URBAN FORESTRY AT PALOMAR COLLEGE

All around us—on our streets, in our parks, in our yards and in our undeveloped lands, are many valuable trees such as sycamore, magnolia, ficus, pepper, jacaranda, carob, mulberry and elm.  For the most part, these trees are cut down when they have been deemed to be "no longer useful, needed or appropriate," or they fall down due to age or storm damage.  Old age for most trees in these categories is about 35-50 years.

Traditionally, these trees have been primarily sent to landfills, or secondarily, cut up for firewood. With recent state mandates to lower the tonnage put into landfills and because most existing recycling programs such as aluminum cans, plastic, etc. had "topped out," agencies began looking at one of the biggest offenders: entire trees.

The California Department of Forestry (CDF) developed a program to utilize trees removed from our urban environment by allowing selected sites to process them for woodworking and furniture making purposes.  To accomplish this, the CDF, recognizing Palomar College as one of the leading woodworking schools in the country, loaned Palomar College a "Wood-Mizer" (a small, portable sawmill) and a portable kiln drying unit.   Together, these two units allow us to receive donated logs and process them into usable lumber.  Go to photos of urban sawmill.

Woodworkers and furniture makers are always looking for beautiful and desirable hardwoods.  You are probably familiar with many of these very desirable "more traditional" woods, such as walnut, oak, birch, maple, cherry, mahogany, etc.  Virtually none of these species is grown or harvested in California and some are imported from outside the country.   Using such traditional lumbers means harvesting "prime" trees from "prime" forest areas, often at great expense to all involved.

Another long-term goal of the CDF's Urban Forestry Program is to generate enough revenue to replant trees in the urban forest, thus completing the cycle of wood utilization from beginning to end by involving the entire community in continuing to make wood our only truly renewable resource.

Those donating logs receive a tax donation letter citing the amount of board footage donated.  Perhaps more importantly, we preserve the more traditional prime lumbers and forests while simultaneously ensuring better use and utilization of our urban forest.  This benefits our students directly by their being able to purchase the urban lumber for approximately one-half the price of traditional lumber.

We now have a flat-bed truck for picking up logs in the community and bringing them back to Palomar College for processing.  However, we still hoping to procure the donation of a crane or large boom to be able to load the logs onto the truck without having to use a forklift on-site…can you help???

If you have further questions about our Urban Forestry program, contact our Director of Urban Forestry, Dave Thomsen at 760-744-1150, x-2554.