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Yesterday I started clearing a new section of forest that I hope will soon be arable land. In the past I have described how you can use animals to go from woods to field without a lot of money, but I never described how the wood harvesting should go for optimum speed. I try to do this either in the fall or in the spring when the leaves are not on the ground, but not in the winter when the snow is deep, otherwise you get high stumps.
I found out the hard way that the very first thing to do is go into the section you want cleared and cut the saplings and unharvestable dead trees down. This is the hardest part, and uses up gasoline and bar oil, but its vital. By getting all the non-harvestable wood out of the way first, you can see what you have for harvested trees. Believe me its amazing at how different the area looks. This is important because I often find a section of woods looks overwhelming before I cut the saplings and non harvestable wood, but afterwords it looks so much more doable. As I stated in another post, you can use many of these saplings to use as fence posts too.
The next step is to harvest all the hardwood trees. I do this because with the leaves off the trees, there does not seem to be as much mess to walk over when you go back and do the third step.
That third step is harvesting the soft wood trees. Because they always have their needles on (save for the hackmatack of course) it makes for a real mess out in the woods, so trying to work on top of them is a pain. I get everything else out of the way first and then work on them last. It also does one other thing. Because of all those branches and needles, the areas skyline does not change much until they are cut. Before they are cut it does not look like you did much, but once those trees are removed, it looks as if you cleared a bunch of acres overnight when in reality it took a few days.
Time wise, it takes me 2 days to clear an acre of forest of saplings, about two more days to cut all the hardwood trees, and then about a day to harvest the softwoods...for a total of 5 days at 8-10 hour days of very hard labor. Of course that is just a rough estimate of time per acre so you get an idea of how I clear forest into arable land. Piling the brush with equipment takes about 3 hours per acre, but stumping takes all day for an acre of ground.
Hope this helps someone out there.
I love vegetarians...slice them real thin, dip them in ranch dressing and they compliment lamb quite well! :-)
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| about using saplings for fence posts. i think that sounds great considering that the metal t-posts i planned on using cost 4.00 a piece which would come up to 1500 bucks to fence in a 900 x 200 area( just for the posts) that is if i spaced them every 6 feet but the ground is thickly covered with saplings i know there is locust which ive seen websites that sell locust fencing for a hefty price. so would i need to peel the bark off of them and would i need to paint the bottoms with tar or something and can you think of other varieties of trees that would work well i know i have alot of cedar as well thanks seth
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| Six foot spacing seems awfully close. We usually use ten foot. Twelve is stretching it a bit even with a couple stays in it. Cheers, Paul
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I go 15 feet apart, with the bark on, shoved into the ground 18 inches with the bucket of my tractor. Frost depth here is 3-4 feet so there is no possibly way of achieving that below-frost-level holy grail of fence post setting.
I do this mostly for costs, no so much because of the saplings (they are free) but because of the costs of insulators. With cattle its only a single wire, but with sheep it can be from 3-6 strands. That's a lot of insulators over a big field.
I love vegetarians...slice them real thin, dip them in ranch dressing and they compliment lamb quite well! :-)
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| hey drawbar hope you had a good vacation how long would you expect saplings used as fence posts to last
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