Family Forest® Flooring
Project
Family
Forest® flooring continues to flourish! Our first batch was very
well received, and customers have been raving about the quality and
beauty of their hardwood floors built with wood from healthy, local,
beautiful, productive Vermont forests. Our second batch of flooring
includes 10,000 square feet of beech, ash, cherry, red oak, sugar
maple, and red maple flooring.
Several customers have opted for our Northern Hardwood Forest
Floor™, a mix of fine-grained woods from the dominant
members of the Northern Hardwood Forest community—sugar maple,
American beech, and yellow birch. These floors are as beautiful, diverse,
and richly hued as the forests they came from.
Another mixed-species flooring line is in the works—the Clayplain
Forest Floor™
,
a mix of more distinctively grained woods from trees common to the
Clayplain Forest community—ash, hickory, and oak. The beauty
of Family Forest® flooring is that customers can design their
own floors from what the local forests have sustainably yielded. Customers
may opt for a single-species floor, or one that mixes grains and hues
of their favorite local hardwood species.
We are growing Family Forest® Flooring to become Vermont’s
Conservation Brand™. Customers buying this wood know
that the trees come from healthy, local Vermont forests. They know
that value-adding is done locally to the maximum extent possible.
They know the conservation story behind the wood, and so are directly
connected with the forest community that grew their floor.
The flooring project, by design, involves many landowners, consulting
foresters, loggers, truckers, and secondary wood product manufacturers.
David Brynn, who coordinates the project for Vermont Family Forests,
jokes that steering the process sometimes seems like herding cats.
“It’s a community-based, forest conservation initiative,
if there ever was one.”
Family Forest® flooring is available through Vermont Family Forests
in Bristol. Call us at 802-453-7728 or e-mail David at david@familyforests.org
to set up an appointment at our office in Bristol to see a beautiful,
finished sample of mixed-species flooring.
From Forest to Flooring
The wood from Batch 2 came from Middlebury College’s Crystal
Brook Lot in Ripton and Vermont Land Trust’s Little Hogback
Community Forest Lot in Monkton. Logging operations have been completed,
and both forests look superb. Steve Weber, Middlebury College’s
forester, was very involved with the Crystal Brook sale last winter.
It shows. The forest has been cultivated with exceptional care. Snags
and den trees are sprinkled throughout the forest, tops are neatly
lopped, and residual trees have almost no nicks or scrapes from the
logging. Middlebury College proud used some of the flooring in its
own Hillcrest Project and many others are enjoying these high qaulity
floors from healthy local forests. You can too!
Bill Torrey logged the Little Hogback Community Forest. It, too, looks
superb. Bill used his new Deutz Fahr Tractor and Hardy forwarder to
carry the logs out of the woods instead of skidding them. The impacts
on the forest were minimal. As an added bonus, Bill reports that his
fuel demands have been cut nearly in half, another indication of the
value of replacing skidders with small-scale forwarders.
We are now working closely with the Vermont Land Trust to identify
additional lands managed in compliance with Vermont Family Forest’s
management standards and to bring those lands into our certified pool
of well-managed forests. Collaboration and high quality work are hallmarks
of Vermont forest conservation.
