Forestry mulching

What it is

A forestry mulching head is a drum or disc of teeth on a carrier. It severs woody stems and breaks them into chips in the same pass. The target is brush and smaller trees, including Ashe juniper and mesquite. A finished building pad and a gravel road are different work. Hauling the chips away is its own scope.

When a landowner needs it

Use it when woody growth has closed a pasture, a fence, or the way across a tract, and when oaks or other trees should stay standing. It also fits a first pass that opens the ground enough to see the next scope. A house pad, a culvert, or a request for bare dirt is a different job.

Process and machines

The work starts with a walkthrough. Boundaries, trees to keep, and places a machine should not travel are marked before cutting starts. The carrier commonly used for this work is a skid steer or compact track loader with a forestry mulching head, or a purpose-built forestry mulcher. The teeth on the head do the grinding. The carrier moves that head through the stand. Slope, rock, and the gaps between trees decide whether that kind of machine can work the tract.

What changes the price

The price follows time on the machine. Dense stems, larger diameters, steep or rocky ground, a long carry from the road, and trees that must be worked around all add time. Hauling chips off takes more time than leaving them.

Season

Mulching can wound nearby oaks with the head or the carrier. Treat those wounds as oak wilt risk. Paint them the same day.

Do not wound oaks from February through June. Sap beetles that spread oak wilt are most active then, and a fresh cut is how the fungus gets in. Paint every oak wound immediately, in any month. Texas A&M Forest Service counts land clearing and cedar clearing as wound sources, the same as pruning. Texas Oak Wilt sets the window as February 1 through June 30 and includes fresh stumps and damaged roots.

Mulching leaves chips on the ground. If that material is piled to burn later, a county burn ban can stop the burn. A county judge or the commissioners court sets the ban, and Texas A&M Forest Service posts a statewide map of which counties are under one.

On the Edwards Plateau, golden-cheeked warblers nest in juniper-oak woodland. They return in early to mid-March, lay eggs in April, and leave from late June to mid-August. If the tract is that woodland, look at the calendar before opening it in spring.

Hill Country and South Texas ground

On the Edwards Plateau the woody cover is Ashe juniper and brush on shallow limestone. In Guadalupe and Wilson counties the cover is oak woodland and grassland on sand or clay. In Medina County the brush includes mesquite, and huisache is on the browse list. A mulching head is for those woody stems. Prickly pear is a cactus, so it is handled as a separate question from the woody brush.

Kendall, Bandera, and Comal counties sit on the Eastern Edwards Plateau: shallow soil over limestone, with Ashe juniper, honey mesquite, Texas red oak, and yaupon. Ashe juniper is the tree people call cedar. Guadalupe and Wilson counties are Post Oak Savannah, oak woodland and grassland on sand and clay. Medina County is South Texas Plains, where the brush is mesquite, acacia, and prickly pear. Huisache (Acacia farnesiana) is on the South Texas browse list, and it sprouts again on disturbed ground. The town pages describe the soils in each place.

What the land looks like afterward

Texas Oak Wilt says chipping exposes the oak wilt fungus to heat and drying that kill it, so chipping is one accepted way to dispose of infected red oak wood. Paint fresh cuts on healthy oaks anyway. Mulch from a cedar thicket is woody debris on the soil. Opened ground with a layer of that mulch is the result. Marked trees are still standing. The soil is still there, covered, and the site is not a building pad. Mesquite sprouts from a buried crown if only the top is cut, so a mulched stem can grow back. Follow-up is part of keeping a field open.