Forestry Mulching

What forestry mulching actually is

Conventional clearing is three jobs pretending to be one: cut the material down, drag it somewhere, then get rid of it. The getting rid of it is usually the expensive part, because volume has to be chipped into a truck, hauled and dumped, or burned under whatever rules your municipality has that month.

Mulching collapses all of that into a single pass. A drum head on a skid steer or excavator takes standing stems and grinds them from the top down into chip, which drops where it stood. What you get at the end of the day is not a pile to deal with but a mulched surface you can walk on.

That makes it the right tool for volume of small material and the wrong tool for a few big trees. Anything beyond roughly six to eight inches through is faster and safer felled first, and a mature tree over a building is a climbing and rigging job, not a machine job. Most real sites are a mix, so the honest answer on a lot of quotes is that some of it gets mulched and some of it gets removed properly or cleared conventionally.

What it is good for

Reclaiming overgrown ground. Land nobody has touched in fifteen or twenty years, gone to Buckthorn, Wild Cherry, Manitoba Maple, Sumac and Dogwood. This is the single most common mulching job we get asked for, and it is what the machine is built for.

Trails and tracks. Cutting a trail network into bush, or reopening one that has closed in. Mulch underfoot is a genuinely good trail surface and it is already there rather than trucked in.

Fence lines and field edges. A wire fence that has become thirty feet of hedgerow, or a tree line quietly walking out into a field or paddock each year. Mulching puts the edge back without leaving a windrow of brush along it.

Under-canopy cleanup. Taking the scrub layer out from under mature trees you are keeping, which opens the ground up without touching the canopy above it.

Invasive control. Buckthorn in particular. It takes over the understorey, it holds its leaves late so you can still identify it when everything else is bare, and it is exactly the kind of dense small-diameter material a mulching head eats.

Right-of-way, laneways and access. Keeping a laneway, hydro run or access corridor open and wide enough for a delivery truck or a fire vehicle, overhead as well as either side.

The things people are not told

Mulching does not remove stumps. A head can take a stump down close to grade, but close to grade is not gone. If the ground has to be mowable, buildable or plantable, those stumps need grinding or excavating, and that is a separate line on the quote. Sort it out before the work rather than after.

Plenty of species come back. Buckthorn, Sumac, Manitoba Maple, Poplar and Wild Cherry all resprout from a cut stump, often harder than before, because the root system is still there and now has nothing to support. One pass buys you a season or two. Keeping ground clear long term means either a follow-up pass, mowing it as it comes, or cut-stump treatment by somebody licensed to apply it. Anyone who tells you one pass ends it permanently is selling you the next pass too.

The mulch layer has a depth limit. A thin, even layer is good for the site: it holds moisture, slows erosion on a slope and rots down into the soil. A deep pile on top of ground you want growing grass next spring is not. On a heavy stand the material has to be spread out rather than left where it fell, and that is part of the work, not an extra.

Rock and wire wreck teeth. Old fence wire buried in a hedgerow, field stone, scrap and dumped metal are the usual culprits. If you know about any of it, say so. It is a cheap conversation at the quote and an expensive one afterwards.

Ground, season and access

This is machine work and the ground has to take the machine. On the low wet ground around Lake Scugog, the creek flats and the clay through Courtice and Oshawa, mulching in a wet spring means ruts and compaction you will be repairing afterwards. Frozen ground or a genuinely dry spell is far better, and it is worth booking for conditions rather than for the calendar.

Winter has a second advantage beyond hard ground: no leaves. You can see the structure of what is actually there, what is worth keeping and where the ground goes, instead of guessing at a wall of green.

Before anything starts we will want to know about whatever is buried or fragile: septic beds and weeping tile, wells, buried hydro and water lines out to sheds and barns, old farm drainage tile, and any wall, monument or planting the machine should stay off. Old field tile is the one people forget, and it is easy to destroy and expensive to put back.

Permissions, and keeping the good trees

Clearing of any kind is the one area of this work where paperwork can cost more than machine time. Municipalities across Durham Region and Northumberland County have tree and woodlot by-laws, the Region and County have their own, and conservation authority rules apply near watercourses, wetlands, valley slopes and floodplains, which covers a great deal of ground around the Ganaraska, Graham and Wilmot Creeks, Lake Scugog and Rice Lake.

We are not a permit service and will not pretend to be your authority on it. What we will do is say plainly when a job looks like it needs a check first, and we would far rather ask that question at the quote than mulch something you did not have permission to touch.

The other thing worth saying before the machine starts: buried in most overgrown ground there are a few genuinely good trees, thirty or forty years of growth nobody can buy back. Walk the site with us and mark what stays. Mulching around good stems rather than through them costs a little more time and is the difference between cleared ground and a property worth having. Protecting what stays is its own piece of work, and there is more on that on the tree preservation page.