeah yeah because they'll uh oh of everything you have here yeah maybe the arborvities they love to eat well we don't care about the arborvitaes they could eat those yeah in the white oaks that's what they're after yeah yeah we might even plant the arbor vitae so they can eat them yeah um yeah now this is what we want to return to meadow yeah it's but he brought in a lot of tile drainage and gravel and then some geotextile material so we're in debate now how do you best establish it do you take out just the geotextile and you leave the gravel and the uh and the pipes underneath you grab all through gravel throughout nine acres a hundred thousand tons of gravel we want to return it to meadow now the soledago and everything has moved in but we don't want a full solidago forest here how deep is this gravel four to eight inches i would plow furls okay that's what i would do yeah you know but we'd love to get some bobo links in here and maybe orioles well if you had uh a sandy um like gravel bar type thing yeah a lot of exposed dirt along the edge of the pond and the kill deer will come well they killed you are here already yeah i think they we i heard them before i saw them i see you've got the honeysuckle we're getting the honeysuckle and the multiflora rose we probably pulled out 600 of them and we have more piles and we burned up we started burning them before the winter we have really appreciate your time and your insights into the woods because we're we're we're eager to get the deer fence extended we want to get the planting starting to get some plantings done yeah we're up against the time on the honeysuckle but this is all honeysuckle we remove most of it good god you know and and to to let some of these trees breathe i'll tell you something with this honeysuckle is um you have to get it up by the roots otherwise it'll sprout back we've been pulling it out as much by the roots as possible with our utv that's become the oh but you know you sometimes you still get a rope oh it's amazing you still get a root in the the ground in your ceiling pick it up like that i actually sprained my finger oh yeah yeah you know ripping it out oh my god so at first we started cutting them and then we said oh why don't we use our utv to pop we have our homework to do with our forest yeah it's got a lot of work we got a lifetime that's what you say it's a lifetime project it is it's like generational project yeah that's true for sure we we just feel like the folks here they had one way of using it and there's some really interesting plantings they put the ponds in oh the ponds are fantastic yeah and they really kicked the ball down the the field for us and now we're gonna kick it the rest of the way there you go um do you have many turtles i haven't seen turtles yet we have lots of amphibians yeah a lot of frogs we got a lot of frogs peepers peepers buffos papers i know they're my fave oh my gosh we got some i think we had a leopard leopard frogs we got bufos americana they were cool uh and then we saw uh spotted salamanders very nice that's very nice and then this is amazing oh yeah it's two and a half acres that's a that's a real i can't wait to come back and really look at these you

Channel: Flock Finger Lakes

Views: 6,703

Rating: 4.9915075 out of 5

Keywords: Flock, Flock Finger Lakes, Finger Lakes New York, homestead, homesteading, start your homestead, find your homestead, permaculture, permaculture farm, intentional community, upstate New York, agroforestry, summer rayne oakes, how to start a farm, farm life, market garden, gardening, gardening Zone 5, forest, Northeastern Forest, emerald ash borer, ash disease, white oak, New York Forest, forest walk, Forest tour, tree ID, hickory forest, oak forest, how to read a forest

Id: S9C4BFrjspQ

Length: 54min 3sec (3243 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 06 2021