[Sca-cooks] Forest management (was ovens)

[Phlip]

Ene bichizh ogsen baina shuu...

> This brings up a question that has nagged at me for years. We moderns
> look at forests, woodlands and unkempt urban lots and see lots and lots
> of "dead and down" wood. Those of us who live in the West also see a
> catastrophic wildfire waiting to happen. But it took many, many years
> for those forests to get that way.
>
> Here's the question: how much "dead and down" does a managed forest
> generate? If the pressure from the local population is constant, there
> should be very little. So it is up to the professional foresters to
> trim/thin the trees to maintain a constant supply of firewood while
> protecting the forest from wholesale destruction - yes? I seem to recall
> that there were penalties for ordinary folk cutting live wood. Bear?
>
> MD/Marged

Standard wisdom is that a properly managed 5 acre wood lot can provide
sufficient wood for a family's needs. This refers to a temperate forest, and
a family which uses wood almost exclusively for heating and cooking, and
requires occasional thinning of diseased or otherwise "worthless" trees, but
also allows harvesting of some trees for other uses, such as furniture or
fenceposts.

I suspect this would vary, depending on the particular mixture of trees
therein, and some of the more exotic usages- sugar maples, for sap and
syrup, and so forth, and includes cutting and trimming necessary trees a
year before they are used, in order to allow them to dry and season, but
this is a rough guesstimate, based on a reasonably managed second or so
growth forest.

Saint Phlip,
CoD

"When in doubt, heat it up and hit it with a hammer."
 Blacksmith's credo.

 If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it is probably not a
cat.

Never a horse that cain't be rode,
And never a rider who cain't be throwed....