Black Hills Spruce
By Bill Hirst, Tue Jan 10th
Did you know that Black Hills Spruce trees have dark, dark brownbark and dark, dark green needles which are their leaves. Fromafar, it takes surprisingly few of any evergreen tree to appearblack. It takes even fewer of the Black Hills Spruce treestogether to make an apparently black forest. Yes, the BlackForest of Bavaria in Germany is named for it's evergreen trees.One-third of the Black Forest today is Spruce, and Pine treesare close behind at 30%. Evergreen trees are (for)ever green,but none is more deeply, darkly green than mountain area Sprucetrees like the Black Hills Spruce. There are no species ofEuropean Spruce trees named for the Black Forest, but the RockyMountains' Spruce trees which have remained for millions ofyears in the Black Hills were named well. So, guess what percent of the trees covering the Black Hillsare Black Hills Spruce trees? The Ponderosa Pine tree, alsoknown as the Western Yellow Pine tree makes up over threequarters of the area's trees, 76%! Would you believe just 4% ofthe trees in the Black Hills are Black Hills Spruce Trees?Yeesh. Spruce trees are not just valuable as evergreen trees suitablefor rich, year 'round, dark green color from their denseneedle-leaves, and of course, for Christmastime.
One of our customers worked at the Homestake Gold Mine aftergraduating from college. Left over from the 1876 Gold Rush tothe Black Hills of South Dakota, where George Custer wassupposed to chase
away the prospectors bothering the SiouxIndians, but instead tried the opposite and got himself killed,the Homestake Gold mine is still operating today. The mine is agreat tourist attraction, ranking right up there with MountRushmore, Crazy Horse Mountain, the indoor hot springs pool inthe town of, well, Hot Springs. The Homestake Mine has producedmore gold than any other mine in the entire western hemisphere,including the huge open-pit surface mines of Nevada. Guess what species of tree from the forest of the Black hillshas been favored for the timber supports and structures down inthe mine all these 120-odd years ? It was the aptly named BlackHills Spruce, because the Spruce wood is better able to stand upto being constantly bumped and being constantly wet (youwouldn't believe just how wet underground mines are our customertells us) than the far more locally common Ponderosa Pine wood. How about that? If you want to mine your property with anunderground operation, you'll be able to cut down your matureSpruce trees in just 30 years after you plant the seedlings youbought from SeedlingsRus, or maybe just half that time, 15years, if you get 6-foot saplings. You can see other articles bybill at the following links: http://seedlingsrus.com/Soils http://seedlingsrus.com/PlantingTips.html http://www.zone5trees.com/GrowingGrasses.html http://zone5trees.com/PlantingInstructions.html http://seedlingsrus.com/TransplantShock http://www.zone5trees.com/Hedges.html
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