Oak trees are one of the most valuable trees you can have on your property from a timber as well as wildlife standpoint.  Everywhere oaks grow, landowners want to know how to grow good quality oaks and how to regenerate new ones.

Here in Pennsylvania, we have huge areas of oak-dominated forest.  In the higher elevations, the forest is mostly what we call a northern hardwood forest type, where oaks are rare.

The oak forests are the result of massive clearcutting in the late 1800s to the 1930s.  Behind the clearcuts, there were many fires started by locomotives and other sources.  Also, there were very few deer since people had mostly wiped out the deer with market hunting. Invasive plants were less prevalent.  This is important to know because, in order to regenerate a new oak forest, we need to duplicate these conditions.

Decades of high-grading, overpopulation of deer and the introduction of foreign pests and invasive plants have made growing an oak forest very difficult.

To grow oak trees on your land you need

• close to full sunlight reaching the forest floor
• ground disturbance – either mechanical or with fire – in a good seed year
• elimination of invasive plants such as fern, striped maple and foreign invasive plants
• greatly reduced deer numbers or a fence to keep them out of the area long enough to get the trees above browse height

In this blog I will go over these points in more detail.

Benefits of Growing Oak Trees

Oaks or the genus Quercus, have about 90 species growing in the U.S.  They generally fall into two categories, the red oak group and the white oak group.  Different oak species are adapted to different soil, climate and moisture conditions, from swampy soils to high and dry ridgetops.

The oaks are a great group of species. They not only provide beauty and shade.  The acorns produces by oaks are eaten by any herbivore found in the wild.

The wood is very strong, providing some of the highest quality and most beautiful hardwoods for building finishes and furniture.

How to Get Oak Trees to Grow on Your Property

There are many tactics to growing oaks, most of which involve natural regeneration.  In this video, I explain how I am marking a shelterwood timber harvest to allow enough sunlight into the stand for oak seedlings to grow quickly.

This site is what is known as oak/heath forest type.  The soils are very acidic and the understory is full of blueberry and often mountain laurel.  This is a fire adapted forest type.  In other words, these species love to be burned.

If a good hot fire went through this stand, blueberry and oak trees would sprout back prolifically, regenerating a new oak forest.  However, if there isn’t enough light getting to the seedlings due to a closed canopy, like we have here, oak seedlings stall and deer can eat the terminal growth and buds.

This situation will not grow new trees, but create a brushy deformed tree.  This stand is also full of birch and beech saplings, which shade and crowd the oaks out.  These species need to be greatly reduced for oaks to thrive.  They grow much faster and over-shadow and out-compete the oak seedlings quickly.

Often, between deer eating the seedlings and ferns, striped maple or stiltgrass taking over the understory, it is impossible to grow oaks.  When oak prices are up, there is tremendous pressure on them from sawmills.

Usually, these mills don’t give any thought to what comes after they high-grade harvest a stand.  Most of the time, the landowner is left with no seed trees, invasive plants and no timber value.

Every harvesting operation should include a plan for regenerating  a new stand of oak.  This may include herbicide applications and deer exclusion fencing.  It also should address on-going TSI or Timber Stand Improvement.

As the trees regenerate, the landowner should follow up with “weeding” operations by finding the oaks and killing birch, beech and maple or other faster growing undesirable species.

Another way to get oaks to grow where there are no seed trees is to cut whats there and plant them.  In this video, I discuss planting oak trees into a recently clear-cut pine plantation.

Conclusion

In conclusion, oak trees are some of the most beautiful and valuable trees you can have.  They are extremely important to wildlife, especially now that out beech and chestnut trees have been devastated by foreign diseases.

It is one of the few mast producing trees left.  Good forest stewardhship requires that we reproduce and preserve this group of species.

I will leave you with this one last video that shows What it Takes to Grow Oak Trees.