Thinning the Cabin Woods

Yesterday evening I wandered down to the Cabin Woods with my red marking tape and worked my way through the trees marking those that I thought should be felled.  I made a mental note at the end of last summer that some thinning needed to happen down there before this spring. The Cabin Woods is just over an acre, so it didn’t take me long.

Last summer I could see the Cabin Woods needed some thinning

In the alder wood I marked two lovely big, straight trees.  Their smaller neighbours will now have room to breathe and one of the small Douglas fir that was planted about three years ago will benefit from the extra light.

In conventional forest thinning the school of thought is to take out the smaller and poorly shaped trees so that the end result is a uniform ‘final crop’ of  good quality large trees.  But of course in close-to-nature forests, there never is a ‘final crop’.  The aim is to constantly improve both the forest yield and the forest health by harvesting the larger trees, but only as many as the forest needs light to keep it thriving. Forest trees need light, – human beings need timber.  It works.

Then I marked two poorly shaped alder that have begun crowding out the crowns of the better shaped trees. I could have taken these trees out a few years ago, as it was clear then that they would have poor form due to the leader shoot being damaged when they were young.  But I left them grow on as they helped to force up the better trees and to shade out the brambles. Plus of course, they are now of value to me for firewood, whereas earlier they’d have been too small and would have been ‘felled to waste’.

Poorly shaped alder trees marked with red tape for felling.

All told there were about seven or eight trees marked.  They are all only 9 years old, so it is just a very young forest.  This little alder wood has already been thinned twice and each time we have enjoyed a surprising amount of firewood from the thinnings. Alder grows very fast on these damp, heavy soils.  So fast that our Pro Silva friend from Austria, Prof. Josef Spoerk, could hardly believe that this tree (below) is just nine years old.

Gabriel Toolan, Jan Alexander and Prof. Josef Spoerk with nine year old Alder.

When I arrived home this evening I wandered down to Cabin woods again.  Niall Miller, my long time friend and wonderful woodland helper, had been working here for the day.  Niall does such excellent work with woods and with woodcraft.

When I arrived at the Cabin I was amazed to see the amount of firewood that Niall had harvested.  I was tired when I arrived at the Cabin, having been driving for the last few hours.  I started splitting the larger logs and stacking the firewood in the wood shed.  It was so lovely working away in that heavenly spot with the fresh breeze whistling through the bare branches of the trees and the sound of the lake lapping against the shore.  Within minutes my tiredness had vanished.

As I worked I began to think how strange it is that so few people here seem to have trees and forests on their farms. Why is there this lack of  wood culture here in Ireland and how will that wood culture develop here? It is only by working the forests and woodlands and using timber, for whatever purpose, that we learn what they are about.  Even a quarter of an acre is big enough to grow a little forest on. And of course until we stop growing plantations and then cutting them down again forty  years later, we  will never truly know forests.  Forests are not things that can be planted.  Forests are things that evolve over time.

A forest is a thing that evolves over time. – Beech forest in Slovenia

This is not a forest. – Clearfell site, Drumshanbo