This article is going to be about a typical Irish forestry plantation throughout its life span. Although we could go into a retrospective about Irish forestry in general, it is well-known that up until the last few decades Irish forestry as a commercial operation has not been very successful. Now, fortunately Irish forestry accounts for about 10% of the total land area of the country. This means that we have a better chance of removing a lot of the carbon dioxide from our atmosphere and increasing the amount of oxygen that we breathe. It also means that we have a renewable energy resource. Many Irish businessmen are becoming involved in producing commercial Irish forestry plantations in order to make use of this renewable energy resource in the form of biomass wood chips.
The Irish forestry site begins with the preparation of the ground itself. Once the land has been fenced in order to protect you from encroaching animals, the ground will be prepared with a mechanical digger, scraping off the larger vegetation, digging drainage ditches, and making nouns which will be the home of the new trees. The new trees arrive on the site after spending a couple of years in a tree nursery. They will then be planted into the mounds. These two factors will give the tree an added advantage of a height over the competing vegetation once that competing vegetation begins to regrow.
The forestry site will then be left to its own devices for between 14 and 20 years. Nothing needs to be done to the forest until the first thinning process. This first thinning process involves removing weak, damaged, or misshapen trees. This allows the remaining trees, the stronger trees, to have a much bigger percentage of the available nutrients. It also gives the remaining trees more light. A further thinning may be carried out between 10 and 15 years after the first thinning process. This eventually leads to just one third of the original tree population remaining. But these trees will be good timber and when the Forest is eventually clear felled the best possible timber will be extracted.