Boxelder in wetter wildlife area

S

saab900

Location
Upper Midwest
Hi everyone,
My first post here. I am trying to reclaim a floodplain wildlife area from reed canary grass, garlic mustard, and buckthorn. Boxelder does well in the area because the soils are wetter and calciferous. There really isn't much other overstory - a few black willow, quaking aspen, elm (a few make it past 25' before DED hits), green ash (all dying from EAB), black ash (EAB), cottonwood, and black cherry. The boxelder make up more of the overstory than other species due to shade tolerance an ability to compete in a few spots with buckthorn. The rest of the trees are near maturity and starting to die. When they fall down, they can't regenerate due to shading primarily from buckthorn and also from boxelder to a limited extent.

I have been trying to replant the area with Swamp White Oak, Red Maple, Silver Maple, Bur Oak, and Schuette's Oak (natural SWO / Bur hybrid).

My question is what to do with the boxelder. Two foresters have told me to get rid of it. Some are huge, 18" - 24"+ trunks. I have girdled them in some areas, and to be honest, I feel guilty / foolish for doing so. While not desirable wildlife trees, they were big, healthy, and not really a huge problem.

What do you all think?

Thanks.
 
You can (and probably should) incorporate brushpiles into your reclamation project... the undesirable trees can stay on the property and enhance your efforts. You're dealing with a number of invasive species, most notably the buckthorn and reed canarygrass, which are going to take a lot of effort and diligence to get rid of. You don't say how large the area is, but I presume you're talking about something considerably bigger than a backyard project.

I've burned both Boxelder and bison pies in a campfire... I prefer the smell of the bison crap. Acer negundo is lousy firewood, but is soft enough to be good for practicing your chainsaw carving skills. You could carve gnomes or giant frogs or something, but I think brushpiles would be the easiest thing to do with it. Only the Silver Maple trees you're planting are fast growing, so it seems to me that you might have to choose manageable chunks of the property and concentrate on keeping out the invasives and undesirable species in those areas until they start exhibiting the species makeup that you're after. If this is a very large area, trying to do what is essentially a long term project all at once will only frustrate you.
 
Hi Jeff,

Thank you for the advice. It is a larger area, about 6.5 acres in total. Overall the wooded area is 17 acres. So I took on about a third of it. I took on the project through a contract with the Natural Resource Conservation Service. I'm kind of wishing I hadn't right now....

In future areas, what would you do about the boxelder? Girdle it / get rid of it? Leave it grow?
 
My thoughts run along the lines of leaving the mature trees alone in areas where you haven't planted replacements. As you said, they're not hurting anything other than reproducing... which would still be a problem with those things if you only left one. I get the feeling that your goal isn't deforestation, but renovation. If you need more light in the understory, start thinning them. If there are lots of saplings of the undesirable species, I'd carry a jar of Tordon and a small paintbrush around as you cut those down. Paint the "stumps" right after cutting. In order to get desirable stuff going good, you've got to clear areas of the junk and diligently keep it out of that area until your plantings get well established. Problem with invasive plants is that they're really good at out-competing the native plants that you want to establish. If you plant stuff and walk away, the area will look just like it does now, when you come back in a year.

It's a very worthwhile thing that you're doing. It's more work than folks think, but extremely satisfying when things start coming together. I hope you stick with your plan.

In case you're not familiar with it, never spray Tordon. Only use it to kill the stumps... and paint it on the fresh cut. Smaller stuff, just paint the whole "top" of the stump, and bigger stuff you only need to paint about 2" in from the (bark) edge. You don't want the thing growing right back as you're walking away, and some of those trees seem to be able to do exactly that! ;)

Are you looking to plant forage shrubs, etc. as well? Again, I prefer to pick an area and clear the scrub out of there, and get a thicket of things like viburnum, sand cherries, chokecherry, etc. growing. I'll even put a few T-posts in and fence off the rabbits and deer for the first couple of winters, until they're established. Fruit trees, same thing. That's more work than most people want to do. The best thing, of course, is to stick with stuff that is indiginous to the area... even if it wasn't at that particular location. I don't know how much freedom your contract gives you. Around here, they give you a huge list of things they'd like to see you encourage or plant.
 
Hi Jeff,

Thank you very much for the encouragement. It's a daunting task. I have been painting stumps with 41% or 54% glyphosate with success. I don't use Tordon.

At this time I'm on the fence about the boxelder. I have girdled some in areas that I've replanted, but I feel guilty / foolish about that. I also removed some ash that was really poor form, 25' tall poles that sprouted/coppiced from old 30" diameter stumps. The ash were falling over because the stump rotted out and a crescent-shaped base was left.

For broadcast spraying, it depends on what I'm trying to eliminate. Garlic mustard and reed canary grass have shown sensitivity to glyphosate. However, buckthorn volunteers from the seed bank have not. I have had to resort to Crossbow (2,4-D and triclopyr) or straight 2,4-D or straight triclopyr (Garlon 3a) diluted to appropriate concentrations. I spray in the early fall at the latest if I'm planting in the spring.

The follow-up weed control is the really tough part. I'm going to try to go out tomorrow, but we've had so much rain in these parts that I don't think a billy goat mower is going to make it back there. The survivor trees are in shelters, but the shelters are a plastic mesh and the weeds grow like crazy.

I mention survivors because at the time I completed the contract with the NRCS, I wasn't able to shelter all of the trees. Every single tree that wasn't sheltered, oak, pine, maple, and tamarack, were all eaten by deer / rabbits. So I haven't thought about shrubs yet until I can get trees up above 5'.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.

New threads New posts

Back
Top Bottom