Dealing with Pines, Continued

Last summer I posted about removing a bunch of volunteer pines. It was hot sweaty work on a black flag day.  Later in the summer I cut a bunch more.

To my dismay, I saw that some (not all) of the pines have coppiced, i.e., they've sent out sprouts around the former main stem.  They're down but they're not out.  Glyphosate may be called for once things start growing again in the spring.

The biggest of the trees I cut down last summer were about two inches in diameter.    Shown below is one of the bigger stems.

This size is easily manageable with loppers.  When pines are neglected for a longer period of time, it's a different story.

I have some pines that, unnoticed by me, have grown up too close to a pole barn and they are now threatening the structure (or actually damaging it).  They have been growing on the back side for the most part.  In the years since I've had the property, they have grown to something twenty feet tall and up to eight or nine inches at the base.  These trees are more like 14-16 years old.

Felling them has not been too difficult so far, but things are crowded in the area where they are growing, so some have to be dropped and removed to make room to cut down others.  They were big enough that I wanted to buck them into firewood-length pieces as I hauled them out.

 Once they were on the ground, I used the Stihl chainsaw and timber jack to part them out.

You can see that the one growing closest to the back of the pole barn was so close I had to cut it off a couple of feet up from the ground.  At the base there wasn't enough room to get the chainsaw bar behind it. You can also see that the needles still look green and reasonably fresh--even though this picture was taken a couple of months after the tree was cut down.

Once the main stems were cut into 18-inch pieces, I hauled them out in a wheelbarrow.

The work is still ongoing.  I plan to split them into firewood; although pine is not highly valued in the east compared to hardwood, it has some value.  As previously noted, I also have a lot of tulip poplar on deck for next winter.  It is not much higher on the BTU-per-cord chart than pine (and may even be lower; some sites indicate that southern pine yields over 20 million BTUs per cord, which approaches 80-90% of what oak provides).  Some suggest that pine causes heavy creosote deposits--the rounds above exuded drops of sticky sap along all of the ring lines soon after cutting--but if seasoned and used in a hot fire, it can burn as cleanly as anything else.

Garden Carts

I have a nice wheelbarrow.  I got it at Lowe's 20 years ago and it still serves me well.  For some tasks, like hauling dirt or other dense, heavy items, wheelbarrows are optimal (though for truly heavy loads, one with dual tires would probably be better than my model).

However, for other things they leave much to be desired, such as hauling brush.  I have a long driveway and keeping the privet, wisteria, and other plants hacked back during the growing season is a chore.   Recently, I did some trimming along the driveway.  I used a garden cart instead of the wheelbarrow--I got mine at Carts Vermont.  Its capacity is nominally only about double the wheelbarrow, but because of the box shape and the handle, it can hold far more plant cuttings.  I was able to pile brush high on the cart and balance it for the walk back up the driveway, towing the cart behind me.  I don't know if it was effective or not, but I cut some lower-stem pieces and stuck them into the stack vertically to try to hold it together.  One way or another, it worked, and nothing fell off on the walk.  Most of the cart is privet, although there was some wisteria and a few oak or pine saplings (very fortunately, there's no poison ivy in the area I was cutting).  Before loading, I trimmed everything to be about 4-6 feet long so that I could still get a decent grip on the handle.  Here's a side view:

When dumped into the truck bed, before stomping the load down, the one load from the cart looked like this:

I'm impressed with its hauling ability.

Volunteer Pines

In the south, pines are weeds.  There are some varieties that are nice, and all are useful for lumber or pulp, but for a homeowner with land, they're just a pain.  When I bought my house a few years ago, it was pretty clear of volunteer pines.  The house had been vacant for a while, and the upkeep was limited in some respects, but the approach to the house and the back yard were in relatively good shape.  A few years later a number of pines had grown up, and I cut a lot down with my clearing saw.

Fast foward two years, and the ones I didn't get last time have grown up (in some cases they were too small to cut with the saw (the stems just bent away from the saw blade)].  Then others have grown up as well, and some of the ones I cut two years ago coppiced (small shoots grew out from the trunk below where I cut, in turn growing taller themselves).

So I went to work.  One area was dense enough that I was able to make pretty short work of them with a pair of loppers.  The stems were so soft that I could cut even fairly large ones easily.

Based on size, these were probably up to about four years old.  Most were probably a couple of years old, which sounds about right given the last time I cleared the area.

A few were as large as 2" in diameter near the base, but most were  1.5" or less.  Probably a third of them were slender stems with plants that were 18" to 2' in height, just 1-2 years old.  And there were some sprouts, which I just pulled.

After about an hour of work, the area above looked like this:

Most of them are on the ground and stacked in the foreground of the photo. You can still see additional standing pines to the left and more up near the house.  After another hours' work, the lower ones are all gone and about half of the ones up near the house have been felled, as well.  They're all loaded on the truck now for a trip to a mulching place.

Before hauling them, I'll strap them down to hold them in place.  This is probably 300-400 trees.

After this, I have plenty of other pines.  There are some in an overgrown pasture that are now over 10 years old, so they're pretty large.  And I have others that are 5-10 years of age, plenty tall in their own right.  The older ones have some value as firewood, but the stems in the truck above are too small to make that worthwhile.  Stripping the side branches and cutting the stems to length wouldn't be worth the effort.