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The Rural Voice, 2001-10, Page 32CROPPING THE HUMBLE CEDAR Throw out everything you know about woodlot management if you want to grow cedars By Keith Roulston Jt can be a scrubby little shrub or a soaring giant. It can be good for little but fence posts or it can be cut for saw logs. Ontario's white cedar is a tree unlike any other. Humble though the cedar is, it's been a matter of acrimonious debate on the Bruce Peninsula in the past two years, to the point of protests and injunctions against massive cutting operations. To create greater understanding of the management of cedar stands, the Bruce County Woodlot Association is holding a seminar at the South Bruce Peninsula Hall in Wiarton on November 3 beginning at 9:30 a.m. One of the speakers at that meeting will be Jim Eccles of Lands and Forestry Consulting and if you think you 28 THE RURAL VOICE know about cedar management because you can manage maple or white pine. you've got something to learn, he says. "The management is the opposite of what you do with hardwoods or pine," Eccles says. Where other trees respond well to cutting away competing trees to "release" a selected crop tree, cedars don't. Where opening up a clear spot in a hardwood forest promotes regeneration, cedars won't sprout around other living cedars. That's because, Eccles says, cedars excrete a toxin through their roots which prevents germination of seeds in the vicinity — not just cedars, but anything else. In a dense cedar bush there will be absolutely nothing growing on the ground below the larger trees. It means that while a healthy hardwood woodlot will include all ages of trees so that it's endlessly sustainable with proper use, cedar trees in a stand tend to be all the same age. This can happen in nature because cedars invade an attractive habitat. In Grey and Bruce Counties. for instance, there have over the years been plots of land that were pastured to death. The soil was compacted by the cattle. The grasses were gone. That's an inviting target for cedars because they like compacted soil and there's no grass to compete. If there's a nearby seed source, the farmed -out pasture can spring to life with cedar seedlings in a short time. That's why there are some large areas of cedars in the' two counties. Cedar also likes the land in the northern part of the two counties because the limestone of the Niagara Escarpment comes very close to the surface and creates the kind of "sweet" soil that makes cedar thrive. So is there profit in cedar? Obviously there must be for somebody in order to create the size of the operation that caused the controversy on the peninsula. Eccles, however, is cautious in answering the question. There's profit in cedar to compare with others woods on a per -acre basis but not on a per -tree basis, he says. What's more if as a landowner you value aesthetics, cedars are not the tree for you. That's because the profitable way to grow cedars is by clear cutting, Eccles says. Only when all the cedars are cut will they stop producing the toxin which prevents germination. Given time, the seeds from nearby cedars will infiltrate and regrow the stand. Eccles suggests a modified form of clear -cutting to provide a woodlot with a variety of age classes within a parcel. From a 180 foot width of bush, he says, you can clear cut a 60 -foot swath. In 20 years you come back and take another 60 -foot swath. By then the original swath will have regenerated and be starting to grow. Twenty years later you take the final swath and by 20 years.later, the area first harvested will be ready for harvesting again. This might not be a direction landowners who care about aesthetics will want to follow, Eccles says. For them, the profit from harvesting cedar may not be worth the cost of the eyesore that's left behind for a fairly long time afterward. There is one alternative, however that does allow for selective harvesting of cedar. Though cedars exude the toxin to prevent germination of seeds, if seedling trees are brought in and planted in areas where larger trees have been removed, the seedlings aren't affected by the toxin.