162 



PRACTICAL FOREST MANAGEMENT. 



Thinnings 

 and clean- 

 ings. 



Artificial 

 reproduc- 

 tion. 



places will hardly start before October or "November. Both foiling 

 and export to the coupe lines must, as already pointed out, be 

 finished by 15th April. Only slackness and inefficiency in the 

 divisional management will permit exploitation to continue beyond 

 that date, which means that the coupe cannot be cleaned up and 

 that the workmen and their carts are trampling on the young 

 coppice shoots. 



As the young coppice comes up it must be cleaned by removing 

 inferior species, olimbers,'etc., and this cleaning must be repeated as 

 often as is necessary. In the sixth year in the case of sal coppice 

 the cleaning will be combined with a thinning out of the coppice 

 shoots and in the eleventh year regular thinnings will commence and 

 be carried out at 10 year intervals during the rest of the rotation ; 

 all mention of thinnings in coppice crops is generally omitted from 

 text books. The necessity for thinnings in coppice whether of sal, 

 sissoo or babul has been established and this operation will in 

 future be considered as of equal importance in coppice as in high 

 forest crops and will be carried out at regular intervals. 



In all coppice coupes the question of completing the coppice 

 crop by sowing and planting must be considered. In G-orakhpur 

 sowings of sal have been made before the clear felling but this 

 method has nothing to recommend it and has been given up. 

 Sowings of sal are now made after the clear felling with success, 

 and blanks in the coppice are no longer a source of anxiety. The 

 present routine is to hoe up wide strips (1 chain wide) alternating 

 with untouched strips (i chain wide) ; single lines have been 

 found unsatisfactory, and soil preparation 18'deep is very necessary. 

 Wood found that sal seedlings which developed a root system 

 less than 13" during the first monsoon invariably died, while those 

 whose roots were less than 18" mostly perished, proving the 

 necessity of adequate soil preparation. The question of doing 

 this artificial work along with the cultivation of field crops ha? 

 now been taken up. In Chauga Manga lines are cleared and 

 mulberry weeded out in order to obtain an admixture of sissoo in 



