Tending your little piece of earth

[SwampDonkey]

Ok, here's a couple of pictures of trees I planted in mod- heavy slash piles 3 summers ago (2002). I had this area that wasn't growing anything accept some scattered cedar, fir and balm. It was alot of work getting into the groove and finding a spot for each tree. It's something you could only do on your own land unless someone is paying you by the hour. I was quite pleased with the results and the slash helps deter the weeds. Nothing is impossible I guess, just need determination.


Moderate



Heavy


Did some plantation cleaning this spring (May) with a spacing saw. I cleaned about 10 acres of the plantation and 2.5 acres of natural mixed growth along the edge of the plantation. I have more ground coming online for thinning each year. It's not that bad going and I prefer the coolness of the spring air. When it gets hot out, I'm not as keen to lug around a spacing saw. Try it for a week yourself and find out why. 




Notice I also have a nice nurse crop of aspen that will be harvested before the spruce. There are also hardwood in the plantation that are on a longer rotation than the spruce. In some other areas I have alot of balsam fir that will be thinned out when the aspen is taken. This section was scarified in '95 and planted in '96. My plantations were planted at various stages after that.




This is an area of the plantation taken over by fir. I will be favoring the fir because of size and it's faster growth rate. I'll have to soon thin this before it gets too tall, it's handy to 10 feet tall now. Hoping for my first commercial harvest in 30 years.

Anyone is welcome to post the work they have done with their own hands to improve their land. Even road building is an improvement. Good roads are essential for ongoing tending, nurturing and admiring of your ground.

[Part_Timer]

that is neat.  Could you tell me what a spacing saw is??

     We have a small tobacco farm in virginia.  We have 9 years and then we are going to move down there.  Just going to slow life down a bit.  This summer one of the neighbors helped us doze a road up to the barn.  We went down and planted about 3 5gal. buckets of red oak,burroak, walnut and osage nuts and seeds.  I won't have any pictures of what comes up till spring but it should be interesting.
    We just purchased a 4 wheeler and a bush hog this week for Christmas so we can mow it down and keep the weekds under control.

   This summer we met with a state forester and walked the whole place looking at trees and openings and what we should keep and what should go.  We spent most all day up there and had a ball.  Most of the place is at about a 50 deg slope in the up direction.  I was flat worn out at the end of the day. 

The forester showed us what to mow back and what to let go hence the 4 wheeler.  he even sent us some paperwork on getting in a planting program for some pines also a reason for the 4 wheeler as we need it to keep the weeds back from the pines if we get in.  I think that I'll just move some of the small white pines around instead of thinning them out.  If we get in the program we're going to plant long leaf since we already have pleanty of whites.    He thought that planting the burr oak would be a neat idea since they don't have any to speak of should freak out the loggers in 40 or 50 years to find a stand of them.  

Well those are the plans for the coming year.  I'll look and see if I can find some good pictures of the place.

good luck with your plantings

Tom

[jon12345]

'My little piece' is actually my mom's right now, but some day its gonna be mine   

Is a little under 6 acres though so I'll have to obtain another 'little piece' somwheres else to play with too.  Basically this lot used to be a field, there is a hedgerow through the middle of it consisting of ash, hard and soft maple and apple trees.  Most of the old field grew in with ash and sugar maple, with a lot of maple and cherry growing under the ash.  I've transplanted some of the maple to a non-wooded part, that will become the edge of what I hope will some day be a small sugarbush.  Im not sure if I should clear the ash out now or wait til it gets bigger, because right now it is pretty small, you wouldnt even have to split it to use it as firewood.  Regeneration under this part is almost too thick to walk through, so until I decide what to do I'll just keep transplanting maples out into the open.  Since it is such a small area,  I plan on doing a full inventory as soon as time allows.  If worse comes to worse I can at least have a few bonfires 

[SwampDonkey]

Could you tell me what a spacing saw is??

Spacing saw Stihl FS550






Its engine displacement is 52cc and comes in at 22 lbs. It requires a full-torso harness to support it and hearing protection to run it, having a 103-dBA rating at full throttle.

[beenthere]

"Clearing" saw is what Stihl calls it, but the 'spacing' tag might be the end result of 'spacing' trees. Never know what these foresters are going to dream up next. 

