Planting a tree, any tree is good right? Good for the environment and all that jazz. Well the first thing we need to keep in mind in our part of the world, is that this was prairie not forest. It’s difficult to grow trees here, I know my two counties to the East have it easier, but it still isn’t child’s play. Problem is we are treating it as such, and I’m including those of us employed in conservation planning.
That might sound harsh, but if you can understand how long trees have been part of my being, then you might know I’ve put my dues in to comment on this. I was around 5 or 6 when my Grandpa Lachnit gave my brother and I some Ponderosa Pine trees to plant in our yard. I don’t think they made it a month. Not too long after that, I got my Arbor Day tree, a Green Ash. It lived for years, never getting over two feet tall. Our “yard” was a couple acres of sometimes mowed grass and trees did not grow for me. I became obsessed, trying different things as I got older. Even going as far as digging a hole with the skid loader and planting a 12-foot-tall Cottonwood that I dug out of a slough. That one made it though it should be twice its size after 30 years. It wasn’t until I took what I learned working at the conservation district that I came up with the “answer.” I planted cedars and Russian Olives. So, now when you go over to my mother’s house you are greeted with those wonderful trees. If I had to do it all over again, would I change anything? Darn right, I would have turned that ground black and planted some good trees.
I want to instill some honesty on how we have approached our tree plantings. We have become lazy, and our tree belts have suffered for it. The diversity in them hasn’t ever been great but our infatuation with cedars has continued the lack of diversity. The irony is that many of the cedar belts were planted with wildlife as the objective. If you limit diversity, you limit wildlife potential.
If you are a newer reader, you might be confused when you read me rail against cedars. “Hey aren’t they the thing to have for pheasants?” Pheasants are a grassland species; they need grasslands to live and reproduce. What tree belts do is protect against wind in the worst of winter. It isn’t that the cedar is God’s gift to pheasants, it’s that it is a tree. Any tree would have the same affect you see of the birds flocking to them in bad winter weather. Where the cedar comes in is that it can actually survive the way we take care of our trees. Remember I said we are lazy now, think about what the ground cover is in most trees planted in the last few decades. It’s a carpet of Smooth Brome. What tree is good at growing through grass? Yep, the cedar. It’s the same reason we have a huge encroachment issue on pastures along the Missouri and Jim River. They are a species that evolved to compete with grass. Our other beneficial trees don’t have that ability. They grow where there are disturbances, that’s why you see them in river breaks or around a wetland. The water creates conditions for them to germinate and get going before the grass gets back in.
Either you want trees, or you want grass. I know you can seed a bunch of grass inbetween the rows, but what is our management style once we do that? We leave it idle or mow once a year. What do you get with that style? Brome city, that’s what. I’m going to harp on this into perpetuity as brome will always be the biggest threat to successful tree plantings here. There are several things that contribute to that grass being in our tree belts, the largest being our mindset.
Take the tree fabric, what is your assumption about the management of that tree belt if you have fabric installed? Less work, right? Which turns into no work. Remember what I said about idle conditions? Fabric doesn’t prevent brome, heck it will grow right over the top of it eventually. Do the trees die from the grass, generally no. Most of the missing rows we see were from a poor selection of exotic species. What the grass does is stunt everything except the cedar. It keeps our shrubs from expanding, producing runners and filling inbetween the rows. That’s how shrubs are supposed to function, they are supposed to create a thicket. If you can row your shrubs after 10 years, something is very much wrong. The fabric is also contributing to the dysfunction. It’s not just a barrier to weeds; it’s also a barrier to those suckering shrubs both between the original plants in the row and between the rows.
Now I’m not saying don’t install fabric but what I am saying is we need to change our mindset. Maybe fabric can be part of your management, but it needs to come with the understanding that it will need to be cut away at some point. That point will come very soon in shrub rows. Given that shrubs can start to sucker within the first year, definitely by year 3, you will want to have your knife ready. I’m talking all of the fabric in those rows too, not just widening the holes. On the larger trees you will need to widen the holes as the fabric will girdle those trees if they aren’t.
Given that fabric is around two-thirds of the cost when included in a tree planting, you would think there would be more evaluation of its effectiveness. If you get cost share then you might not get quite the sticker shock, but you are still paying a percentage of it. Originally when fabric came out it was supposed to degrade from the Sun after so many years. Of course, we now know it doesn’t, but we never re-examined our guidelines on it. It doesn’t just cost financially; it costs us successful belts unless we want to keep our heads in the sand and think cedars are the only thing we need. Fabric is counterproductive if we don’t have the right approach.
If you have trees and want grass, kill the trees. If you want trees, kill the grass. And if you have fabric, cut it.