Timber help

[aimfirst]

Hello all-I have 35 acres of timber in 2 tracts. One tract has a large portion in hickory. Smaller sized maybe 5-10 inches diameter with some larger ones. I have an infestation of prickly ash in some of those areas. Have any of you had luck with getting rid of pr ash? I have some tordon rtu and was just going to spend the winter slowly cut and painting but was wondering if I was wasting my time. I also have some 1-4 inch hornbeams that I would like to get rid of as well. I made the mistake of cutting those in years past and now have bushes sprouting. I am making an educated guess they are hornbeam/ironwood although at first I thought they were small elm. Any of you guys with experience with these problems I would appreciate the advice.

 

[jw_wildfire]

Give a call to you district forester and schedule an appointment to get them out and take a look. They will be able to write you a management plan that will get you on the right track. Just a quick thought would be prescribed fire. Fire is typically very effective at killing understory undesireable species, such as ironwood and prickly ash. Its hard to believe but as nasty as prickly ash can get it is actually a native species!

Here are the forester contacts:

http://www.iowadnr.gov/Environment/...ownerAssistance/DistrictForesterContacts.aspx

 

[raven]

What are your goals? Are they to enhance whitetail habitat quality? Make a park-like understory? Killing the understory, with a young overstory, won't really accomplish a whole lot in my opinion, unless you just want a clean forest floor.

 

[aimfirst]

my immediate goal is to not have an understory that is snarly and getting impossible to walk through. I'm afraid if I don't take care of them now they will get bigger and much tougher to get rid of. I just don't see seedling oaks/hickories having a chance to survive in that environment. My long term goal is good diverse habitat with a possible timber harvest in the future as icing on the cake so to speak but not something I am counting on. I'm just concerned that all I will have in this area is big prickly ash with nothing else growing and it is very tough to move through. I probably need to remove many of these pole sized hickories to allow more sunlight to forest floor so something other than pr ash grows, but I thought I would need to get the pr ash taken care of first or that is all I would have growing.