Brush piles

[wango]

Hello, I'm new to the site and I hate to ask a stupid question, but it's never stopped me before.

I recently was given permission to cut firewood on a couple woodlots within a few miles of my house.  I've been cutting firewood since I was a kid but this is the first time I've ever cut firewood off of our family farm.  These woodlots had select harvests done in the last 9 months or so.  All hardwood tops, mostly black walnut and ash, with some maple and oak. 

I want to do the best job for the property owners.  For future tree regeneration is it better to pile the brush or leave it scattered around?  Or does it really matter?  I think it looks better piled up, rather than left all over the place.  I don't have a chipper.  There are alot of tops, renting a chipper wouldn't be practical.

I have small, lightweight equipment, compaction shouldn't be a problem.

What do you think, pile it or leave it scattered?  So far I've been putting it in small piles.  I cut small diameter wood for a syrup evaporator down to about 1 1/2", so the piles lay fairly flat.

If this is something that is common knowledge, please forgive my ignorance, but I would really like to know.  Not just for the neighbors woodlot, but for my own as well.

[mrcaptainbob]

I'd ask the wood lot owners what they'd prefer.

[tyb525]

The piles are good for animals, if that's what the landowner is interested in. Plus they are neater as you mentioned. However, you should ask the landowner to be sure. I'd be willing to bet they don't have a preference.

[SwampDonkey]

Around here it's left dispersed and is gone by 10 years unless it's cedar. If you leave dense brush piles around those spots won't regenerate and up here the porkies will come den in them and feed on the bark of neighboring trees. Rare for anyone to handle brush on a harvest job up here unless they are a chipping operation. In fact landowners don't like big piles of brush on their land around here. I've thinned ground on a lot of clearcuts with roadside slash piles that takes acres of land out of production. It is also a fire hazard on softwood sites. Now those harvest sites have a lot heavier slash because of the nature of the harvest, but I prefer dispersed limbs myself as a woodlot owner. Sometimes however, less dense piles of tops might help keep deer away from getting at some hardwood already regenerating. I don't care for the park look.

[Chuck White]

If you want the brush/limbs to disappear quickly, leave them scattered, but if you want to help the wildlife, put them in piles!

The small critters will make homes in brush piles! 

Brush piles are protection from coyotes & birds of prey!

[thecfarm]

I myself prefer to cut anything I leave in the woods in shorts lengths,about 2 feet.This way it lays on the ground and will rot faster.I don't like to leave limbs sticking up in the air.This way I can drive my tractor over the brush in a few years without the brush hanging up under it.If I made brush pile they would be in the way. Maybe make a pile once every few thousands feet?

[John Mc]

Wango - how about filling out your profile to let us know what part of the country you are in?

As others have noted, landowner preference should be followed.

If the goal is to get it to rot as quickly as possible, the lower it lays to the ground, the faster that will happen, and the faster the nutrients contained in that brush will return to the soil. However, this does tend to look messy until it rots, and some landowners just won't abide by that.

If wildlife is a goal, brush piles can create good habitat for many smaller critters. If this sort of cover/habitat is in short supply in the area, creating it can also attract other animals which prey on those smaller critters (attract the little guys, and you'll also attract what feeds on them). Try to start your brush piles with a few larger pieces to create some good gaps and hollows - if everything is 1.5" diameter or less, and packed down fairly densely, about the only habitat you'll create is for mice.

You mentioned regeneration. Deer browsing can be a problem in some areas. I know in parts of Vermont, the Deer browse pressure is so heavy that it's tough to get any regeneration of desirable species. Leaving the brush piled up a bit can help that. The deer don't much like to wade into it, since it can slow their escape if a predator shows up. This can provide some protection for seedlings and saplings to get their start.

Lastly: there are some places I cut wood that require anything under 3" be left in the forest to allow the nutrients to eventually return to the soil (a surprisingly large proportion of the nutrients in a tree is in these smaller branches).

John Mc

[MtnDon]

Nobody has mentioned fire danger. Here in the SW slash piles and even all the branches left scattered about create a high fire danger. It is too dry for any wood on the ground to rot quickly, it takes decades and by that time there are more branches and dead fall. It's a real mess from decades of wild fire suppression. As a result we make piles after cutting and removing the usable wood. The piles are located in scattered small clearing and covered with tarps or 6 mil plastic. In the winter and spring we then burn them.

