CHAPTER XXII 



THE WOOD LOT 



IF you have a bit of woods on your little farm, take care 

 of it. By intelligent thinning you can make an average 

 income of five dollars per acre from ordinary second growth 

 wild woods. The cord wood, barrel hoops, fence posts, and 

 so on will decrease your expenses, while the timber will in- 

 crease in value. That lot is the place to start your boy as 

 a forester. 



Instructions how to treat the trees can be obtained from 

 your State Forestry Department or from the National 

 Forest Service at Washington : the care of growing timber 

 is a big subject and requires study, but don't sell your stand- 

 ing timber without their advice. Forestry can hardly be 

 made to pay on a small lot with hired labor or hired teams, 

 and you must not pay much for your wood lot, else 

 interest and taxes will eat up the returns. 



To be of high quality, timber must be, to a considerable 

 proportion of its height, free of limbs, which are the cause 

 of knots ; it must be tall ; and it must not decrease rapidly 

 in diameter from the butt to the top of the last log. In a 

 dense stand of timber there is very great competition for 

 sunlight among the individual trees, with the result that 

 height growth is increased. Trees in crowded stands are 

 taller than those in uncrowded stands of the same age. 

 When the trees are crowded so that sunlight does not reach 



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