Harvesting Timber andGinseng Sweet Spots

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American Veneer Company was formed with the idea of blending forestry andginseng. One of the key elements is the proper light in the woods. Ginseng is a shadeloving plant and over cutting your woods is just as poor a practice as under cutting.Ginseng seeds are expensive, the labor and materials necessary for successfully growingboth have to come from someplace. The proper raising of veneer quality timbers will helpoffset some, if not all of these expenses. A veneer quality tree is almost always at leastdouble the value of a lumber quality tree.

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Over the years I have worked as a professional timber cruiser inconjunction with American Veneer Company.  Walked a lot of woods, had the opportunityto look at a lot of different stands of timber.  When you harvest mature timber outof the woods on a select cutting type basis, you're opening up holes into the canopy.  Nature many times opens up these type of holes in the woods.  Trees get blownover, struck by lightening, etc.  When you come back in and you see that the area hasfilled with all kinds of nice young saplings, this is caused by a process known ascompusing.  When you've cut a tree down, the root structure is still intact, and itwill send up saplings.  Most of the time in these cut areas, the saplings come in waytoo thick, and this slows down the development process of the timber, but it creates SweetSpots out there in the woods, open holes in the canopy that sunlight can get through.  These Sweet Spots make natural places to plant ginseng.  They also makeexcellent places to plant trees like walnut, cherry, white oak.  These youngseedlings are 2 and 3 year old seedlings and are 2 or 2 and a half feet high.  Whenthey're planted in the spring of the year they go up, straight up, trying to get to thetop of the canopy of the existing forest.   This gives them a 2 to 3 yearhead start over the saplings that would normally come up out of the root structure,consequently shading back those trees.  Makes an excellent place to plant youngsaplings where you want real nice long, clean bodied logs, no cat faces on them, and niceuniform growth.  This is an open area in the canopy that you create when you harvestmore mature trees usually about 90 feet across.  You can regulate the area. Many times the woods has already been cut over.  Figure out a rough circle 90 feetacross in diameter.  Harvest the trees that are in that area to create a sweetspot. 

Over harvesting any woods at any stage of development is alwaysa mistake in hardwoods. It’s not a mistake under different circumstances growing fordifferent reasons. But if you’re gonna grow veneer quality timber, good forestrypractices are an absolute must. Now here I recommend very highly the Stewardship IncentiveProgram. Now this is a government program and I realize "government involvement - nottoo cool", but this is a terrific guideline. I have studied a lot of these reportsand still do. This does not obligate you, but it gives you something to follow, and itmakes real good sense.  Some areas there’s even up to $10,000 federal subsidyavailable. That’s up to an individual. Here in Michigan, we’ve contacted theDepartment of Soil Conservation and they are sending  me a copy of it. It varies fromone state to another. It’s just like your ginseng laws. Every state seems to have adifferent set of rules. Somebody out there ought to gather them all up and find themsomeplace where I can put them on the web site where people could look them up.

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Proper light management for growing ginseng blends extremelywell with good forestry practices. Sometimes where a tree is placed, the value as shade,can be more valuable than the commercial value as lumber. This is where you need to workwith good people. It is unfortunate that the timber industry has some people who don'tnecessarily like to play by the rules. You need a forester in there that you can explainto about what you are doing. Now the stewardship incentive program blends extremely wellwith the growing of ginseng.  It does not obligate you.

Fell your trees north or south whenever feasibly possible.It’ll make the maximum amount of use of that direct sunlight. Where yourexposure’s in there, one of those big trees comes down and opens up a nice littlepath down through there. It’ll break some saplings when it comes down, that’s afact, but most instances these saplings are dwarf timber, they’re only maybe acouple, 4, 5, 6 inches in diameter, and yet they’re 45, 50 years old.

When working into a woods and you have merchantable timber, youcan finance your ginseng venture from your woodlot. If you have a woods, I would put my"Glacial Gold" ginseng seeds in first. Get your seed bed started first, then youcan recoup your financial investment from the harvest of your timber. That timber marketis good and has been good in southern Michigan. I do a lot of work with VanKeulen andWinchester. I have been associated with those people for thirty years now. They ownBuskirk Lumber Company and they have affiliated sawmills all through the hardwood, ginsengarea. You have local mills, check with you neighbors. Understand who you are doingbusiness with. If you let some indiscriminate loggers into your woods, they can put youout of the ginseng business in the blink of an eye. Correctly harvesting your timber isimportant, both for good forestry and the shade factor to grow ginseng. Listed below arethe basic requirements usually necessary to facilitate the moving of the equipment andmanpower necessary to do a competent job in Southern Michigan. However, if plantingginseng is involved we have a lot more flexibility.