advantage to reclaim these barren areas which will never be 

 fit for farming and are the natural home of the trees. What- 

 ever land is suitable and which will return a greater revenue 

 if used for agriculture should be so used, but the vast amount 

 of land which is too poor for such a purpose should be used 

 for the purpose that nature intended it should. 



The process of putting the trees back into their natural 

 home is not difficult. 



Different methods of reforestation are in use and a short 

 description of each will be given. 



Starting with the seed; the seed of our native conifiers is 

 collected the latter part of September and the fore part of 

 October before the trees have begun to release their seed. 

 The seed is located in the cones of the trees. 



It takes these cones two years to mature on the pines and 

 they occur in abundance only every four or five years. If 

 these cones are picked too soon and the seed is not ripe it 

 will be no good and if they are not prcked soon enough they 

 will open and let the seed drop out. This makes it neces- 

 sary to collect the cones at the proper time, and to have the 

 areas located where the seed will be found. Some parts of 

 the state will have a good seed crop while in other parts 

 there will be no seed. 



There are several methods of selecting seed; one is by 

 climbing the trees and pulling the cones off with hooks. This 

 is a slow method unless the trees are heavily loaded, and 

 works well only with white pine. This year at the forest sta- 

 tion at Cloquet, the white pine were loaded with cones and 

 it was possible for one man to collect from 4 to 5 bushels 

 by this method. 



Another method used in the collection of cones is to gather 

 them from the hiding places where squirrels have stored 

 them for winter. Sometimes as many as 10 bushels will be 

 found in these squirrel caches as they are called, but this is 

 rare. The cones found in these squirrel caches are always 

 the best as the squirrels seem to know which cones contain 

 the best seed although all the cones look alike. 



The last and best method where it is possible to do so, is 

 to gather them from trees as they are felled in some lumber 



