Planting in a woodchip/sawdust log landing? How Early to get rye to overwinter?

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5 year old buck +
Looking to get a log landing converted to a food plot. Open areas are hard to come by in my logging company lease.

The loggers chip trees for pulp, so there rotting chips everywhere. Beech and birch are starting to pop through, which Ill take care of. The nighboring section of the clearing is low pH sandy soil with weeds that grow in porr soils.

My plan is to make it a volunteer rye field for 3 years or so to build up soil quality, with me adding seed annually too. With the rotting chips and sawdust, I ghave no clue how to get a soil sampole for this? Doing a 3/4 ton / acre liming sometime in june. Can I plant the rye then and expect it to over winter? Plan B might be to oat and clover the spot in june, then lightly harrow and seed rye in august.

I plan on bring home a few 5 gallon buckets of the "soil" and doing small seed experiments.
 
If it was me I would get out there with a landscape rake and scrape as much of those wood chips off of the soil that I could before I even though about planting anything. It will take years for them to decompose.

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If it was me I would get out there with a landscape rake and scrape as much of those wood chips off of the soil that I could before I even though about planting anything. It will take years for them to decompose.

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What he said ^^^^^^
 
Looking to get a log landing converted to a food plot. Open areas are hard to come by in my logging company lease.

The loggers chip trees for pulp, so there rotting chips everywhere. Beech and birch are starting to pop through, which Ill take care of. The nighboring section of the clearing is low pH sandy soil with weeds that grow in porr soils.

My plan is to make it a volunteer rye field for 3 years or so to build up soil quality, with me adding seed annually too. With the rotting chips and sawdust, I ghave no clue how to get a soil sampole for this? Doing a 3/4 ton / acre liming sometime in june. Can I plant the rye then and expect it to over winter? Plan B might be to oat and clover the spot in june, then lightly harrow and seed rye in august.

I plan on bring home a few 5 gallon buckets of the "soil" and doing small seed experiments.

Here is what I'd do:

I would use the lime recommendation in terms of tons/ac from the neighboring plot to start. I would do no tillage, just apply the lime to the surface. Next, I would include an annual clover with the WR seed that is right for your area. Crimson works here, berseem works better in some areas. You might even try a short-lived perennial like medium red. The decomposition of the wood chips is good to build OM, but it will take time and will tie up N as part of the process. Adding a legume will help add N and speed up the process as well as benefit the WR.

I would not get rid of the chips with a landscape rake. With sandy soil, it will take a long time to build OM no matter how you do it. The wood chips provide the carbon half already. I've seen guys add wood chips to help build OM.

Best of luck,

Jack
 
I've never been in this boat before, but here's what I'd try. If it's sandy, I'd jump right to 1-ton of dolomitic lime without even testing. I'd leave the rye out and plant a low carbon blend instead. Those wood chips are a high carbon load and that's why nothing grows well for at least a couple years. Once they turn, they add nicely to the situation. Whip up a cocktail of sweet clovers, hairy vetch, collards, buckwheat, fixation balansa, flax, sunflowers, ragweed, and chicory. If it grows, let it grow and grow. A spot like this calls for a year or even two focused only on getting the soil working.

300 lbs/ac of gypsum is going to go a long way to helping your soil crank up natural nitrogen output to speed up the breakdown of those chips too.
 
I've never been in this boat before, but here's what I'd try. If it's sandy, I'd jump right to 1-ton of dolomitic lime without even testing. I'd leave the rye out and plant a low carbon blend instead. Those wood chips are a high carbon load and that's why nothing grows well for at least a couple years. Once they turn, they add nicely to the situation. Whip up a cocktail of sweet clovers, hairy vetch, collards, buckwheat, fixation balansa, flax, sunflowers, ragweed, and chicory. If it grows, let it grow and grow. A spot like this calls for a year or even two focused only on getting the soil working.

300 lbs/ac of gypsum is going to go a long way to helping your soil crank up natural nitrogen output to speed up the breakdown of those chips too.

I agree that he doesn't need the C of the WR, but I do like several other things it provides. First, I like the root system it provides below the soil. Second, I like the fact that letting it go to seed will provide a volunteer crop. On the other hand, what he really needs to add is N and the legumes will help with that.

