By tilling wood chips into the soil, I hope to raise the levels of nitrogen after they break down. It will not happen right away, but eventually all that wood material will become black gold and make for some of the best soil possible to grow in. It starts by cutting down scrub trees and collecting their branches. The goal is to retain the old trees, wild nut producing hickory and chestnuts and wild fruit producing cherry trees.
The scrub trees are young saplings that have not been around much longer than 10 years, the property I own was clear cut previously so I stick to those areas to collect trees. So I can retain the old growth forests and other trees as mentioned before.
I mark the trees I want to keep with orange tape, it can be seen on the tree above.
This area above has already been selectively cleared of scrub trees, all that remain are black cherry trees. This should aid them in growing bigger with less competition around them now. We can see all the scrub trees growing back from where we cut them.. unless we pull up a tree by its roots chances are it will come back.
Using the grapple on the skidsteer we collect the trees already cut down, lining them up neatly is key so the grapple can get them in one shot.
As my foreman runs the skidsteer, I move more trees into piles for him to collect.
Some of the cut trees are too large to move by hand, but many can indeed be moved just by myself. So I do what I can on foot.
While cutting some areas I was able to make them fall in one direction. This will make collecting them easier.
Loving that grapple, its such a great attachment.
We drag the trees over to a marked area where we will run them through the wood chipper and then till them into the ground.
We spent a day doing just collection down downed trees, theres probably another days worth of work collecting all the ones in the forest the skidsteer cannot get to. Then we have a half days work chipping them all up, after that will add the wood wash and then time to till it all into the ground.
These lines of trees will all but pulverized into little pieces and made into piles for us to work into the soil.
We probably have no where enough wood for one acre, but if we need more nitrogen we can also buy it in granular form. But we do plan on tilling in grass this summer as well to help with increasing nitrogen into the soil. That will work much quicker than the wood chips, acting in just four to eight weeks. While the wood chips may take a whole year or longer to really start breaking down good.
Some of the trees we found out in the woods were perfect for firewood.. Too big for the chipper but perfect for the wood furnace. So as we got deeper in the woods we pulled out these dead trees that fell at some point. I cut them all up and stacked them near my wood furnace.
Got another tree that needs to be cut up, will add it to my wood pile. Always thankful to have more firewood.
So next we will go back into the woods and pull out what I cut, pile them up, mulch them and move onto the next steps in this project to plan to grow garlic on a commercial scale.
