Cedar Trees

Been noticing a lot of regrowth. Most are under 6Ft tall.

Anyone using an atv to clear small cedars? If so, what kind of implemenet are you using? Any other very effective methods?

Fire works real well......

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We have a friend that is a rancher, he uses a Bobcat mini excavator for brush removal. The brush includes, cedar, mesquite cactus, and weeds. If the invasive "stuff" can't be eaten by the cattle, it goes to his burn pile.

I've seen areas where cedars were cleared only to see after a year or two small cedars bushes popping back up.
They thrive, and the new cedars grow faster after they've been cleared.
Only way to keep them from taking over once again is stay on top of it.
It's easier to remove those foot high pencil thin cedars than those thick bushes that will soon take over.

The little ones come from berries. Grub them with a hoe.

Cedars are usually shallow rooted, so it takes less than you'd expect to push/ pull them out, trick is doing it without breaking them off. I have pushed them easily from a couple feet tall to over 20' with a tractor, 6 footers you may be able to chain and pull with the atv, but It may be hard on the tranny and may not be quick enough to cover much ground.

^^Fact.

The painstaking way is cut them off with a chainsaw, and spray the stump with 1 part Remedy : 4 parts diesel.

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Yep, and easy to remove. Grab the cedar with a good solid grip and you can yank it right out of the ground. The problems people have getting them out the easy way is when they get a little taller. .Once a cedar get 3 or 4 feet tall, you need a quarter to a half a stick of explosives to get the damn thing out of the ground.

If you know where some decent sized cedars are that have tiny tap roots, I need 12 fourt foot tall ones for a project; cash

A controlled burn is the fastest, most effective, also helps get rid of prickly pears, and improves rangeland.... I've been trying to get my uncle to set his place in Lampasas on a four year burn plan. Take the 300+ acres, divide it into four roughly equal parts and burn one 1/4 each year.......

He still pays a dozer guy.....costs more, and is less productive......

My granddad was a foreman on a ranch in Lampasas, which I think is the Cedar capital of Texas, and he hated cedars. His way of getting rid of them was to take a pear burner on a cold wet day and burn the young cedars down, the ones that were 3 ft high and smaller. He would walk from cedar to cedar, put the burner on them for a few seconds and done. I remember walking behind him and pulling the wagon. Labor intensive but effective.

Thanks everyone. These things are out of control.

Controlling cedar is a never ending ordeal.
Once you ease up even a little, the cedar always gains the upper hand in less time than it takes you to work at getting rid of it.

Spanish goats for the small ones

my dad dumped out 10 nannies and one billy goat (spanish) on 33 acres (with good fence), within 18 months, there were no more cedars (eaten into the dirt) ... Every nanny had twins that were all female the first go around and shortly thereafter, they were all bred and dumped twins again, the cycle continued until there was nothing left to eat. We loaded up 70+ goats and took to livestock auction and made a pretty healthy return on the investment plus they removed all the cedars.

Winning!!!

Fire is the way to go. We burn rotationally. Our place has never looked so good

For small numbers of trees, I think cutting them and spraying the stump is easiest. For a lot, fire sure sounds appealing.

My place is not very big (90 acres), and doesnt have many cedars at all at this point. And every January when the leaves are off of everything else I go through and cut and spray every one I can find. Usually take out 20-30 per year, either new ones, or ones I run across that I missed off in the brush in previous years.

Pretty easy to stay up on it at that rate with the chainsaw, but I could sure see it getting out of hand if I skipped a few years...

No need to spray cedar they don't do well after you cut them as in they will die but the stump will be there a 100 years. You can pull them or knock them over pretty easy. Burning is more fin

We have good luck just chopping them down to a stump, they won't regrow. And then in a few years go and push the stump over

I use basically a circular saw blade for weed-eaters (found them on Amazon). works great on the smaller ones, up to about 2" diameter. I can cut them as fast as I can walk, cutting them off ground level It's also good exercise. I use them until there torn up then toss them. Always keep spares around since they don't cut rocks!!

That is awesome.

There are two types.... the ones with red berries and the ones with blue berries.....one is in east Texas, the other west Texas. My uncle has both on his place in Lampasas. When you cut them one dies and the other sprouts from the stump and regrows.....I can't remember which is which.....fire hammers both of them. Had a wildfire burn about 5% of his place....took years for them to come back....figure animals replanted them.....




blue berry
red berry....

I was always told if you get all the green off of them (i.e. cut them off below the lowest limb) that they'll die. From what I've see it works. We have the type with blue berries.

Problem with pushing them is all the berries underneath them fall into the fresh ground and Boom, you've got a whole new crop of trees coming. I could see where fire would help with that.

Ours have blue berries, they will not regrow; at least they haven't yet.
We burn fields, but when you have fifty (or more) 15ft tall cedars under a big oak, it seems risky to burn them. So we (or ranch help) will cut them down under oaks, then grub hoe them every five years or so when they start to show themselves again.

I would cut them out from under the oaks and lower the fuel load under them then burn everything else. A little grass burning under the oaks wont hurt them.....best thing about a controlled burn is you choose the weather conditions for the fire.....we've all seen how bad late fall/mid-winter wildfires where the fuel load is high and high winds.....catastrophic!

I remember the grass fires going thru Cross Plains a few years ago....fire was moving 60+ miles an hour....

Remedy and diesel makes stumps rot.

I choose not to re-adress the problem a second time.

Power pellets

I drive through where the Wildcat fire burned north of San Angelo back in 2011. It took about 4 years to start seeing sprouts coming up from the cedar stumps in parts of the burn. Dang mesquite was sprouting out the following year.

Yep, my experience is cedar is a lot easier to eradicate than mesquite. Cedar is prolific, but several ways to kill. Mesquite doesn't die, it just tricks you and comes back with revenge in mind.