It is used for furniture, woodenware, and fuel.Minnesota’s forests are breathtaking, especially in autumn when the leaves change color, creating a stunning display of red, orange, and gold. The wood, which is known commercially as soft maple, is light brown, heavy, weak, and close grained. It is light gray on young stems and dark gray and rough on old trees. The fruit consists of a pair of winged seeds or keys that germinate in the spring. The flowers appear in dense clusters in early spring before the leaves, and, although small, are quite conspicuous because of their red color. The leaves are simple, opposite, three- to five-lobed, doubly serrate or toothed, dull green above, and whitish beneath. Some varieties are cultivated for ornamental purposes. While widely distributed, it is short-lived and forms only a negligible part of commercial timber stands. Red maple is usually a medium-sized tree forty to sixty feet high and one to two feet in diameter, though it is sometimes larger. Red maple is quick growing and makes a fair shade tree for light soils. It is also found on drier sites in mixed stands of other trees. Red maple is common in the north central and northeastern portions of the state and is usually found in moist soils adjacent to wetlands and swamps. The wood is heavy, hard, strong, close-grained, and light-brown to reddish, with lighter sapwood. The bark on young trees is light gray to brown and rather smooth, later breaking into long irregular plates of bark that often loosen vertically along the side. The fruit, called a two-winged samara or key, differs from other maples in that it matures in the fall and germinates the next spring. The flowers are greenish and inconspicuous. They are thin, firm, opaque, dark green above, paler beneath, and turn brilliant shades of yellow, orange, and red in autumn. The leaves are opposite, simple, three to five inches long, broad, and usually five-lobed. In forests it develops a clean trunk to a good height, whereas open-grown trees form a dense, round-topped crown. On better soils, it attains a height of sixty to 100 feet with trunk diameters in excess of three feet. Sugar maple grows in most regions of Minnesota except in the extreme western counties. Following are descriptions of the four maples used for syrup production in Minnesota: During the active growing season, maples can be identified by their leaf shape. Maples are easy to identify because of their opposite branching habitat, leaf shape, and unique fruit called samaras. While our Maples can be distinguished by the bark with it's gray furrows and long irregular vertical, the leaves are the easiest manner of identification. The Sugar Maple can be distinguished by it's 5 lobed leaf which is 3-6 inches wide.The leaves have a bright green upper surface and a pale green lower surface. Our forest also contains Basswood, Red and White Oak, Red and American elm, Bitternut Hickory and Ironwood. A little known fact is that the Box Elder (Acer Negundo) is a species of Maple that can also be tapped and used for syrup making.Īt Somerskogen, we are a part of the Southern Mesic Maple-Basswood forest which only contains the Sugar Maple. While there are 13 native species of Maple, only the Sugar Maple (ç) and the Black Maple (Acer Nigrum) are preferred due to their higher levels of sugar content in the sap. Somerskogen approaches the western most region of Maple Syrup production. These are the regions that contain the most Sugar Maples. Production of maple syrup is confined primarily to the Northeast United States and Southeastern Canada for a simple reason.
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