Landowners....... how difficult is it to clear land for pasture?

[Ellie_NY_chick]

If they were meant to be Christmas trees in the first place, why don't you stick out a sign on the day after Thanksgiving that says "free Christmas trees - U cut, U take".

Or call a church or school and offer them up as a fundraiser.

As for being earth-friendly, I know many communities recycle the discarded Christmas trees as mulch, so there you go.

Everybody wins. Come spring, all you'll have to deal with are stumps.

e

 

[gypsy2621]

In order to move 25 ' trees you are going to need a big back hoe.
you have to go outside the diameter of the widest branches.

EX: if the longest branches are 30 ft you have to start digging 35 ft from the base of the tree , otherwise you will be destroying the root system.

another thing t o remember , Conifers have a mother toot which normally digs straight down. this is the root that feeds and waters the tree. Very hard to get trees that large out of the ground with out destroying it. And to have a professional come in to move the trees will be very expensive.

Stumping will be a pain if you dont have the loggers take them away, removal and such is back breaking work .

conifers such as this are better served as pulp wood.

 

[Cuban Longtails]

I think the general rule is that you have to go as wide as the end of the longest of the tree limbs and as deep as the tree is tall to dig them up for transplanting.

 

[Miltonchix]

Quote:
HUH??

You can cut them close to the ground and wait for the stumps to rot naturally over several years if you don't plan on tilling or planting. Otherwise to clear an acre would mean heavy equipment. The heavy equipment would do a "prettier" job and level the lot. Just cutting to the ground would leave uneven ground that might not have the same "eye appeal"

 

[Ellie_NY_chick]

Stump grinders are your friends.

I still say have a Christmas tree sale, then grind the stumps in the spring.

 

[HorseFeathers]

Quote:
Or find another piece of land... 25 year old trees being cut down for pasture just makes me want to cry... What a waste!

(Sorry, just my opinion...)...

I know. I'm not too keen on it either. But Mom's right, they aren't indigenous, so they may be spoiling the habitats... Still, I don't like any tree being cut down...

 

[patandchickens]

Quote:
Difficult. If you also want them to LIVE after transplanting, extremely difficult and expensive, and if these are pine trees bigger than 4' tall or so there is no point in even CONTEMPLATING it. Yeah sure, tree companies with (big, expensive) truck-mounted "tree spades" can dig up even fairly large conifers, like up to 15+ feet, and replant them wherever you want, for like $5,000 and up per tree, but the tree may well not survive and if it does it will look like hell for the next decade and only survive by dint of extensive guying, artificial watering for the next five years, etcetera. (BTW, no, they do not dig up the whole root system, that would be impossible

)

If you have some pines that are, like, 2' tall, they move ok (by hand) as long as you're careful and do it in early spring. 3' is pushing it. Pines will not make a dense hedge like arborvitae do, though. Well, not for long anyhow.

As far as clearing land. It is not normally done by grinding stumps out - usually, assuming they are shallow-rooted 'trash' species, the tree is cut and removed (or even just levelled with a large tractor or backhoe or loader, and dragged away to a brush or burn pile) and then a tractor or backhoe is used to snake the stumps out. Then the field is ploughed/disked/harrowed and seeded, sometimes with fallowing-and-re-disking and/or herbiciding in there too.

You would have to do the whole megillah there to make a hayfield. It would be expensive. I seriously doubt it would be worth it, b/c you are not going to get much hay off a coupla acres and anyhow you are likely to end up spending as much having someone come in and hay it for you as you would if you just bought the darn hay in the first place - and if you buy it you can be SURE it is good quality.

However, for a goat or sheep pasture, as long as you do not demand a golf-course lookin' thing with the highest possible productivity, you could perfectly well just leave the stumps there (at least for now) and simply let the existing vegetation grow up for grazing. (assuming this is a typical xmas tree planting with lots of space and grass between the rows, and not some overgrown thing with only pine needles and dark dim bare ground between the trees). It does not have to look like a postcard to feed livestock

Personally I'd try to have the trees cut a couple feet above the ground so you can SEE where the stumps are if you ever want to weedwhack or mow part of the paddock. After five years or so, you could have someone with a tractor snake them out -- they will be MUCH easier to remove once they've sat and rotted a while. At which point you could, if you really wanted, disk and reseed the whole pasture, although you would then have to keep your animals off it for most of the next year.

If most of the land is wooded and you want to keep sheep/goats, bear in mind that wooded = extra predators so you will have extra issues with fencing (not just fencing your animals in, but predators OUT).

Hope this helps, and good luck,

Pat

 

[oldsoftie]

We purchased 5 acres, overgrown with brush, small trees, locust trees, and thorn trees. We've cleared about half so far, keeping the "good" trees. If you were to cut the trees leaving a 3' stump (used for leverage when pushing the stump for removal), cut up and burn the cut-down tree, you can hire a dozing service for a reasonable amount to push the stumps into a pile for you so you can burn them also. Excavating companies charge by the hour, and pine trees are easy to push out if you leave a stump. They will give you free estimates.

I wonder if the pine trees can be ground up by a tree service so you can use it for the chicken coop?

Brad

 

[tfpets]

I'm not sure if it's been addressed yet, or if it applies to your situation, but besides contacting a timber company to make use of the wood, around here you need a county permit for tree removal, especially for lumber, even non-native trees once its established, and if you are paid money for your trees, dont forget the TAXES, which are paid at the end of the year with your income taxes. If you use a timber company make sure you get legal documents or you may pay later, and I mean pay....just a thought cause my brother had to sell some of his trees and we learned alot about the process

 

[digitS']

I did some of this sort of thing quite a few years ago. I moved to property where about 2 acres had been recently cut for fence posts. The lodgepole pine were obviously only about 6 inches at the butt.

These 2 acres were located where I wanted to have a garden so I had a small crawler tractor come in and push the stumps out of the ground. It took about one-half day and I had a huge pile of stumps along one side. After snow fell that Autumn, I set the pile on fire - it burned slowly for months!!

Once the ground dried out in the Spring a little, I took my small tractor and plowed and disced the area. If I'd been older and wiser, I'd never have tried to plow. A good heavy disc harrow does a reasonably good job on somewhat rough ground if you make enuf passes over it.

Because I was young and healthy, I was able to dig out permanent garden beds and do a good job of leveling about 1/4 of this ground over the next few years. The pasture area was on the other 3/4 and was fine without me out there with a shovel

. I grew oats and cut it with a scythe the first year and planted it to a permanent forage crop thereafter. It was tiny but somehow a lot more attractive than the field of stumps I'd been left to deal with.

Beyond my forest clearing, was a farm field or what-once-was-a-field. The little tractor (same size as a Ford 8N) and I spent long days turning that back into farmland.

Steve