We leave some small piles of branches as animal refuges but clear most of the crap off the ground. We leave the odd dead standing tree hear and there as long as they are not near the trails and other areas we use frequently. All the hard work payed off in May '09 as the neighboring property had a fire start by a careless guest. The wind blew the fire our way but it slowed to a crawl where we had cleared and thinned out the small trash trees. That gave the forest service fire department time to get six crews on site. We only lost a couple of our trees but the neighbor lost about a hundred.

[Tom]

Somewhere I heard that if you hoop and holler a lot and run around in circles around the stumps and piles, west of the Mississippi, it will rain.     

[John Mc]

Nobody has mentioned fire danger. Here in the SW slash piles and even all the branches left scattered about create a high fire danger. It is too dry for any wood on the ground to rot quickly, it takes decades and by that time there are more branches and dead fall...

That's why I asked the O.P. where he was from. In my part of Vermont, we joke that our forests are made of asbestos. Occasionally you'll see a fire in a field that spread to an adjacent forest... it just dies within a few feet of entering the forest. I guess they don't call them the "Green Mountains" for nothing.

Not to say we don't or can't get a forest fire, it's just not near the level of concern that you have out your way.

John Mc

[SwampDonkey]

Eight times out of ten, those slash piles that catch on fire are from vehicles or a flicked cigarette around here. Once in awhile a lightning strike, but when you listen to the fire reports around here they are mostly man caused. One of the largest fires was a university graduate studying meteorology, left on a Friday from the bush for home. Didn't know that he had backed into a brush pile on a logging yard and a spark off the tail pipe caught the pile on fire as he drove home only to find out soon there was 5,000 ha of forest on fire. A lot of people in poor rural areas would light to woods on fire for a job fighting fires. You can go to regions of the province where it's been burned so bad that all you get in pioneer species, mostly aspen. Not a softwood in site for miles except near water. And those aspen look pretty poor.

[MtnDon]

Agreed, most fires around here are also human caused; plain stupidity for the most part. The neighboring property was the first fire  that I have encountered where I knew the land well before the fire. Where he had large piles of brush and even 6 inch logs "teepeed" just about all the 50 to 60 foot pines and firs were  cooked so hot they died. Took some of them over a year to give up the ghost and there are still maybe a dozen that have very small live crowns.. Of course his property had too high a tree density before the fire and still does in areas that never burned. It would be nice to live in a forest that took real effort to get burning.

[Ron Scott]

Ditto to all the above methods for slash treatment. As stated, it's always best to check with the landowner as how the want the slash handled and then do a good job as to what they want.

They may have their own objectives as to how they want the slash managed such as, looped and scattered so as to lie so high from the ground, piled into structured piles for wildlife at staggered distances between piles, cleared away from their access roads, trails, and property lines, piled into large piles for burning during the snow season, placed in designated locations to discourage orv trespass on the property, etc.  

[wango]

Thanks for all the information.  I will take your advice and ask the landowners.

I filled in the profile, Vermontville Michigan is located in the southern central part of the lower peninsula, about a half hour west of Lansing.  Forest fires are not usually a problem here, most often grass or field fires die out when they hit the woods.  Not to say it couldn't happen, but it rarely dries out that bad.  I don't know about running around stumps, singing and dancing.  All I have to do to make it rain here is mow some hay.

So far the wood I've taken from the neighbor's place, I've been piling the brush in small piles blocking the trails the skidder used from the road.  The landowners have a padlock on the access gate to keep atvs and dirtbikes out, so I've been trying to use the brush to make it less inviting from the mainroad.  But I will check with the property owners tomorrow, I'm taking them some maple syrup as a thank you.

Cutting wood away from home is a lot different than I'm used to doing, being careful not to make ruts, trying to remember to take everything I might need with me (like the key for the gate, doh!) etc.  I guess I've been spoiled.

[John Mc]

Cutting wood away from home is a lot different than I'm used to doing, being careful not to make ruts, trying to remember to take everything I might need with me (like the key for the gate, doh!) etc.  I guess I've been spoiled.

