384 THE BOOK OF THE LANDED ESTATE. 



Young plantations of larch and pine, under ordinary circumstances, 

 should be ready for a first thinning when from six to ten years old. This 

 depends entirely upon the soil and situation in which they are grown. 

 If the locality is warm and sheltered, and the soil good, the trees will of 

 course grow faster, and will crowd upon each other sooner than when 

 the situation is exposed, so that no time can be laid down beforehand 

 as to the precise year in which any plantation will require thinning. 

 This should be done whenever the trees begin to indicate a tendency to 

 interfere with each other. 



We very often find young plantations left unthinned until the trees 

 are so crowded that all the side branches are completely dead, and then 

 a pretty severe thinning is given; but instead of being thinned gradually, 

 a great number are taken out at a time, and at long intervals ; and the 

 consequence is, that the trees receive a sudden check, from which they 

 do not recover afterwards, and the growth made by them is very small. 



The only way to keep plantations in thorough good condition, and to 

 take the greatest income from them over the whole period of their exist- 

 ence, and at the same time to leave the greatest amount of value of crop 

 on the ground, is to commence thinning them whenever they may appear 

 to require this, and that period is whenever the trees indicate that they 

 are interfering with one another too much. I say too much, as in my ex- 

 perience I find there is a certain amount of crowding required to check 

 the trees from growing" too freely to branches. It is necessary to keep 

 them at a certain distance, so as to check the branches from overgrowth, 

 but not so crowded as to kill them. If the branches are allowed to 

 grow freely and without being checked in any way, the result will be 

 that the tree will grow larger in branches and not so much in stem as 

 would be the case if the growth of the branches had been checked. 



It is a difficult thing to state the exact distance at which trees should 

 be kept ; it must be learned by practice and experience. 



At each thinning it should be kept in mind to leave as much as possi- 

 ble the strongest plants on the ground, and to remove the weaker ones. 



In fact, in thinning any plantation, this should be done on the prin- 

 ciple of removing gradually and from time to time the weaker portion 

 of the crop and the least promising trees, and of leaving at each time of 

 thinning the strongest and healthiest, and those which are most likely 

 to become valuable on the ground, keeping them at such distances 

 apart as will not overcrowd the trees. 



If plantations are not attended to in the way of thinning, the trees 

 become tall, weak, drawn-up poles, and are matured before they are 

 of any useful size. When plantations are allowed to go on from year 

 to year for a long period without being thinned, they become in such 



