Homestead
BDN’s Homestead section is a celebration of rural life. Our writers cover small farms, animals, DIY solutions and fascinating Maine people who find unique ways to live simply. Read more Homestead stories here.
I have experience with garden plants and livestock, with a few conservation projects mixed in. But I’ve never been involved in decision-making before.
With about 2 wooded acres that have been unmanaged for at least a decade, my family and I are learning and planning what we need to do to care for it.
Generally, that requires deciding on goals for the trees — such as harvesting them, leaving them for wildlife habitat or using the area for recreation — learning what’s growing on the land and developing a management plan for the future.
I’m also finding it takes a new way of thinking about the things I see and a shift into planning for the long term.
Experts can help you take most of the steps you need. Maine has a forest service with professionals who can visit and help evaluate your property, an association just for woodland owners, local land trusts, county conservation districts and other educational resources specific to the state.
But directing that process is up to you.
We’ve started working on a general inventory of the trees and landscape we have with the help of our district state forester. He wisely recommended that if we do some pruning and thinning we start toward the back of the property, so we won’t have to see it out the window every day for years if we don’t like how it turns out. That advice was too late for us, but good to know.
It’s also helpful to understand the bigger picture of the land around the lot, the topography and the soil type. If you know what trees grow best in your conditions, you can narrow down which ones you remove (though between two trees, you’ll want to keep the healthier one, even if it isn’t “supposed” to be as well-suited to the area).
On a walk through the woods to start the inventory process, we found some things I expected but was still happy to see: natural paths and other signs from deer and turkeys, decaying trees providing habitat for wildlife and returning nutrients to the soil, and the big rocks we suspect long-ago farmers moved.
The woods are dense near the house, but we found clearings farther back. That was exciting at first, but as it turns out isn’t a great sign: they’ve formed because a few big trees cast so much shade in season that younger ones can’t thrive.
I also learned that the dense stands of young trees around the property are actually a good thing if you want straight, tall wood. Clustered together like that, they grow upward rather than branching out.
I was surprised to find a tree with beech leaf disease, which was confirmed in Maine for the first time just three years ago and has spread rapidly. The same tree has beech bark disease too, which happens when an insect called the beech bark scale gets into the bark and makes it vulnerable to two species of fungi.
Seeing these diseases in a personal way like this made me appreciate our forests more and recognize that they can be fragile in their own ways.
Our next step will likely be cutting some trees to make up for the years of unmanaged growth, which our forester said is a common start for managing woods that have been left alone for years.
We’re also trying to plot a path to clear a trail so we can enjoy walking through the woods.
When those goals are clearer, it’ll be time to develop a management plan, or have one developed by a professional, to guide how we do things in the future. Maybe in a few winters, we’ll have some firewood too.