Yeah, if you don't do it for a living, or at least do it very regularly, you can forget some vital item. I finally bought a large plastic storage box on sale at the local hardware. I put all of my chainsaw tools, ax for driving wedges, a jug of bar oil, chaps and a few odds and ends in there and leave it packed. Throw that in when I go and I'm just about set - as long as I remember the chainsaws and gas... I started storing my choker chains in there as well, when one of them turned up missing after being left hung on the back of my tractor out in the woods.

The only drawback is that the big box is not waterproof - it leaks in around the edge of the lid when it rains. I ended up getting a smaller box that looks like a plastic version of the old military ammo boxes with a gasketed lid... that goes inside with some of my chainsaw supplies (files and other tools, spare 2.6 oz. mix oil, spare chains, etc.)

Whoops, guess I'm drifting way off the brush pile topic.

[Magicman]

Satisfy the customer.  Here the customer had a White Oak tree that had been lightning struck.  I wanted the logs, and he wanted the firewood.  I got three nice logs, he got firewood in piles, plus I piled the limbs for him to burn.
 


Lightning killed White Oak tree.
 


White Oak tree felled.  (notice the widowmaker from another tree that fell several minutes later)
 


I got three nice White Oak logs.
 


This is how I left it for him.  Yes, if/when he ever has any other trees to die, I will be first in line to get them.

[Ron Scott]

Well done!

[wango]

Nice job Magicman.  I have the same goal, leave it as nice as I can and keep the owners happy with the job I do.  The property is less than two miles away and could be a good firewood source for many years.

[Doc Hickory]

Sounds like a good rule of thumb might be to leave it better than you found it, treat it like you're a guest. I see lots of complaints from people who have someone come in to cut out certain parts (dead and down, trash species, etc.) and end up unhappy because their cutter goes bugnutty, dropping everything but what they're supposed to cut. Sure leaves a sour taste in a land owners mouth for a long time....

[Phorester]

I agree, DOC, but I've found that a lot of time a good written contract between the landowner and the tree cutter, whether logger, firewood cutter, or whoever, and marking the trees to be cut alleviates these problems.  Also the landowner needs to realize that big trees with wide spreading branches and that weigh several tons apiece cannot be cut down without causing some damage to neighboring trees. That's where the tree cutting expertiese comes in, to avoid unnecessary damage to the residual trees.  But some damage is going to happen.

I've been called numerous times by landowners complaining about a logger "tearing up their woods", or a firewood cutter "not paying me what he's supossed to be paying me", or "leaving a big mess".   My first question, what does your contract say about marking the trees to be cut, cleaning up the mess, payment schedules?  They invariably answer, well I didn't  get a contract.  Case in point: I had one landowner who called me before he sold a few acres for firewood asking for advice.  Told him what I just stated above. He had the audacity to call me back a few weeks later complaining that the cutter had not payed him, was taking too long to clear out the trees, leaving a mess, wanting to know what "I" could do about it.  I asked him, what does your contract say.  He hums and haws, than finally says, well, I didn't have a contact with him.  So after asking me for advice, he ignored it, and wound up with problems.

Even if just having a few trees cut, it should be treated as a business deal.  Casual handshake deals lead to unnecessary problems, loss of friendships.

[thecfarm]

I've had people ask me who to get to cut thier lot. I tell them,they call him,he's busy for a year,but will still do it.They can't wait and get this guy that will be there in 2 weeks.He makes a mess. They never check his past work or nothing about him.I always tell them to check past lots that they have cut.They never do and I feel leave a big mess.But they get thier money.People ask for advice but don't really want it.

[Grunex]

Sorry about the screwed up post gentlemen,  I wanted to say that agreed it is the choice of the landowner, I've been working a three acre site recently where the landowner absolutely did not want my equipment in the plot.  we trimmed out well over a hundred trees/trash wood for the purpose of woodlot management and am happy to say that the job is looking good.   I will be cutting the stumps a little lower to clean up the appearance of the site as well.   I think all in all the landowner is happy and we'll more than likely be called back for the other portions of the plot.