With another growing season in the books, I stopped by to visit one of my favorite young pine plantations. Despite the sandy soil texture and limited water holding capacity, these trees are awesome. The lower inherent soil nutrition is offset upfront well by the strong retention of prior stand organic matter (we can fertilize later, but the OM is contributing now). And, the pictured 3-year old GenTreeXT LLC loblolly pines have absolutely fantastic stem form, strong growth vigor, and very high survival.  This is due to purposeful breeding for a combination of traits ---

-- Strong straightness

-- Small to moderate branch size

-- Low forking incidence

-- Strong height growth allocation

-- Strong rust resistance

-- Strong stem stability

With age-3 dominant and co-dominant heights of 10’-16’ (the orange hat in a couple of the pictures is at 5') this plantation continues to grow well about an hour northwest of Wilmington, North Carolina.