Taking down some trees for land clearing - how high should I leave stumps for easier removal?

[4570Man]

Yeah it’s important to leave high stumps. That’s why it’s important to decide what you want before cutting. You either have to leave the stumps or use a mastication machine to deal with flush cut stumps.

An excavator of equal weight would be a lot better at removing stumps than a dozer.

 

[jyoutz]

An excavator of equal weight would be a lot better at removing stumps than a dozer.

But slow if you need to treat acreage.

 

[4570Man]

But slow if you need to treat acreage.

Excavators and dozers usually work together. There’s attachments to help bridge the gap but they’re neither one very efficient by themselves.

 

[jyoutz]

Excavators and dozers usually work together. There’s attachments to help bridge the gap but they’re neither one very efficient by themselves.

Was just describing how we did it for some fire lines and horse pasture clearing. It worked good. We didn’t have access to an excavator and the dozers did the job. The key message is leave high stumps if you are going to remove them. We also used a brush rake bar on the dozers for pushing stumps into burn piles. The rakes don’t scrape up the soil like a flat blade.

 

[4570Man]

Was just describing how we did it for some fire lines and horse pasture clearing. It worked good. We didn’t have access to an excavator and the dozers did the job. The key message is leave high stumps if you are going to remove them. We also used a brush rake bar on the dozers for pushing stumps into burn piles. The rakes don’t scrape up the soil like a flat blade.

I’d leave the trees standing and push them over and then cut the root ball off.

 

[KilroyJC]

We have a mix of loblolly pine, poplar, black walnut, and a smattering of others mixed in. based on aerial photography from the GIS, and local information, the land was once part of a cattle farm and was open field in 1954.

 

[KilroyJC]

Not real sure what the area is that you want cleared or what your intended use will be. How dense is the growth?

Those 3 questions seem to me to be necessary to determine what you will want to do.

I had about 3/4 acre behind a house I wanted to thin out the < 10” trees and underbrush. I don’t plan to till it or build anything on it. I just wanted to reclaim it to walk through easily, keep it cut back easily and be able to fence it in.

There are some large trees, (oak, pine, sweet gum) from >10” - 36” out there that I’ll leave for now until I get the rest under control and decide what I want to do with it. Lawn, shaded recreation area, ???

Started taking out the < 10” pine and sweetgum trees and leaving ~36” high stumps so they were obvious and I wouldn’t run over them. Possibly that would be enough for some leverage to push/pull them out with the JD 110 backhoe. It really wasn’t.

Even stumps that small left pretty large size holes to fill in. I had a guy with a JD 333G and drum mulcher go over it and mulch the entire area including grinding down the ~36” stumps and some lower that I had cut lower up near the edge of the lawn. I paid for 4 hours @$150 so $600 and the stumps are gone and all underbrush is gone. Some areas were so overgrown you couldn’t walk through before he started.

I think it’s knocked down enough I can keep it under control and can take out a few more trees selectively. The area is fairly level but is not totally flat.

If I was going to plant a garden over the entire area, or build on it I would have needed to do something differently. I may decide to do that, later.

In the future, if I decide to take out some of the bigger trees I could push or fell them toward the rear of the property without concern that they would fall on any buildings.

I have several goals here:

-logs for my sawmill
-firewood
-plantable areas for personal food consumption
-open land for family recreation (I need to be able to get the tractor to where I can brush hog all the thorny grabby bleedy stuff and then plow the roots out)

I will be doing this in stages, starting with the easiest, most accessible, least thorny part, approximately 100’x300’ irregular shaped area, that has about 30 or so trees to come down, most in the 10”-20” range (not counting stuff under 4”).

 

[KilroyJC]

Looking at projects like this, it is downright amazing to think that people used to do this with nothing more than two oxen and bare hands while building a log cabin so the family could move out of the covered wagon and still have food grown for the following winter. . .

but then, they weren’t sitting around with their thumbs tapping on tablets…

 

[oosik]

I have no problems just leaving the stumps. There are no trees in my yard. They are all out on the acreage. I tried digging out one pine stump. It was about 35 years ago. I was young.....and stupid. After three days of digging - I burned it. On my 80 - Mother Nature takes care of any stumps.

 

[jyoutz]

I’d leave the trees standing and push them over and then cut the root ball off.

See my earlier comment about the risks of doing that. Maybe for small trees.