By Maddie Eberly, Low-Impact Forestry Specialist
My spouse, Johnny, and I bought our first home last year and with it came nearly 8 acres of forested land. I am a forester and botanist. Johnny is a farmer and agricultural weed ecologist. Our individual knowledge pools and curiosity have merged into a great resource as we navigate this new adventure. For Johnny, his focus has been on building up our garden and food-growing space close to the house. For the woods, he hopes to support landscape conservation as well as build walking trails while maintaining aesthetics. For myself, my focus has been on learning the land — trying to find remnants of past land uses and the ever-elusive boundary monuments. I hope to manage the present invasive species, implement some timber stand improvements, harvest balsam tips and otherwise forage, promote biodiversity, monitor wildlife, build trails, and engage with local communities focused on forest conservation.
Our home was built not so long ago in the year 2011. The owner cleared a small amount of the land, less than an acre, for building the house and built a wide trail, likely for riding an ATV and hunting. A small clearing along the old trail produced dozens of shotgun shells. Presumably, this was the owner’s personal gun range for sighting their deer rifle for hunting season. The first owner of our home passed away, and the house and land changed hands.

The next owners, previous to us, were interested in working with the woods and remarking boundaries but lacked the time. During their time on the land, the cut space around the house regrew. When we arrived on the land, young maples, ash, hawthorn, oak, balsam fir, red elderberries, and white pine scattered the hill we hoped to convert into our garden. A smattering of shrubby honeysuckles, common buckthorns, and coltsfoot filled gaps in the diverse young forest.
Red oaks, Quercus rubra, are the giants in our forest. They somehow found strong rootholds in the shallow soils coating prolific granite slabs. I’ll forever be amazed by their strength and stability. The majority of the land had been heavily cut, likely years before the house was built, when the land was still part of a larger parcel. Among the oak giants kept safe from the high grade by waterways and slopes stands just one large white pine atop Oak Hill. The forest is dense with balsam fir regeneration, some patches thicker than others. We have a few young sugar maples scattered throughout, among other species ideal for timber or firewood. We will favor these young trees with hopes they will someday meet maturity and permit us to tap them for sap.
The hidden gem in our woodlands is a stand of enormous, mature brown ash, Fraxinus nigra, in a wet area. Brown ash is a culturally important tree to Wabanaki people — both for basketry and the creation story. Our land only includes a thin slice from this stand. The longevity of ash on our landscape is uncertain as emerald ash borer spreads through Maine; the fatality of these trees is nearly certain. However, while the ash still stands, we are taking as much time as we can to appreciate its beauty and function in the local ecology. We let the Ash Protection Collaboration Across Wabanakik (APCAW) lab at the University of Maine know where the ash trees are and counted the number of trees producing seed — ash trees can have three different sexual presentations. If a basket maker contacts us through APCAW, we’d allow them harvesting access to the trees within the boundaries of our land — and perhaps ask the neighbors if they’d like to join in granting permission on their land. Next year, we hope to collect seeds and pass them along to APCAW.
The ATV trail from the first owner of the house connected to a once well-used ATV trail passing through the back end of the woodlot, now blocked by our neighbor’s posted land. The relics of the trail have proven quite useful to us — that combined with the still well-traveled deer trails. Thus far, we have built a bit over a quarter mile of trail, only halted by a handful of blowdowns we have yet to find the time to tackle. Our initial trail was far too steep if we ever hoped to use it for cross-country skiing or to have our family members explore the land with ease. So, Johnny built us a shortcut that is far kinder to the knees. Unfortunately, this is how we discovered that we have an ideal habitat for ground hornets. We let them be in their log of choice and redirected the shortcut through another section of woods.
We placed a game camera where the walking trail crosses a small brook. We’ve moved it up and down stream over the last year and have been astonished by the diversity of wildlife. At the stream we have seen fishers, weasels, racoons, a bobcat, deer, mice, various squirrels and songbirds, chipmunks, coyotes, foxes, crows, owls, hawks, the neighbor’s cats and dogs, and, to our awe-struck surprise, a black bear. While exploring in the snow last winter, we found snowshoe hare tracks and scat, and the remnants of a grouse kill. At the house, we have been keeping track of the birds we see and hear. A barred owl is one of our more regular visitors. We’ve seen coyotes and porcupines wandering through the strip of woods outside our living room. When we roast marshmallows over campfires, the fishers cry into the night, accompanied by the occasional scuffle in the woods. I can’t think of anything more magical.
The acreage of our land is too small to sustainably depend upon it for firewood as our only source, but we plan on harvesting supplemental wood in the future. We have utilized downed trees to build the edges of our garden and felled a red oak to cultivate shiitake and lion’s mane mushroom logs. We harvested our own holiday tree last year and shared another with a nearby friend. We collected balsam tips to sew sachets as gifts. We found a couple patches of golden chanterelles and another of black trumpets. Already, the land has given us so much, and we hope to return the favor through timber stand improvement, remediation of past dumping sites, removal of introduced plants, plantings of species favored for assisted migration, and so much more. It’s been an adventure up here on Oak Hill, and we are excited to embark on our next year!
This article originally appeared in the winter 2024-2025 issue of The Maine Organic Farmer & Gardener.