Reclaiming overgrown land

   / Reclaiming overgrown land #11  
Nice project and pics! (by the way, I'd like to see some of them larger and play that video, but they all link to a yahoo page requiring a login I do not have)

I love the topography of your land. 16 acres through that ravine and it was dry enough to work the soil that easily? Is there normally a small creek in there?

My own 19 acres of land was also regrown, young forest full of nasty saplings and invasive bushes. I started by brush hogging mostly, but had enough 3"+ trees and large bushes that I found it easier to carefully bulldoze with my front loader and just get a lot of the stuff dug out, stumps and all. But if your brush hog is chopping through easily and leaving nice, blown out little stump fragments, I wouldn't even work the soil at all. Just keep mowing for a couple years and the grasses will take over. The little stumps will just start to disappear, and you can leave all that nice top soil in place.
 
   / Reclaiming overgrown land
  • Thread Starter
#12  
Deezler thanks for pointing that out. I have changed permission settings to public on the photos now. You should be able to open them larger including the video.

The ravine has a small amount of water about 50 yards east. We have had no snow this winter and rain for some time. Everything is really dry so I'm glad to see some storms today. Usually the bottom of that area is always somewhat wet. I agree with you on the stumps. Anything that will hurt a finish mower I've cut down to soil level. The rest I will leave as suggested.
 
   / Reclaiming overgrown land #14  
For the ads most browsers have a "private mode". You have to start it up each time you open the browser but it will cover your tracks enough that the ads don't pop up.
 
   / Reclaiming overgrown land
  • Thread Starter
#16  
TheMan419 said:
For the ads most browsers have a "private mode". You have to start it up each time you open the browser but it will cover your tracks enough that the ads don't pop up.
Click to expand...

Too late for that. My wife is already on to me and probably has a count on my implements. A couple of years ago I made the mistake of organizing all of them in a nice row instead of leaving them scattered around the property. She immediately asked when I bought two of them I had had for a few years. Lol.
 
   / Reclaiming overgrown land
  • Thread Starter
#17  
Re-posting my aerial pic from google earth. Not sure how but I managed to delete that post clicking from my phone. Red box is the area I am clearing. Yellow line is the ravine. Three sides of the ravine form a bowl that water flows from.

aerial
 
   / Reclaiming overgrown land #18  
Any osage orange over 4-5" in diameter will make a great fence post. They are ugly and crooked but rot resistant. You may not have a fence planned now, but you might want one in the future. Just cut them up into 7.5 foot lengths and pile them up out in the woods. That pile will still be a good resource 70-80 years from now...
 
   / Reclaiming overgrown land
  • Thread Starter
#19  
Osage orange also makes some really good firewood. Have to be careful not to burn too much at a time.
 
   / Reclaiming overgrown land #20  
jk96, looking at your pictures, a forestry mulcher would make short work of clearing your land. That's if you wanted to hire the work out and there were contractors with such equipment available for hire in your neck of the woods. A forestry mulching machine would shred and chip that including the roots in no time. No stumpage at all left sticking out of the ground.

I have watched them go through the woods like a Tasmanian Devil :shocked: clearing right-of-ways, ATV trails, food plot areas, etc.
 
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