You can invest in them. The simplest investment would be time. There are many young hardwood stands dense with saplings the size of your finger or fist that need nothing more than time to develop quite nicely on their own. Often within 20 years they become heavily stocked stands of pole-sized trees of good form, well on their way to sawtimber. When you find thickets of vigorous, well-formed trees of species well adapted to the site, stand back and watch. Sure, you can keep an eye out for out-of-control insect or disease problems, and your careful lower branch pruning may improve eventual stem quality. But you certainly don’t have to remove any trees. Not just yet. Somehow, through natural competition, the right individuals become boss trees while others die and rot. These stands will likely become what you want even without you.
But you will also find other thickets that might well benefit from a more active investment. Many sapling stands look considerably different from those doing-well-on-their-own thickets. Often they have different origins and, without tending, much different futures. These sapling stands may not become what you want without your efforts. They are often artifacts of poor past cutting or even unlucky disturbance and have a diminished species mix and poor structure. Here, a little physical labor now may well pay dividends later in the stand’s life.
Unlike thinnings and regeneration harvests, which occur in older, more-developed stands, foresters classify these efforts to manipulate the vegetation in young sapling stands as “release cuttings.” These include weedings and cleanings designed to release from competition some young trees by killing other young trees of unwanted species or poor form. They are often applied when the thicket includes a mix of species and a fast-growing, undesired species – oh, let’s say aspen – is overtopping a more valued but slower growing species, say, sugar maple or even red oak. “Liberations” are a similar kind of release cutting, but they occur when the young thicket is released from competition exerted by older but poorer trees that are overtopping the saplings. Such liberations might be warranted where a highgrading has left a scattered overstory of poor trees above a thicket of good regeneration.
With loppers, shears, and hand saws you can manipulate the competition among young saplings to favor certain trees over others – usually based on species and form – and try to redirect the stand’s future toward a better mix than would otherwise occur. However, when thus armed, you can also ruin a good young stand if your weaponry lacks intelligence. Any fool can run loppers. A good thicket manager knows where and when it’ll result in more than just exercise and fresh air at best and a degraded forest at worst.
Before attempting any of these release cuttings, you’ve got to know why it is that your desired saplings are being outdone by other less-desired saplings, vines, shrubs, or older trees. Here, the advice of an experienced local forester can be quite helpful in determining which species to favor on a site. Sometimes, for example, the relatively poor performance of your favorite saplings in a thicket is explained by the physical conditions of the site. That is, these species are not well adapted to the soils, hydrology, and local climate, and no amount of cleaning or weeding or liberating is going to make them better suited to that growing environment. If your desired species is in fact well adapted to the site, but is simply being outgrown by others that had a head start or are capable of fast early growth, then freeing the tops of your chosen trees will likely pay off.
But don’t get carried away. Just because it’s easy doesn’t mean you should do a lot of it. Removing too many trees from young stands can be disastrous, whereas maintaining high tree density affords several advantages. Young trees grown at close spacing are forced to grow upward and tend to have straighter stems with fewer low branches. This results in better stem form for future sawtimber production. They also suffer less from snow and ice loading; they physically support one another. And, of course, you’ve got to allow for future mortality.
What’s more, release cutting in young stands tends to remove those fast-growing, short-lived species like aspen and pin cherry and paper or gray birch. Keep in mind that these species – precisely because they do grow fast and die young – are the only ones in that young stand old enough to produce flowers and fruits or standing and downed dead trees. These are extremely important parts of the forest, and it can be decades before they would be produced and provided by the more economically desirable and long-lived species like sugar maple and red oak.
Invest wisely.