Loblolly pine

And, you know, all the way up here in Virginia, we're...

You know, we're at the northern range of Loblolly Pine.

Right.

And so one of my favorite spacings in the study area now, which is kind of a perfect area, is an eight by 20, which is 270 trees per acre.

We could find a sheltered canyon here in central Texas where there's spring fed water, where there's seeps coming out of the walls so that the soil doesn't get too dry so that we can replicate the conditions of Yunnan, maybe have more complex soil structure, like maybe some more silt and some more sand rather than just clay like you would get in some other areas.

We plant the Yunnan Pine, we plant Loblolly, we plant Penis Remota, we plant Afghan Pine, we plant- Afghan Kush.

We plant Shortleaf Pine, we plant Longleaf Pine, and we inoculate the soil with all of the, we establish these plants, we inoculate the soil with this specific species.

We see, and we just see what comes up at the base of these trees.

And so driving through the Southeast, uh, you know, lo- longleaf is what we think about as being sort of the, the fire species, the woodland, the conservation-type species, the, the ecological value.

Loblolly is, you know, largely the economic species.

Yeah.

It's been planted all over the place, um, for the purpose of growing timber, growing fiber.

Today is the first anniversary of this podcast, Everybody Has Something to Say.

One whole year! Can you believe it? And here I am, sitting at a new kitchen table in a beautiful Charlotte area of North Carolina, looking out at these magnificent loblolly pines.

You know, the pine trees have a sacred connection to the sun in my spiritual understandings, and I've always regarded the sun as one of my elders.

Sitting here looking at them, I feel something I haven't felt in quite some time: peace.

Those are really hard to come by.

Loblolly.

But now a Loblolly is working just as...

I mean, so but the one thing that all of them have in f- in common, they're soft and they're sappy, and so it, and cedars are not.

I mean, they have a little bit, but not very much.

We're putting a white pine tree in a place that it doesn't exist, and the deer love it, and so don't be afraid of going and finding a white pine somewhere-

Yep

... or a Loblolly or a Scotch pine.

It grew up in the open.

Loblolly pines don't self-prune very well.

Here's what that means.

Loblolly pines hold onto their lower branches very readily.

And because of that, They can easily develop splits, and some of those limbs can get too big for their britches, and you get limbs breaking off.

That tree probably needs, it's not too old, it's probably much younger than you think.

But it's at a stage when it is quite possible to actually begin to control the growth of that tree so that even though it's a loblolly and even though it's susceptible to problems, you can do the right pruning and reduce the problems that can occur because those limbs get too big for their britches.

So just a thought there.