Perry Clements walks through summer forestry work: prescribed burns, tree planting prep, watching for bark beetles, pulling invasive species, fixing roads, and maintaining fire breaks. Practical tactics for keeping land healthy during the hot months.
I'm Perry Clements. Just want to talk to you a few minutes about. In the forest management, timber management business. What's going on right now? It's nearly July. We're the end of June, and It's hot and 100 degrees, and everybody's going to the beach. And so what are. What are foresters doing this time of the year? Foresters. Right now, we just. We just completed, believe it or not, about three weeks ago, we completed all of our prescribed burning for the year. A lot of people think that, you know, you do your burning in the wintertime, and primarily we do winter and spring burns, but we do some late spring and summer burnings. And this particular year we had a great year of doing summer burning. Why do we do summer burning? Summer burnings are done mostly to control hardwoods. And so during the growing season, we call them growing season burns. We do prescribed burns. So we just got through with that, those operations, and now we're, believe it or not, we're thinking about tree planting. We're actually doing, have contractors in town doing chemical herbicide site prep. So this time of the year, that's what we're pretty much doing is planning for our reforestation or tree planting that will come up this winter. Also. This time of the year, in my opinion, is a good time of the year to monitor your forest, to check for disease or primarily bark beetle activity. It is hot and dry, and if you've done any logging or you've not had rain in several weeks, then certainly you can get into some tree mortality from bark beetles. And so this time of the year, you need to be looking at your forest and being sure everything's healthy, monitoring things like invasive species. You can identify those this time of the year and come up with a plan on controlling them. You know, road maintenance, summertime, it's dry. It's a good time to do any kind of road maintenance that you may be thinking about or need to do. It's a great time to get equipment in on your site and drainage ditches, put in culverts, you know, improve roads. One of the things that we like to do this time of the year is our fire break, fire line maintenance. And what I mean by that is a lot of times your fire lines are going to close in on you with limbs and trees growing, competition growing in, especially on your property line. So this time of the year, we like to go in and trim those back or do any bulldozer work to widen them. Herbicide work. We use herbicide a lot. We call it trimming our fire breaks. And so this time of year is a great time to do that again. Get prepared for Reforestation is one of our big ticket items this time of the year, and otherwise it's pretty quiet. Our busy time will pick up in the fall.
