Torres Reforestation planted roughly 8,000 trees on O’Neill Pine Company lands in the Chehalis area on Thursday.
While the family-owned timber company typically plants after harvest years, this year’s planting was to supplement plantations where a significant number of trees had died due to a problem with the nursery stock and vole problems.
“So it was not a typical year but we were still putting trees in the ground. We regard those trees as our babies, we kind of mourn when we come back out and see (that they died),” said company President Richard Pine. “There’s nothing like the thrill of going back out 10 years later and saying, ‘we got those trees planted and look at them now, they’re 20 feet tall, they’re going to grow and reach for the sky and they’re going to be magnificent creations.’ There’s nothing quite like it.”
Approximately 3,400 of the trees planted on Thursday were Willamette Valley ponderosa pines, which were once a dominant species in Southwest Washington but are now mostly found on the Oregon side of the Columbia River, according to Pine. “We’ve planted quite a bit of them and we’re hoping to re-establish them as a viable tree on this side of the river,” he said.
For more information on O’Neill Pine Company, visit http://www.opineco.com/.
