There is an opportunity here. Mill the lot and plant some other varieties and be the only property with desirable trees in 20 years plus some cash in the pocket?
All of my ash trees died last year. I've only dropped 3 of them, there's probably 20 more still standing. The largest 2 are 30+ inches and are within house distance, so I need to get both of those down this winter. Luckily ash trees typically lose their smaller limbs first when they die, so it's not likely that the trunk will just fall over, but better safe than sorry. For some reason, my neighbor had a 12" ash that completely survived the EAB infestation. AND THEY TOOK IT DOWN LAST MONTH!!!! From what I can tell, they widened part of their driveway and they must have been worried that the roots were close enough to do damage to the blacktop. But it was sad to see one of the last surviving Ash trees in the county be killed after it somehow lucked out with the EAB.
It has arrived here and I am not happy. About 25 years ago I converted marginal farm land to a wood lot and included about 20% ash in the planting mix to get some quick growth. It has worked and most of my wood lot is now well over 30 feet tall but I wanted to keep some ash in the mix as I thinned it for better sustained growth. Now it looks like I will end up with less variety as I will be thinning virtually all of my ash over the next few years. The county maintenance crews have already been out cutting road side ash less than a mile from my wood lot. I have no idea what they are doing with the wood since it disappears very quickly. Over 100 trees over 24 inches dbh cut along a road and 2 days later there are no remnants of downed wood along that road. Most casual scroungers are not equipped to deal with wood that big or with that much wood. A casual walk through of my wood lot does not show much damage yet but no way can I afford to try to treat 16 acres of ash planted on a 10 foot grid with other species and with 20% being ash. My rough estimate is that I am looking at losses of around 1000 ash, minus what I have lost since planting seedlings, which might be as many as 100.
All the beetle killed ash here is still solid. The beetle damage is just under the bark. However, ants can really make a mess outta the insides of some parts, but I find plenty of solid logs.
