People's Pilot, Volume 3, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 June 1893 — PLANTING NEW FORESTS. [ARTICLE]

PLANTING NEW FORESTS.

PenniylTsula Woods Cut Away to Form Coal-IVltne Props. In the coal regions of Pennsylvania nearly every piece of available timber has been cut away to form props for the archways and for various other uses in connection with coal mining, says Meehan’s Monthly. Nearly every stick and every piece of plank used in these regions now all have to be brought from a distance. The Girard estate has endeavored to solve the problem by making some small plantations as a test. Eight years ago a large number of larches and Scotch pines were planted; plow furrows were simply driven through the underbrush growing up where the old forest had been cut away and one-year-old seedling larches and pines planted. The larches now average some seventeen or eighteen feet high and are particularly healthy and thrifty. There can be no doubt, from these experiments, that forest planting in these regions would be an undoubted success. It may be noted that the larch was the most popular of forest trees in the early planting on the western prairie, but the leaves were attacked by a fungus; the timber, therefore, did not properly mature. It finally fell into disfavor for forest planting. On these early experiments the larch has suffered much in reputation, but it must be remembered that the western prairies furnish unfavorable conditions for the larch. It is a mountain tree, one thriving in comparatively poor soils, and the low altitude and rich earth of the western prairies was entirely foreign to its nature. Girard plantings are some fourteen hundred or fifteen hundred feet above the level of the sea; these are the conditions of its own home, and the remarkable healthiness of these trees show that they appreciate the position in which they find themselves.