Eastern white cedar is a powerful medicine.

Good luck with the cedars AJE. The deer leave mine alone for the most part except the bucks want to rip them apart once they got big enough. I usually leave a little buckthorn by them to protect them. Prevents them from getting the backside if they still rub them and keeps the tree alive longer. When I didn’t, they were killing multiple trees as they worked down the line.

I have oaks, spruce, hazelnut, highbush cranberry, and willow ready for pickup on Thursday. Friday I will start the planting. Hooked up the planter today and did a test run. Gassed up the tree auger and dug out the tree spades. Hoping for decent weather.

I have 100 3'-4' white cedar coming soon....I'm going to put 1 hardwood stake by each one, and some cheap deer netting to help them out.

Hope the netting works

Good for boat building should you want a wooden boat. Light and rot resistant. Some people call it juniper.

White cedar (Thuja occidentalis - sp? because thats from memory and not spell checked) grows well a lot of places far from the natural range. They are also known as “arbor vitae” because of an early European colonists who were dying of scurvy and the Indian folk told them they would be cured if they drank cedar tea. Worked so well, they started calling it “tree of life” or arbor vitae.

Up north they are important for winter deer cover and browse, but other places, south of the tiaga ecosystem deer are not very interested in them presumably because there is better browse available, and winters are not so harsh that the thermal cover becomes important. I am currently down in the southwest tip of Indiana for the eclipse that is happening tomorrow, and I saw a row of them looking very healthy today at an abandoned homestead, not even a mile from a cypress stand. I see it thriving all over the upper midwest, and suspect it will do well most places when planted. Interestingly white cedar is a cypress family plant (Thuja), but they don’t grow naturally very far south of the tiaga biome except in isolated locations that are mostly low wet soil spots.

They provide a number of resources like bark that makes nice baskets and makes a great waterproof roofing/siding for homes, very straight splitting strong lightweight wood, the wood also makes a fantastic friction fire base board (one of my favorite combinations is white cedar base and mullein flower stalk spindle for hand drill fires), and the tea as I alluded to earlier contains vitamin C. And those just a few of the many resources provided by this tree.

There is a lot more to know about white cedar, but I dont want to write a book here…

Probably a good idea.
I get my 1st ever white cedar tomorrow.

Mine I planted last year survived and put on a little growth . Excited to see what they do this year! Good luck

That's awesome.

I planted my first ever White Cedar yesterday--55 of them. It was cool. Hopefully I can get them to do well and not be totally destroyed by deer

Hopefully the deer don't rub 'em all up on you. I know deer love to rub my eastern red cedar, I don't know about white cedar.

White Cedar is winter browse for deer here. If you don't fence them the deer will eat them. They grow VERY slow and most of mine have grown 4-6 feet in the last 20 years or so.

White cedar and western red cedar are very closely related to each other (many cedars aren't).
I just curious, what does the wood of white cedar look like?

I don't know. Deer rarely let it get that big.

As for red cedar, I think I only have eastern red's-at least that's what I always figure.

If mine grow to (and stay at only about 5 ft tall) that'd be fine with me because I'm growing the White Cedar for deer not timber. I just don't want the deer to KILL them. It would be cool though if some make it tall.
.

It is GORGEOUS! Lots of character, very light and buoyant and extremely rot resistant.