Newbie Land Clearing Questions

[toolsorbust]

ive cleared out thickets by bush hogging it works well if you have the time. To do it this way you need to mow every thing down three times a year. When the weeds and such come up mow em down before they seed. If you do this for a couple of years the grass will come back and the weeds will go away. Now for the kudzu ive only found one wat to get totaly rid of it and that is to move! In its peak growing season it will grow a foot a day. Live stock is a great way to keep it back I know that cows prefer kudsu to grass. I had kudzu and it took about ten years but my pasture was finaly free from it. Goats work well for clearing thickets if you can put up with the smell. Pigs work very well, If you dont pen them up in a small area the smell from pigs is no more that cows. Pigs will root up everything in sight, They are the organic tiller so to speak. You can run one electric wire 12" above the ground and they wont cross it. These are just my thoughts on this I would rather work with nature than to try and beat it into submission.

 

[Barneyhunts]

dan, I would not put a tiller in there until you have dealt with the stone, you could quickly destroy a very expensive attachment in stoney ground. rent a skidsteer with a rockhound and see how that works.

This is good input! I have a tiller on a 22Hp Kubota and it will "rattle your teeth" if there are many stones. I also like the input about using livestock to keep the growth under control. Good Luck!

 

[putt_putt_green]

I'm not sure where you are from. If your from an area where the temperature drops below freezing, the frost will push stones up to the surface over time. Just because it was farmed at one time doesn't mean that there are no buried stones.

 

[danielread]

No suggestions, but welcome to TBN. Where abouts are you located?

Thanks for replying, Moss. Unfortunately it's been a few days that I haven't been able to reply to everyone who took the time out to reply to my post. I hope to remedy that today.

We are in west central Georgia. The property is anchored by an old home built right after the Civil War; the back ten acres at one time had slave housing on it, and later tenant farmers, who apparently lived without water or electricity on the property into the 1960's.

 

[danielread]

How about going Organic? By that I mean getting some goats or cows in there for a while.

Thanks, Jim. We've actually thought about goats, but we'd definitely need to improve the fencing situation. However, our main goal is not to just keep it mowed (we can do that with the DR even though it's a lot of work) but rather to get rid of all the roots and stumps and underground vines from all of the invasive species. We like to start fresh with some native plants or just ground cover like rye grass or something. Maybe this is naive.

Dan

 

[danielread]

dan, I would not put a tiller in there until you have dealt with the stone, you could quickly destroy a very expensive attachment in stoney ground. rent a skidsteer with a rockhound and see how that works.

Thank you, Jim! We had never heard of a skidsteer or rockhound. I believe some other people have commented on this below also. Getting rid of rocks is not a particular goal we have, but if that's something we have to do first before we can do tilling or something similar, then we're willing to go that route.

Dan

 

[danielread]

May want to check if any of those naughty weeds spread by root cuttings. Knew a guy who disced a field of thistle. The next year he had the best thistle field of anyone!

Thanks for the reply. Are you saying that tilling/discing the field actually caused things to get worse? I guess that makes sense if cutting up the roots and underground vines just creates more places for them to fork out...

Dan

 

[danielread]

I would go for a tractor with at least a top cylinder and a brush mower. Then just mow your fields a couple of times per year. If you go big enough you can back over the the brush piles and skip the chipper. Use the FEL to go after some of the rocks that get in the way of the mower. You will find a lot of other uses for the tractor.Zeuspaul

Thank you, Zeus. I hadn't thought of the bonus that we could grind up our wood piles with a large enough tractor attachment. We definitely have a lot of wood piles. We've been making the piles by hand before we move through with the DR. If we decide to go this way, we might need to keep up with it using the DR for another season or two before we can make the big leap to a full tractor.

Dan

 

[danielread]

ive cleared out thickets by bush hogging it works well if you have the time. To do it this way you need to mow every thing down three times a year. When the weeds and such come up mow em down before they seed. If you do this for a couple of years the grass will come back and the weeds will go away. Now for the kudzu ive only found one wat to get totaly rid of it and that is to move! In its peak growing season it will grow a foot a day. Live stock is a great way to keep it back I know that cows prefer kudsu to grass. I had kudzu and it took about ten years but my pasture was finaly free from it. Goats work well for clearing thickets if you can put up with the smell. Pigs work very well, If you dont pen them up in a small area the smell from pigs is no more that cows. Pigs will root up everything in sight, They are the organic tiller so to speak. You can run one electric wire 12" above the ground and they wont cross it. These are just my thoughts on this I would rather work with nature than to try and beat it into submission.

Thank you, toolsorbust. I like the suggestion of the pigs as an organic tiller. Even better than the goats because they go under the surface. I also appreciate the insight that if we keep cutting the weeds before they seed each year that they'll be overtaken by grass eventually. I wonder, though, how that will translate to our "weeds" which are mostly privet and sticker bushes that have roots already in the ground--maybe each time we mow those get weaker, but my fear was that they would just keep coming back stronger... The privets can grow three our four feet in a season no problem.

We have two fairly localized kudzu infestations. So far we've been attacking it by tracing the vines to the much larger roots/vines, and then we attack those big mothers. We've found and cut out some very large kudzu vines. We've also now mowed down all the milkweed and privet that the kudzu was using as a base. We're going to keep attacking it and hopefully we will eventually prevail.

Dan

 

[4720 OWNER]

It is sounding like you just need a dozer to come in and scrape off an inch or so and start over! With such a history, anyone use a metal detector in there and see if any goodies were left over? Sudan grass or lately the teff hay seem to be dandy competitors for weeds. Or any of the annual hay crops.