Did you know you can support land conservation by purchasing a “wild grown” holiday tree from Bear Yuba Land Trust?
Helen Crawford and Brent McDermott donated a truckload of beautiful trees harvested from their high elevation property, Clear Creek Preserve.
Choose from white fir for $8/ per foot and red fir or “silver tip” for $10/ per foot (trees above eight feet are $12/ per foot). Stop by the Land Trust office 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. Get them while supplies last!
For more information, contact Laura at 272-5994 x 211 or email laura@bylt.org.
Here’s what Helen says about the trees:
“As you may know, much of the Sierra is over-crowded because of fire suppression and horrible environmental abuses over the last 150 years. We are only removing trees which are being thinned for forest health—not tree health but forest health. The heart of the woods lies in its whole ecology. We are dedicated to this. All of the trees we are cutting are wild and organic. We have an easement on the property to prevent any cutting of trees EXCEPT for forest health.”
Here is an update from Helen on the work being done at Clear Creek Preserve:
Helen Crawford, the same lovely woman who has supplied us with wild grown holiday trees to sell, has this report from Clear Creek Preserve:
“We have been making brush piles for wildlife, sowing native wildflower seeds, thinning trees out of crowded areas, burning slash, and tomorrow —God willing and the creek don’t rise—planting seedlings specifically grown for us from seeds which are from our elevation.
We have ordered Ponderosa, Jeffrey, blister-rust resistant Sugarpine, and Douglas Fir. To get to the point of being able to plant has quite a few steps and A LOT of labor. We have to mark trees to be removed, cut them down and remove the limbs; trees we are leaving standing need to be limbed as high as we can. We especially leave dead snags which are primo-habitat trees. We move cut trees out of the area of planting ( some we leave for habitat but not so many that you cannot re-plant),cut back excessive brush, and build structured burn piles and later cover the slash piles with burn paper; get permits for burning and find a safe time to do it. We have rakes,a burn torch, pitch forks, a water tank backpack for any run away burning.
We have also started restoring the small meadow area and next year will expand it a bit. I can send photos in the future if you want.
We have a beautiful new open area of tree seedlings with wonderful southern exposure where we hope to replace the underrepresented tree species and, of course, create animal habitat. The birds are loving the opened up mountain area and grasses have been showing themselves. We have seen some elderberry provide fruit this year and we hope that can expand naturally once we have more openings.
More ground animals have moved in and we had a red-tail hawk hunting there and I found a skink for the first time. We had a forest raptor diving into a brush pile, probably a sharp-shinned hawk. Did not see the band-tailed pigeons this year but last year I saw them fly over every morning I was there on their way to the oaks on the western ridge.”