rScotty
Super Member
- Joined
- Apr 21, 2001
- Messages
- 8,291
- Location
- Rural mountains - Colorado
- Tractor
- Kubota M59, JD530, JD310SG. Restoring Yanmar YM165D
Thanks Scotty. We are doing a shelter belt so will be a minimum of 2 rows. We are thinking poplars on the outside to start because they grow like gangbusters. Haven't decided on what we want on the inside just yet. I have been back on forth on a backhoe too, but I am gonna have to get this past the house's CFO at some point as well...
The CFO was resistant to our very first tractor, but when she saw the work it did over the years it was the CFO who declared that it was time to upgrade to a new tractor .....at the time I was still satisfied to be struggling keeping the older ones going.
I wish that Kubota still made the L39 TLB. Like any TLB, it had a loader & hoe as standard, and the 3pt hitch was optional - just the opposite of most ag-derived tractors. Plus a TLB has a heavier frame, loader, & slightly wider stance. I think that would be the perfect machine for your 5 acres of what sounds like mostly landscaping work rather than clearing, plowing, or gardening.
I like multiple row shelter belts. Just this week drove through the central USA on a thousand mile trip - cold! And saw lots of the dry-land farms that have shelter belts. A popular style seems to be low junipers on the south or windward side with a row of taller trees behind. There is usually some sort of program going on with the local farm or conservation group that will help out on trees. On our place I spent a few thousand $$ on one to two foot seedlings a decade ago. Having it to do over, I would have spent two or three times as much and bought larger trees - six footers at least - and a bag or two of really good soil to put in with each one.
I've been reading and thinking about trees for years now, and am coming to believe that for shelter rows there might be an advantage to planting in a trench with prepared soil rather than in discrete holes all in a row. Comments?
BTW, about every 4th tree is a fruit tree for the critters.
Down by the creek, picking the proper tree is easy. All trees there are willows of various types. From little bunches of short streamside weedy willows all the way up to massive crack willow trees with trunks a yard across.
As for grass, I'm still experimenting with native grasses with no clear winner yet....except that it will probably be be a fine fescue of some sort.
rScotty