You have a wood lot?

lots of variables here-

I've got 6.5 acres of woods around the around the house with about 4 that can be harvested for firewood.

Basically pasture abandoned 60 -80 years ago and down slope with huge oaks/maples etc.

Got all the easy ones years ago and I don't have the heart to take out the big beautiful old hardwoods ( not to mention the collateral damage to the aesthetics of the back yard and surrounding trees).

That being said, IMHO if you have a thick growth of forest you can probably get one cord per year per acre.For sustainability ,take out the big trees that are interfering with other big trees, thin out the medium ( 8-10" diameter), leave saplings spaced in between, and leave the brush where it falls to shield seedlings from deer etc.

All in all. I take 1.5-2 cord a year from my lot.

I echo what Gerry said. My parents have 5 acres, 90% wooded. I cut about 1 cord a year there just cleaning up dead fall and problem trees. That number will go up next year as I have several large dead/dying ash to take down.

I don't cut live standing unless someone asks me to. I clean a lot of fence rows that otherwise would just be pushed into a pile and burned.

I also respect large trees, and realize that at one time those trees were small trees. In fact, I plan to plant 4 trees this spring on my one acre lot. One for each child and one for my wife and I.

I have 2 wood lots. I bought 40 acres to build a house on and it was about 50% forested and the other 50% in a poor quality grain farm that was on sloping ground not well suited to farming. Since then I have planted trees on most of the balance of the land outside the acre I kept back for the house to stand on. My other property was a small level grain farm when I bought it but I planted hardwood trees on about 16 acres of it that is now tall enough, at around 30 feet, that the wood lot needs to be thinned out for the remaining trees to continue to grow well. Since a percentage of that wood lot is ash, that will be my first focus because EAB is already present in the county and it is a matter of time before my ash start to die off. For me, my 16 acre plantation is full of trees that are 10 to 14 inches in diameter so a nice size for firewood use. Those 16 acres are on a 21 acre plot but about an acre and a half is a pond and another acre is an old home site. The remaining acre or two was a hedge row of trees when I bought the place. My plantings on my newer property are much younger so only the older wood land there could be used as a wood lot. The younger trees will be for my children or grandchildren to use.

My older 16 acre woodlot

I have 200 hectors of mixed forest which I have been harvesting
30 to 40 cords a year for the last 35 years you would be hard pressed
to find where we have cut in any given year . In fact we are still removing
trees which were damaged in the big ice storm of 98 and expect to do so for
many more years. We do not replant as we don't clear cut nature does a beautiful job
of infill all by itself.

I have just under 40 acres, of which 15 acres is heavily wooded. I have turned a lot of dead fallen and dead standing trees into firewood. The only live trees I cut down are "culls" that need to go to improve the overall quality of the rest of my standing trees.

Here are a couple of interesting publications I use as guide:

Oldman... Love the pics of your woodlot. My own 100 acres (about 75 acres wooded) does not grow in rows like that, lol. I recently had a timber cut done and so have more firewood than i'll ever be able to burn laying there to be worked on. Beyond that, it is a regular job to maintain the windfalls, dead or diseased trees etc.

neverbilly said:

Makes me curious regarding how to take trees out (smaller live ones but not healthy, large ones) for sustainability. I mean, cut one here and there, that could work. But might it not be better to leave some holes? Such as, say, you have a 20 acre plot. Would it be better to take most of the trees inside a one acre spot to allow light to get in... and plant some new (whatever species you want) in that spot? If you did that, you would not cover the entire place until 20 years goes by. I wonder if anyone has studied this, lol. Would be a good doctorate dissertation study for some outdoorsy student! Then again, a doctorate only requires two years, so, that might not work. Maybe a university has done such a study? I would call my forester friends but they are all about pine tree plantations. I am interested in hardwood sustainability. This is not something I just came up with... I have long dreamed of buying some land to do this on. Hardwoods rule for me, lol. We have a bazillion pine trees in the south.

EDIT: I see that FTG above has posted some articles; I will read!

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Cutting out smaller areas is called 'patch cutting' and is a recognized forestry practice. It is very beneficial practice for a forest and the wildlife in areas that have even aged stands, which has happened in the Northeast where areas that were once farmland have reverted to forest. The forest will respond differently to the amount of light that is getting to the floor. Some species need the sunlight and others are shade tolerant or need shade entirely. A patch or clear cut will change the forest, the area that is cut will go back to the early succession phase. If you plant new things you will be battling what comes in naturally. Like brushing out around your saplings because something else came up that grows a lot faster. Depending on what you want to come in you might find that it is better to plant it under a canopy and not patch cut.

You need to be careful when thinning so as to not open up too much light for a given tree. Think of how the crown on a yard tree looks, all big and branched out vs. what a healthy tree in the forest looks like. Its crown is much smaller. If you let a forest tree crown out it can take up more space than it is 'entitled' to and you will end out with fewer trees and those that you have are less valuable if you are in the business of growing straight logs without knots.

neverbilly said:

I see people mention their 'wood lot.' Not familiar with that term around here, lol. I assume it's acreage that has trees on it.

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I have a wooded lot, 3 acre vacant lot, with the back acre wooded maturely.
I also have a wooded spot where I can cut blow overs for firewood, it's about 1 x 1 square mile. Privately owned by 10 or so owners (from what I can find online) and no public access, only if your property boundries with it. There are paths, according to my dad, that have been back there 70+ years. No one has ever said peep about anyone walking the trails or cutting wood. Very nice it is not posted.

