What's up everyone, welcome back to the Epic Gardening Podcast. Adam Wallace is back, he's the natural resource manager for Sierra Nevada at the Mills River North Carolina location.

Adam you mentioned that you have quite a bit of acreage out there, I think you said 220 acres or so and of course with that comes some forestry right and I'm curious that we've never really talked too much about forest management so I suppose perhaps starting off with just a quick definition why to manage a forest what's the purpose there.

Well you know there's no requirements there's nowhere that says if you own a good chunk of forest you have to manage it the forest has done quite well for itself before before humans came along to manage them but if you if you do have a woodlander whether it's a you know a small plot or you know a 90 acre tracked and if there is any interest in in a direction which you want to push that land to go you have to have a forest management plan.

Here at Sierra Nevada Brewing Company we manage our forest for wildlife habitat and increase biodiversity and that has a that's a little bit different from a traditional someone who has a woodland who's looking to cash in on logging in 20 or 30 years.

So we do a lot of fun things with that how did it look when you guys first bought the property what what sort of trees were there like I guess from like a health check perspective like how was the forest looking.

Well there we actually bought the property from a there two different sections of the property the front 80 I'd say 80 acres of woodland we were lucky enough to wear the previous owners had a fantastic management plan in place and they followed it and you and you can tell by walking through the forest here it is healthy it's uneven age stand it's a healthy mix of species in there and we were super fortunate.

We were fortunate to have someone before us that put some effort into caring for for that land the portion and the back part of the property is a little bit different state of affairs.

It has been logged I would say sometime in the last 50 years and and anytime there's a disturbance that large there's just so many things that can go wrong in there.

You got you got lots of invasive species that will come in and kind of take over if it's not managed properly afterwards so there there is a lot of work to be done on that on that portion of the property.

And I think a lot of people can sympathize with that because there's much of the of the land in the United States has been disturbed to some degree and oftentimes what comes back in its place are exotic invasives.

And they can be a tour to deal with.

Yeah I can only imagine I think I just haven't had to deal with that out here we don't first of all we don't really have forests but even if we did I wouldn't even have one large enough to even have to consider most of the technique.

So I suppose the next question would be you've been at this location for you said about seven or eight years or so how has your management of the forest sort of shaped it and what of you what were some of the big things that you did.

So in my eight years here that is like not even a blink of an eye to to the forest so it's one thing to understand that the scale the time scale that forests operate in are so huge that don't expect to see any drastic changes in a lifetime but know that you're set in the stage for this forest to do what you want it to do.

But so here we have done some things oftentimes people will remove any standing dead trees for firewood or for safety reasons and if if this tree does not pose any risk to falling on structure or or or road or anything around here we leave those standing those are actually very important for wildlife.

Standing dead trees can they offer cavities for nesting birds they offer as that tree is breaking down it is just a huge food source for birds and animals alike because they are inundated with insects and funguses that are breaking down the tissues of that tree.

So each individual tree itself becomes its own biome and if you eliminate all of those from your forest you're really removing a large segment of possible wildlife habitat.

Yeah that's probably something that I suppose would be somewhat counter intuitive to people but it does come to play in the normal annual vegetable garden as well we had a guest on a long time ago that changed my mind on it.

You know at the time and it was this whole idea of you know when fall comes your annuals die off you've got a bunch of plant debris to clear out and perhaps toss into the compost and of course some of that should go like your big tomato vines or or whatever but you know she was saying don't clear off 100% and just leave bare empty beds because you've decimated any potential environment for some of those beneficials that that will over winter it's you're not going to get anything breaking down into the top layer of that soil and it just sort of seems like.

I suppose the annual vegetable garden could be viewed as a very very micro forest in that sense.

That's exactly right I like that analogy because it's pretty much it's that's what it is it's a giant garden that takes many many years to create.

Yeah yeah what sort of goals I guess you said you know like you said it's a blink of an eye even eight years let alone a human lifetime is still not too much time in the eyes of a forest.

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