Posted on 05/30/2021 6:49:50 AM PDT by deport
There is a saying among some farmers in the Carolina Sandhills: “A man would have to be a fool to cut down a longleaf pine.”
It’s not because the gangly-limbed tree is particularly beautiful. The pine doesn’t have a magnolia’s flowers or an oak’s shade.
He could get $4,000 an acre for clear-cutting his mature longleaf pines for timber. Or, he said, he could earn $1,200 an acre collecting pine needles from the same trees — every year.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
good to see you, deport. thanks for posting.
Explains all the pine trees in northwest Florida. Even the creek bottoms have bright white sandy soil.
PLEASE do not link to pay-sites.
ML/NJ
My mother in law lived in the Country Club of NC in Pinehurst. Landscapers came in daily with huge trucks of needles to scatter. Residents are retired and quite well off. I never knew though that these needles were so popular. We visited for 20+ years.
We had lots of them in northern Wisconsin...
My azaleas love pine straw.
Explains all the pine trees in northwest Florida. Even the creek bottoms have bright white sandy soil.
Agree. They grow like weeds around here.
Pine needles very popular landscaping ground cover in the southeast U.S.. Lived in south west Ohio (Cincinnati area) and mulch was the big deal in that part of the U.S.. The landscaping companies would have small mountains of it piled up and ready to go each spring by late March.
I clicked on the link, and read the entire article.
It was not a pay required site.
I once lived in a small city in the mountains above 7K feet which had a huge fire. A resident I knew happened to rake up all the pine needles in her yard the day before the fire. Her house was the only one left on the block afterwards.
Many major news sites are putting their content behind paywalls. If you add “outline.com/” before the link (including http but not the quotations) it will allow you to read the article without any ads and subscription notifications
Used to tell my neighbor not to buy any more pine straw bales at Home Depot. He can rake mine up for free!
I read most of it when it flipped to sign-up only. Maybe I’m a slow reader?
azaleas like oak leaves too.
I live near the coast an hour south of Tampa, Florida.
In my neighborhood people are cutting down the slash pines that used to cover my neighborhood.
It is also a common practice to cut off the lower limbs. I believe that that practice makes the tree more likely to get blown over in a hurricane. People with money can be very destructive.
I planted four seedlings in my large backyard that are now about thirty to forty feet tall.
I often use the needles as mulch after chopping the needles up with a lawnmower.
The pine cones are a large and plentiful problem.
Pine needles are a great mulch, but they are not recommended in the Western US because of fire if you live anywhere close to woods or fields.
Dry pine mulch in flowerbeds around your house when a wildfire starts sending burning embers ahead of the flames will burn your house. They burn very vigorously and they are far easier to ignite in comparison to wood mulch.
Not much can grow through it!
I never knew. I always thought those large swaths of pine trees were there to keep the sand from blowing into the ocean. Ha Ha.
I learned my “something new” early this morning.
Thanks for posting that article.
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