Now, I would not make this as a general recommendation, but I do have another idea. As always when I discuss bicolor lespedeza, I need to note that it can become invasive in some situations, but it has worked well for me over the years. It is a perennial legume. It can take a bit to establish, but once established, it can fix a lot of N deep into the soil. I have one example that amazed me.

As many of you know, we have a lot of native persimmons growing at the farm. I often wait until they are 1" or more in diameter and then graft them over to some variety (or even native) with female scions. It can take a lot of years before a native tree is large enough to graft. Our primary use of bicolor is to break up a pipeline in to smaller fields. It provides great cover for game to cross the pipeline. Because it is on the pipeline, we have to keep any trees that grow up in it cut down or the pipeline company will mow it flat. They are OK with bicolor as the roots are not deep enough to impinge on the pipeline, but they won't allow trees on the easement. It has worked very well over the years for us for that purpose.

We have another small field that is exposed to a neighbors house. We did not want the temptation of them seeing deer in the plot and taking a shot, so we planted bicolor as a screen. It worked well. It wasn't long before I noticed persimmons growing in it. They really shot up much faster than any of our other persimmons. They are ready to graft just a few years after I noticed them growing in the bicolor. I'm attributing that to the N fixed by the bicolor

Once established, bicolor needs only to be either mowed high or burned every 3 or 4 years to keep the stand healthy.

One more annual crop to consider that pairs well with buckwheat is Sunn Hemp. It is a warm season annual like buckwheat, but it can fix a lot of N into the soil as well.

Thanks,

Jack
 
I've got two logging decks that are now 4+ years old. I suppose these decks comprise about 2 acres. Got all the wood debris possible cleaned off this land the first year after logging but lots of chips remain. It's sandy. Tried buckwheat after the first year and it never amounted to much. I have left it mostly barren until last fall when I tried a strip with my drill.....and put in a combination of 10 seeds including rye. Some seems to have taken as of last fall.....and I have not seen my land since then.

I will likely try buckwheat again this year in much of these areas.....and I have two strips I will focus my efforts to grow a blend. The past two years has turned these landings into a combination of scraggly jack pines, some raspberry bushes, lots of bull thistle (which I kill as much as I can) and various weeds. I did get the stumps out of these landings....so I got a clean canvass to experiment.
 
What everyone above said. Do what you want. Wood chips are NOT a good growing medium. The biggest problem I think of is the decay process. Those wood chips will suck the nitrogen from wherever it can be found. You can speed-up the decay process by applying N - although you won't mitigate much of the N robbery perpetuated by the chips. Whatever you might get to maybe grow will suffer. The other problem is the pore space - those pockets of air in the medium of wood chips. There are plenty of them - compared to those found in your soil. Air is good until there's too much. Lot's of air leads to potential root desiccation. No water to the root no green plant.
 
I've got two logging decks that are now 4+ years old. I suppose these decks comprise about 2 acres. Got all the wood debris possible cleaned off this land the first year after logging but lots of chips remain. It's sandy. Tried buckwheat after the first year and it never amounted to much. I have left it mostly barren until last fall when I tried a strip with my drill.....and put in a combination of 10 seeds including rye. Some seems to have taken as of last fall.....and I have not seen my land since then.

I will likely try buckwheat again this year in much of these areas.....and I have two strips I will focus my efforts to grow a blend. The past two years has turned these landings into a combination of scraggly jack pines, some raspberry bushes, lots of bull thistle (which I kill as much as I can) and various weeds. I did get the stumps out of these landings....so I got a clean canvass to experiment.

Logging must be different up your way. Down here, the old decks have no stumps or top soil. They just dozed everything in to piles on the sides. Over the years a lot of the stuff in these piles decomposed. Unlike you guys I have heavy clay. It required decompactions with a single shank ripper when I started. I then reclaimed as much of the topsoil in those piles as possible. It was a mix of topsoil and debris. I did remove any large debris. I then started the buckwheat and WR/CC cycling for two years before planting perennial clover with a WR nurse crop in the fall. These decks would not even grow weeds when I started but now are great food plots.

