Scotch pine

[BuckSutherland]

I planted these scotch pines in 2018. They were given no care, except to have some branches placed over them to try and protect them from browse. I think in 2019, I put a cage on them and nothing else. In 2020, I put a crappy fabric mat on them. without mulch. In 2022, I redid the fabric mats and added mulch. 2021-2023 were horribly dry years for trees. with 2 extreme drought years. In 2024, it has finally rained and now these guys are fully established with good weed mats and really taking off.

I have about 15 of these planted along a travel corridor. I hope someday I will be able to take the cage off, but it wont be anytime soon. These scotch pines have handled my sticky heavy clay quite well. They have really responded to the abundant rainfall this year. Red pine seems to have issues in my heavy soil. I have scotch pine and austrian pine to go along with a bunch of white pine and a few reds. For the most part white pine grows the best followed closely by scotch and austrains.

 

[Bill]

I wish just one of the conifers I've planted survived. Those look like they're going to take off!

 

[bigboreblr]

They look good. Mulch is worth it's weight.... Young confiers at my home are doing alot better with mulch. Been putting in mostly spruce.

Got a 15ft of so scotch pine in the middle of one of my food plots at camp. Just can't cut it down. Got to be more than one on the 600 acres, I haven't seen another one yet though. Might be a lone survivor on a remediation site. Spot is leved out and a drainage ditch dug. IT's an old log landing, they usually do little to nothing to log landings usually.

 

[Jerry-B-WI]

What's in the cage next to the Scotch pine in picture #3?

 

[BuckSutherland]

What's in the cage next to the Scotch pine in picture #3?

A little raspberry, and a bunch of ROD and some misc weeds and stuff in those cages around there. It was a native patch so I removed some stuff and left mostly dogwood and tried to install a weed mat. I think I have 4 cages stacked around a big clump there. I tried to mulch them a bit with some woods mulch and threw a little 19-19-19 on them.

This is what it looked like this spring when I tried to clean it up. I might redo the whole clump with one big cage. They were well browsed before I caged them.