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Jul 22, 2023

Tree seedling program helps keep N.C. forests growing

In late June, a news release popped into my inbox that the N.C. Forest Service’s tree seedlings were on sale again . I had seen similar releases over the years and they piqued my interest. The state

In late June, a news release popped into my inbox that the N.C. Forest Service’s tree seedlings were on sale again. I had seen similar releases over the years and they piqued my interest. The state sells seedlings. What is that about?

I followed up and found my way to the Claridge Nursery in Goldsboro, and Bobby Smith of the North Carolina Forest Service, who runs it.

You may have seen the nursery on the way from Raleigh to the beach without knowing it. When the state built the U.S. 70 Bypass past Goldsboro in the middle of the last decade, it ran the highway over part of the land. There it is, if you look quickly, the birthplace of more than 1 billion baby trees over nearly 70 years.

The nursery was established in 1954 because forests are important to North Carolina’s economy. We are a big lumber-producing state. The forest sector overall contributes $35 billion in industry output to the North Carolina economy — forestry, logging, sawmills, pulp and paper and furniture manufacturing.

There is constant discussion about the health and future of North Carolina’s 18.1 million acres of commercial timberland, mostly owned by private individuals and families.

A century of seedlings

Claridge’s goal is to produce from 14 million to 16 million tree seedlings a year. You can buy small quantities, but the big purchasers are forest owners who harvest trees and need to replant.

“We sell in quantities as small as 10 all the way up to quantities as much as a thousand per bag,” says Smith. “For pine trees, people are planting anywhere from 500 to 600 trees per acre.”

The seedlings program dates back a century, at a time of growing awareness of the need for better forestry practices. “In the late 1800s and early 1900s, they were cutting timber as fast as they could, and they weren’t replanting the seedlings,” explains Smith. This was leading to deforestation and erosion problems.

North Carolina became a center of modern forestry. Carl Schenck founded the Biltmore Forest School near Asheville. Julius Hofmann started the forestry school at N.C. State. And Fred Claridge, trained in forestry at Yale, came here in 1925 as assistant state forester and a part-time instructor at N.C. State.

He launched the seedlings program soon after he arrived; 31,000 were shipped the first year. By the mid-1930s, it was producing a million seedlings annually. By 1959, Claridge, by then the state forester, reported that the program had shipped nearly 400 million tiny trees since the mid-’20s. Prices, which ranged from $3.75 to $6 per thousand in the late ‘50s, were covering the costs of production at the four nurseries at Clayton, Goldsboro, Hendersonville and Morganton.

Today, there are two nurseries, the one in Goldsboro, around 45 miles southeast of Raleigh, and one in the mountains of Avery County, the Linville River Nursery, which specializes in Fraser fir seedlings for the state’s substantial Christmas tree industry. The Claridge nursery was originally named for the Little River that runs nearby, and occasionally floods.

More than pines

Smith started out as a nursery assistant in Morganton almost 23 years ago before transferring to Claridge. His 18-employee operation is part nursery and part outdoor research and development lab.

This year, it is growing 57 species. “We don’t just grow pine trees. We grow the majority of your native oaks and hardwoods. We’re growing five different species of native understory grasses.” For example, Claridge is one of the few producers of Atlantic White Cedar.

Smith drove me over to what he called a “mini-forest,” a landscape of trays where pine seedlings were growing. Each tray had 135 cells with baby pine trees growing. But most of the seedlings are “bareroot,” grown in the ground.

For the loblolly pine seedlings — the largest quantity grown at Claridge — the seed comes from the nursery’s orchards. Toward the end of next month, contractors will go up on boom lifts and pick unopened pine cones off the trees and put them in bushel bags. Trees are painted a certain color to indicate their genetic origin.

“When we collect seeds, we collect them by family. We know the seed source origin, we know how cold-tolerant that particular family is, how far north or west we can deploy that family.” Out of around 110-120 acres of orchards, the nursery can get from 2,000 to 2,500 bushels of pine cones annually.

Once picked, the cones will sit in racks until they are ready for the dry kiln, which is like a tobacco barn. “When those cones start to naturally open on their own, we know they’re ready to go in the dry kiln,” says Smith. With some heat, low humidity and good air circulation, the cones will keep opening up. The cones will be fed into a hopper and onto a conveyor, and the open cones will give up their seeds, which will then be bagged up.

But that’s not the end of it. Seeds are sorted by size to make it easier to mechanically plant them. The seed is cleaned up and trash removed. Empty seed is removed.

“Hours and hours and hours of preparation and planning go into planting one seedling,” says Smith.

Without nurseries and carefully raised seedlings, pine cones would open up in the forest and release their seeds. But it would be random and wouldn’t keep up with harvesting as well.

“I was talking to a person one time,” says Smith, “and he was asking about deploying seed for reforestation, versus buying seedlings. And he said, ‘Well, under all these trees, you see baby trees coming up naturally. Why can’t I just do that?’

“I said, ‘Well, you may see 10 or 12 small seedlings coming up, germinating under a tree. But that tree produced thousands upon thousands of seeds. Birds get some. Rodents get some of them. Some of them dry out and don’t germinate.’ What we’re doing is taking that product and maximizing production for all of the seeds. We have mitigated the risk of natural regeneration.”

The nursery’s hardwood seed is collected around the state by Forest Service staff. “We have a huge team-working effort within the Forest Service to produce these seedings,” says Smith. “It’s not just the 18 people that work at Claridge Nursery.”

Research and development

Claridge Nursery also works to improve trees. The N.C. Forest Service belongs to the Tree Improvement Program, an N.C. State-based cooperative of public agencies, university researchers and companies that was founded in 1956 to improve the productivity and resilience of planted forests in the South. Program members are continually monitoring trees in research trials, says Smith. “How fast is it growing? How disease-resistant? How straight? Does it fork? We measure every tree.”

All the data goes back to the tree program at N.C. State, and “a computer model will tell us who the winners are,” and that will influence, say, future generations of loblolly pine, one of the most common trees in the U.S. and, as Smith put it, “the reigning species for lumber production in North Carolina.”

Planting and lifting

Around Thanksgiving, the Claridge operation starts lifting the seedlings — 12 inches tall with a root system that’s 6 inches long — and bagging them up for distribution. The lifting starts slowly, says Smith, and then gets into “heavy lifting” after Christmas. The seedlings can go by UPS, or they can be picked up at distribution centers around the state, at one of the service’s district offices. Or folks can come by the nurseries.

“It’s always best to plant the seedlings immediately after pickup,” says Smith. “The sooner you get that seedling back in the ground, in its environment, it’s going to be happier.”

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