I'm starting to do small scale patch cutting on my 11 acres with an eye towards wildlife habitat. I only have 3 hardwood spots I can get to with my truck, plus the area immediately near the house and road. To get going, I cut split and stacked 3 years worth in the yard, and a years worth (3 busted crown large oaks + collateral damage) in the first wooded spot. This has become a nice bedding area for does with fawns, and many other critters utilize it. We actually had a fawn 20 feet away in a section of downed crown as we stacked the last of it. kids jumped her as they got within 5 feet.
Will cut another years worth near yard, (last potential house killers) and a year's worth in spot two next. I'm hoping to put a few chestnut trees in there. That stack will double as a blind near a neighbor's clearcut lot that has grown over. I harvested this years' venison sneaking from there across my lot. Spot three is in the creekbed, and is relatively flat. May put food plot and/or arkansas black apples in there.

Any burnable "wildlife trees" with hollows are left standing, unless they are a hazard. Feathered buddies and small mammals love 'em.

jkbemdavis said:

Oldman... Love the pics of your woodlot. My own 100 acres (about 75 acres wooded) does not grow in rows like that, lol. I recently had a timber cut done and so have more firewood than i'll ever be able to burn laying there to be worked on. Beyond that, it is a regular job to maintain the windfalls, dead or diseased trees etc.

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It is really tough to plant 5000 trees without them ending up in rows. Even using a hand planter and just planting wherever you are standing at the time ends up in rows because people do not walk randomly. For 5 or 10 trees in a planting it would be easy to make it look random even if I had to sit down and figure the exact location of each tree so that it could seem that way. The trees in that picture were planted where I had a corn crop the year before I planted. It is a wood lot, not a forest.
As far as harvest patterns, you need to decide the desired outcome. If you are interested in quality tree and wood production you thin relatively evenly so that each remaining tree gets a larger and larger share of water, sunlight and fertility as it grows larger and you select culls with an eye to which trees are not growing well. If you are doing the thinning to promote wildlife you do indeed clear cut small areas of well under an acre each because so many food plants grow as invasives where sunlight is reaching the ground. That will not give you much in the way of tree quality but will improve the wildlife habitat for many of the animals that we hunt. Things like deer hang out on the edge of wooded areas and those small openings create lots of edge habitat. This is a gross over simplification but gives you an idea of some of the thoughts you had better have before you start cutting. Once a tree is cut there is no deciding you don't want that one cut.

neverbilly said:

I love trees and am hesitant to cut live trees. Started this thread for insight, curious about sustainability. I, especially have a problem cutting very large trees; I think they will just have to fall down for me to harvest them.

When I was a child, my dad had land right next to a place that we could hunt on. There were the largest oaks I've ever seen going up the hill. The canopy from each tree was massive. It was like being in a large building. I was SICK when they cut all those trees; logged them out in a timber operation. I would have never cut those huge ones. But, money talks. My own dad cut a humongous pine on our property. I asked him why and he said he needed the money. If I would've known about it, I would have given him the money! But he was a wonderful man, his generation just didn't appreciate large trees like mine does. I don't mean to be disrespectful, but large trees are hard to come by around here anymore, especially hardwoods.

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Just give them a hug and wack em up

Its a good thing for you that forested land is cheaper to come by than developed urbanized properties . You have your transitional properties but if you want trees trees trees...it will come with trade offs.
Mostly no cell phone coverage, if you call 911 or have a house fire or need appliances repaired.
But if you wanna do it, do it sooner than later.
I have a guy friend who lives out in the middle of nowhere. He has a great place, I really like it but he acts cagey.
You have to be into roughing it somewhat. Its what breaks up alot of marriages.
Listening to whispering pine trees 24/7 can make some people go mad.

But I heard the wind in the pines he planted
And the hemlocks overhead,
"His acres wake, for the year turns,
But he is asleep," it said.

A friend of mine owns 15 acres of river bottom land and he's been letting me cut there for the last few years. I've cut a lot of Black Locust and I've noticed for every tree I cut there are probably 40 or 50 saplings that sprout within 50 feet of the tree that I cut. They're an amazing plant and basically once they become established in a place they're nearly impossible to get rid of.

Riparian habitat isn't ideal for firewood harvesting but I've done well there. I've cut mostly Bitternut Hickory and Black Locust. The majority of species there are Cottonwood, Boxelder, and Willow but there's also Linden, Sycamore (including one with a trunk 13 feet in circumference), Spruce (1), Black Cherry, Ironwood, American Elm, Norway Maple, Sumac, 1 lonely young Red Oak, and a young Black Walnut.

One of our parcels of land, our homestead, is made up of 5.5 acres and a good three acres of that is solid woods. I mean thicket. If I had not cut meandering walking paths out there, there would be no way to move about. I could go in there and clear out all the undergrowth, yaupon, and weak, spindly saplings, but I like to just let it go natural. The tree line is about 60 yards from the back of the house and you cannot see a thing beyond the leading edge of that tree line. The woods are thick with post oak, pin oak, water oak and pignut hickory with a bunch of tall cedar thrown in for good measure. Diameter of the various oaks runs 20 to 30 inches. The Hickories are even bigger.
I do not cut live trees. When I see one that is ailing, starting to drop limbs, etc. I'll go ahead and take it down rather than let it rot while standing dead.
Even though we heart exclusively with wood (haven't turned the two heat pumps on in years) I've never burned more than a cord and a half in any one winter. (SE Texas). I only burn when the temps are going to be below 40 degrees.

I've never considered our little forest a wood lot as it is not maintained solely for firewood but for aesthetics, animal habitat and the pure enjoyment that comes when my city living granddaughters come to stay with us, especially now they are getting old enough to go explore in the woods on their own.