[SwampDonkey]

"Clearing" saw is what Stihl calls it, but the 'spacing' tag might be the end result of 'spacing' trees. Never know what these foresters are going to dream up next. 

Who'd a thunk it, but a dumb canuck. No intense offended.

[crtreedude]

Hey SD - does it count if they are my workers? 

I did help plant the first 4,000 trees so that should count, shouldn't it?

[SwampDonkey]

Hey SD - does it count if they are my workers? 

I did help plant the first 4,000 trees so that should count, shouldn't it?

Hmmmm, I guess that would be acceptable.

[Tom]

My first one came from sears in 1984.  I was given a second one, circa unknown, that is a stihl and has a chainsaw power head on it.  Both were called bushwhackers.   I've heard them called power machetes too.  Never heard them called spacing saws.

[crtreedude]

We have about 3 of those - or something like it. We just added a brushhog for behind an ATV (5 foot) also.

Nothing like mowing one square kilometer of land...

[SwampDonkey]

We call'm spacing saws because that's what we use'm for. If it was a clearing saw than in my mind your not leaving anything standing. We don't do thinning from below, it's all thinning from above. Now that statement might invite some more questions.

http://ysc.nb.ca/ysccourses.html

[jon12345]

I used one of those saws before to thin a stand of red & scotch pine, a few of them up to about 4" diameter, lets just say there was a 'little' smoke

[beenthere]

If there is smoke, it needs to be sharpened, I suspect. 

(which reminds me, I have one in the garage waiting to be sharpened, so thanks for the 'reminder')

[SwampDonkey]

Jon, I've cut softwood up to 6 inches on the stump and hardwood up to 5 inches. It doesn't have the Torque of a Huskie professional spacing saw (forget model #). It does have a higher RPM though. I like it 'cause it's lighter. I couldn't lug a Huskie around all day.

Jon, maybe ya didn't set the teeth and sharpen it properly. Shouldn't be too hard to cut pine 4".



Use a blade guage to set the teeth, the good ones are like $30 bucks. The ones on the file guage are pretty useless. When working in hardwood you have to check your set more often.



You can see the blade has been well used. Usually you don't sharpen the teeth below that horizontal line on the tooth.

[jon12345]

I think this one was a Stihl, owned by the college, and of course we always 'went real easy' on their equipment 


We put a small blade on a weedwhacker to thin smaller diameter ash <2"in the stand I mentioned before

[Part_Timer]

Thanks for the picture swamp I understand now. 

We call em brush cutters.  this year we bought the Stihl that you can put different attachments on.  We got ours with the hedge trimmer.  I spent about 4 hours cutting rasberries off of the road.  they were so bad that it would scratch the paint off of the truck.  We also cut some trails to the backside of the place with it.  It works well on the poison ivy and green brier also.




Tom

[Cuz]

Man, you gotrto admire what all that power equipment can do but I have come to look for the bush axe, sling blade, hand saw, etc. before I crank up any of my saws, blades, cutters, mowers.  Must be gettin' old and shore ain't in as big a hurry.

As for my little 15.5 acres, I just (last Spring) cut some nice trees and helped saw them and now drying the lumber for my next project.  Had to get to my little pond dam to rework the spillway to discourage the beavers and muskrats from hanging around.  I have planted and replanted some cypress around the ponds and have found that a barrier of some sort must be placed around the cypress or the beaver will go straight to it and cut it down.  Started with some hardware cloth and ended up with some sections of drain pipe around the base of the trees and that seems to do the job...so far.

I'm still cleaning the tops, splitting and stacking firewood, and doing some erosion prevention, game food plots.  All part of the intial project.  It's great to have a little plot to work and see the fruits of your labors.  Good therapy too.

[jon12345]

Soon we will be removing all the 'junk' from our property such as all the ash.  I don't know whats going to happen after that, may be clearing a building lot, so I'm not really sure.  Until then I'm stuck dealin with the swampy areas I'm gonna try to dry up a little, and around the lawn of the existing house that I think needs a couple hedgerows, especially if another house might be goin in.

[SwampDonkey]

Why do you consider ash junk?

[jon12345]

oops  mis-type.... are not removing all the ash, just all the 'bad' ones - some are split, multiple stems, too close to one another, crooked stems.