A visit to tree planter
Warren Balgooyen
by Tyler Omand, Dynamic Farm Inc., April 2018
This article is about a tour of Wishing Well Farm in Norridgewock, which was arranged by Jesse Stevens of the MTCA.
Atom and I were fortunate enough today to stand under a mature canopy of American chestnuts, black walnuts, honey locusts, butternuts, Magnolias, Larches, Spruces, Pines, Oaks and many others WITH the man that planted them!!
The tour group. Warren is on far left.
We met with fellow Maine Tree Crop Alliance enthusiasts in Norridgewock and toured Wishing Well Farm with the owner Warren Balgooyen. Warren started planting these trees, many of them direct seeded, in the early 70’s while renting this farm. He and his wife purchased the farm in the mid 70’s and he has continued to plant acres and acres of trees ever since. We only toured a few acres of this very special place and walked under and around hundreds (maybe thousands) of mature trees, 12-24″ diameter 40’++ tall trees!—as Warren told us all about the history of the property and of many of the plantings. He pointed out how dramatically soil quality effects tree growth by showing us black walnuts with 12-18 DBH and over 40′ tall that were planted in good soil at the same time as black walnuts that were planted a hundred feet away in poor soil that are only 4-8″ DBH and 20-30′ tall!
Every August for the past 25 years Warren has a local father son team dig a new small forest pond and use the excavated material to build forest roads. He now has 25 ponds and miles of roads on their 420 acre property. He stocks many of the ponds with bait
Warren’s woods.
fish which he harvests in the winter through the ice and sells wholesale.
He co-owns an original Wood Mizer sawmill with a friend and has used it to build many cabins and structures on this magical property. He told us how he built his sugar shack for $50 by harvesting all the lumber on site and at first hand splitting wooden shakes from cedar, chestnut, butternut, and locust with a froe, then realized he could do cut them with his wood splitter. This allows him to cut in an afternoon what would take 2 weeks by hand. The shakes on the sugar shack were still holding up well after more than forty years on the roof!!
The seed-littered forest floor.
He told us about how he was part of the group of people who brought to the attention of the American Chestnut Foundation a blight free tree in Cornville that to this day Warren and other members of the ACF collect seed from every fall—a lot of which Warren has planted all around his property. Unfortunately most of these American Chestnuts are heavily blighted and will not last much longer but they are throwing down huge amounts of mast as they slowly succumb. He has thousands planted all over the property including a plantation of them that we did not cross the snow covered fields to get to. There are six 4′ wide, 25′ feet deep rock lined hand dug wells on the property each with a wooden shingled roof over them. Next to the homestead there are a handful of huge grafted apple trees that date back to the mid 1800’s that produce an apple similar to Baldwin but are a late winter apple which Warren sometimes harvests as late as December and they are unfrozen and delicious!
Warren has a passion for Mountain Laurel and has all of the native and hybridized cultivars planted in many areas of the farm. The porcupine pressure on many of the spruce, larch, and pines was extreme—I have never tried it but we have a good friend who has gotten a porcupine from us that tells us it is one of her absolute favorite wild foods, we should tell this to Warren on our next visit. He showed us some interesting hybrid oaks from Oikos he has planted. A burr x English and a white x black oak both with strange bark and the white x black had smooth edged long oval leaves similar to some fatter leaved 
willows.
Next to his house he has a weeping crab apple that was completely girdled by a rodent and successfully saved by friend who bridge grafted an apple seedling onto the weeping apple’s base.
Warren’s geese were talkative but not obnoxious and Atom was very interested in them.
It is so inspiring to tour farms where the land steward is so 
involved planting a legacy for future generations. Thank you Warren for having us along on this wonderful walk through your forests and thank you Jesse for arranging this awesome tour!
#wespeakforthetrees
#thetreesspeaktooursouls
Photo Credits: Annette Ammarell, Tyler Omand.
Warren Balgooyen offered a tour of Wishing Well Farm on Oak Hill Rd. in Norridgewock to our group, the Maine Tree Crop Alliance. 
The tour began at 10:30 on Tuesday, April 17 and showed us a bit of the work he has done on the 272 acres he and his wife inhabit.
Warren Balgooyen.
