Timber Management
Stewardship is the name of the game as far as we are concerned. Do you know that the world's supply of native redwood trees is in Northern California? Because of this, redwood trees and lumber is what we concentrate our efforts on. This "redwood region" as it is often called is a long and narrow strip of land that is located approximately between the southern Oregon border to just south of Santa Cruz, California. This strip is about 400 miles long and 20 miles wide. That's it! Redwood trees (sequoia sempervirons) don't like the hot weather of the inland areas. They need the coastal fog and moisture to survive. When they are planted too far inland they tend to become stunted and they get "sun scorched" and their foliage tends to look yellowish and not the dark green of a healthy tree.
Redwood trees (sequoia sempervirons, which means ever-living sequoia) sprout back naturally. They don't need to be replanted after the tree is cut down. This phenomenon is called coppicing. It is when a tree sprouts back after it is cut. This why redwoods are called "ever living" (sempervirons). It is very, very hard to kill a redwood stump. We have had to remove some redwood trees very near to our buildings and the only way to permanently deal with them is to remove them with an excavator. Even then, when the entire stump is out of the ground, the green sprouts will shoot up out of the stump. Even logs with no roots will produce sprouts. It is actually quite amazing. We have had stumps ground out with stump grinders and that only solves the problem for about a year. The next year, the sprouts come up off the roots that were not ground out! We have tried burning the stumps to get rid of them, but that doesn't work either. Store bought stump killer (poision) doesn't work either. You can almost hear the stumps laugh when you try to kill them with that stuff! It doesn't even phase them.
Because redwood trees are so resiliant and they sprout back prolifically, we are constantly having to "weed out" the clumps of trees. The forest can get so dense and dark if it is not properly managed that you can almost not see the rays of the sun shining direclty down on the forest floor at noon time. We are constantly trying to improve our timber stands. There are micro climates within our forest lands. The ridge tops are warmer and sunnier than the north slopes. Our property is located on the north slope. There are plateaus (benches), gradual slopes, ravines, and steep slopes. Our trees grow tall and have very little taper to them. We try to maintain good spacing between our trees so that they get enough sunlight and water aren't constantly struggling to surrvive. We do timber harvesting in a sustainable yield manner. What this means is that we don't cut more than we grow. Our property grows approximately 1000 board feet per acre, per year. We have 34 acres of land so that means that we grow approximately 34,000 board feet of lumber on our land every year. All of these figures were calculated by our RPF (registered professional forester) when he prepared our Non-Industrial Timber Management Plan (NTMP). The NTMP helps us to know what volume of timber we can harvest in a given timber cycle. Typically the harvest cycles are once every 10 years, but that can vary with the lumber market. In a ten year cycle our land would produce approximately 340,000 board feet of timber. In a sustainable yield harvest, we would not cut more than 340,000 board feet of timber every ten years. If we did cut 340,000 board feet of timber every ten years, we would have the same amount of timber ten yers from now that we had when we started the whole process (which was determined to be 650,000 board feet of standing timber). We have set a goal for ourselves to cut less timber than we grow every year (or ten years for that matter). We have set the harvest limit at 25,000 board feet per year or 250,000 board feet every ten years. This is roughly 74% of what we could harvest and still be "sustainable."