Since we purchased the pine farm, we include in our timber sale contracts a clause that requires loggers to get permission for location of decks, remove and save the top soil, decompress and reapply the top soil and seed with WR. It is much faster for me to turn these into food plots.

I find decks growing weeds a good thing. As long as you don't have a specific problematic weed (I know thistle can be one), they contribute to soil health as well and I would not spray them. Instead I'd just mow them. Mowing raspberry/blackberry works great. They are great wildlife food when they pop back up.

I think a lot for the OP depends on just how much is there in terms of wood chips. A real thick blanket can be problematic as FarmerDan says. Here, they take most everything. What is left is more sawdust type debris, not large chunks on the deck when they are done. The worst issue I have is when they have a hydraulic line break or get an oil leak. They generally don't do the cleanup the contract calls for. I usually end up with a few dead spots. This doesn't seem to affect the overall field. There is an N tie-up for a few years, but not bad enough to keep legumes from correcting it and getting back to normal nutrient cycling before long.

Keep in mind that while both sandy and clay soils benefit from increased OM, they do behave differently. I think tillage is even more problematic in sandy soils than heavy clay. Nutrients and amendments move through sand very fast and through clay very slowly. It may take longer for the process to balance on sandy soils as you may be losing nutrients faster than with clay while building them.

Thanks,

Jack
 
My forester found a great logger for my purposes. He reduced most of the tops and slash to chips and hauled them away in trailers (went to Duluth MN as fuel). I forget how much I got paid for those chip trailers....but it was quite a substantial part of the total. There was some remaining slash they dozed into a pile and I was able to burn much of that the following winter. The logger basically cleared an area in my pines to use for a landing.....and after that I had him use a huge forestry mulcher (8 feet wide / 400 HP) to take out many of the stumps and remaining debris for my food plots. I then used my tractor and stump grinder to take out a few more he had missed. Then a landscape rake and lots of hand work to clean up about 4 or 5 acres for food plots. I was still in my tillage mode so I disked and then tilled these areas and pulled out roots and wood chunks. It's clean now. <---those areas make great food plots. The landings?....not so much.

The guy that ran the mulcher was the logging company owner. He was testing a large forestry mulcher in order to possibly buy it. Told me that if I paid him for a set of knives ($900) he would take the stumps to below ground level. Which he did. He did hit a few rocks as well....which really takes those knives down. Basically disintegrates 'em. It was well worth the cost to me as I would have been grinding stumps for a few years without his machine. When he would come to a stump.....you could hear the load increase....and a second later the stump was gone. Basically he was running a tiller to about 6" below grade in most of the areas I had him work. I doubt many would abuse their machine they was he used this. He spent about 6 hours in that machine as I watched him work and showed him where to go. .....I have a video somewhere.
 
I would attempt to take and remove the bigger pieces, plant winter rye, and clover in it this fall, along with lime, and your other soil amendments. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to add some urea to the fertilizer to help break down the wood. Do this for a couple years, and your soil should improve a lot.
 
Whole area is raised up about 3ft of chips, junk branches, knotted y sections, rotted logs.

I have to take a close look at it next time I'm up there. There may be general better areas than others.

The added bonus of this large area, is there's older logging roads branching from there, so I can have a few 100 yard food plotted lanes there too.

Ontop of that there a large rock next to a mud put in that open area. I plant fruit trees around the lage rocks, so the logging skidders stay away from them. My Asain plum experiment worked pretty good so far, no cages and every one is stil not munched to death by snowshoe hares. I'll be painting the bottoms of the plums to keep their teeth out of em.


So.... How soon is too soon to make Rye overwinter? Average 1st frost is sept 1 to sept 10th or so.
 
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I plant rye early July.
 
