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Show Intermountain Forests to Regenerate Trees From Region Four headquart-j era at Ogden, Utah, Regional Forester Floyd Iverson has set a' 10-year goal for forest tree re-l generation. In his 1959 regional plan of work, Mr. Iverson has asked forest supervisors to re-1 forest 170,000 acres of nonstocked lands by 1968 and regenerate all newly cut-over areas and burned areas within five year.i of the time they are cut-over or burned. Region Four, of the United States Forest Service, in the Department De-partment of Agriculture, covers Southern Idaho, Western Wyom-1 lng, Utah, Nevada, and a small part of eastern California, To provide more young trees for planting, a new nursery site has, been selected in southern Idaho. Seed from tree species in Region Four will be planted there to pro-' pro-' duce transplant stock for all the national forests in the Intermountain Inter-mountain area. At Cedar City, Dixie National Forest Timber Staff Officer Henry Hen-ry Ketchie summarizes the scope of the program for one national forest: "On the Dixie we have large are&j of nonstocked and poorly stocked timber land. In view of the estimates of future demand for timber, we must get this vast understocked acreage into production and keep it pro-, ductive. Fortunately we have two alternatives. One is to pro-1 vide ground conditions favorable for natural regeneration of de- slrable species. The other is to I plant Good Seed Crop j During the past 10 years we have had limited cone crops in our ponderosa pine stands. However, How-ever, In 1958, Ranger John Strang at Clrclevllle was able to collect 80 bushels of cones from which he extracted 120 pounds of seed. Ranger Jackson Large and Donald Don-ald Cox at Panguitch and Ranger Foyer Olsen at Cedar City, were also able to collect significant amounts, bringing the forest to-, tal to about 200 pounds of seed. Each lot has been labeled and shipped to Boise, Idaho, for storage stor-age until it can be seeded in the nursery seed bed. A pound of cleaned ponderosa pine seed contains con-tains about 9,000 seed. We now have the potential for producing about 1,800,000 ponderosa pine transplants and the seed collection collec-tion program is just getting under un-der way. A great part of our present commercial timber stands are over-mature. The over-age trees are prey to Insects and disease. Our plan is to harvest risk trees from these stands as rapidly as possible to give growth release to the younger, thriftier trees served from cutting and to promote pro-mote establishment of reproduction. reproduc-tion. Ground conditions will be altered al-tered by planned tree marking methods that will create areas of open ground. Logging slash will be piled and burned within thj 1 openings. The soil will bexottt: ' vated with special equipment to reduce competition from brush and to give natural seedlings every chance to survive, i Planting Necessary On burned-over timber lands, or poorly stocked areas and where natural regeneration does not adequately restock cut over lands, we must plant. Experimental Experi-mental planting work within the region during the past 20 years is paying off. Tree planting techniques, tech-niques, planting equipment, and methods of caring for transplant stock during shipment now makes it reasonable to expect from 90 per cent to 100 per cent survival of transplanted stock. To approach such results, plantings plant-ings should be done within 100 miles and within 1000 feet of the elevation of the source of the seed. For this reason, states Staff Officer Ketchie, we need seed from parent trees on or close to the area to be planted. It will be three years before significant amounts cf transplant stock are available. Best survival surviv-al comes from little trees that have spent the past two years in the seed bed and one year in the transplant bed. Meanwhile, we are modernizing our planting equipment and preparing planting plant-ing areas for the big job ahead." |