My forester found a great logger for my purposes. He reduced most of the tops and slash to chips and hauled them away in trailers (went to Duluth MN as fuel). I forget how much I got paid for those chip trailers....but it was quite a substantial part of the total. There was some remaining slash they dozed into a pile and I was able to burn much of that the following winter. The logger basically cleared an area in my pines to use for a landing.....and after that I had him use a huge forestry mulcher (8 feet wide / 400 HP) to take out many of the stumps and remaining debris for my food plots. I then used my tractor and stump grinder to take out a few more he had missed. Then a landscape rake and lots of hand work to clean up about 4 or 5 acres for food plots. I was still in my tillage mode so I disked and then tilled these areas and pulled out roots and wood chunks. It's clean now. <---those areas make great food plots. The landings?....not so much.

The guy that ran the mulcher was the logging company owner. He was testing a large forestry mulcher in order to possibly buy it. Told me that if I paid him for a set of knives ($900) he would take the stumps to below ground level. Which he did. He did hit a few rocks as well....which really takes those knives down. Basically disintegrates 'em. It was well worth the cost to me as I would have been grinding stumps for a few years without his machine. When he would come to a stump.....you could hear the load increase....and a second later the stump was gone. Basically he was running a tiller to about 6" below grade in most of the areas I had him work. I doubt many would abuse their machine they was he used this. He spent about 6 hours in that machine as I watched him work and showed him where to go. .....I have a video somewhere.

Did the chipper look like this one Foggy?

They opened up 3 separate chipping areas on one of my timber sales - all a half acre or less, but as you say the semi truck/trailers need room to get in and get loaded. I think the sale where they did the chipping was around 2013. They paid me the grand sum of $1/ton for the chipped tops. I was just happy to get rid of them that year because we had had an infestation of spruce budworm and they took out almost all of mine while they still has some value. I got paid $1,200 for 1,200 tons of tops and I didn't have to worry about a forest fire from all those conifer tops laying around.

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This is the machine that feeds the tops into the chipper.

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It sure leaves a mess when they are done but this is what all 16 acres of my food plots looked like before they were food plots. And with all the rocks we have there is no using any kind of mulcher for the stumps - we have to use bull dozers or excavators.

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Here is a thread with lots of photos which shows where the food plots went from here:

Another "Creating a Food Plot" thread:
 
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Whole area is raised up about 3ft of chips, junk branches, knotted y sections, rotted logs.

I have to take a close look at it next time I'm up there. There may be general better areas than others.

The added bonus of this large area, is there's older logging roads branching from there, so I can have a few 100 yard food plotted lanes there too.

Ontop of that there a large rock next to a mud put in that open area. I plant fruit trees around the lage rocks, so the logging skidders stay away from them. My Asain plum experiment worked pretty good so far, no cages and every one is stil not munched to death by snowshoe hares. I'll be painting the bottoms of the plums to keep their teeth out of em.


So.... How soon is too soon to make Rye overwinter? Average 1st frost is sept 1 to sept 10th or so.
3 FEET of chips and chit?? That is ALLOT...IMO. I think you got a ten year + wait to let that decay enough for plotting. No? I'd say you need to get that broken down to grow anything there. Maybe the mulching tip would help?
 
^^. No.....the mulching machine looked more like one of these guys.....I think it was 300 HP and the largest in Northern MN.
 

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Check this beast out. I'm fairly certain it was a machine like this he was renting....before he bought one. I had all red pine stumps.....so he took them out pretty easily and deep. I did not have too many rocks....but when he would hit one of them.....it just destroyed the rock into gravel......and in the process wearing the teeth significantly. Of course he had already taken all the standing timber.....so this was mostly about stumps and remaining slash after logging. It made pretty good food plots .....instantly.

This logger used a stroke - delimbier.....and then would feed the limbs into the mulcher that blew the chips into walking floor trailers....as he cut the logs to length....all in one machine. He had it down to an art. Great equipment for our neck of the woods.....and for deer plotters like us. Didn't leave too much trash.....but they all do to some extent.
 
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Wow! That machine is a beast!
 
Wow! That machine is a beast!
Yep. Now I see what you were telling me about a chip making machine. He did have one similar what you show in your pic too....and they used it to fill the chip trailers. The mulcher however was used to open up additional food plot land. Both machines had their place in the logging operation at my place....along with a burn pile. Logging is a trashy business.
 
You know the machine is serious when the sign reads to stay back 400 ft.
 
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