Dead tree management advice
 

On the basis of SteveD's plumbing advice thread...

Now that I've taken the initiative to cut down some of the dead trees and crap in my back yard, I have a big pile of dead tree and crap. It's all pine, so I can't burn it in the fireplace. What do I do now?

Do I rent a chipper and haul it back to my place and chip it all up? What do I do with the chips? Can I use them as mulch around new and old trees?

Or do I call "some guy" and also tell him to remove the two other 20' dead trees as well?

Buy a chiminea and burn it at your leisure on cool nights out on the deck?

You can chip it and have a hell of a lot of mulch, too. Perhaps your neighbors would want some? Pine mulch is, if memory serves, pretty effective at cutting down on fungi and bugs.

Hey I'm a fungi!

Do people not use it as landscaping mulch because it looks like wood? Is landscaping mulch just wood that they coated with some sort of evil smelling crap?

'toad,

Found a link for you: http://www.earthproducts.net/products/mulch.html

Seems to be no major problems with using pine for mulch. I have been warned against using pine chunks in a wood BBQ smoker, though; apparently the resins produce an unpleasant taste and may make anybody eating meat smoked over pine wood sick.

I just last week mulched my side yard, but used cypress mulch (which seems to be most common).

(And boy, was that fun! :neutral: )

Put it in the back of your shiny, new pickup, and bring it to Forks. We don't care what we burn, just so long as it's not the house, any of the horses, or the guests.

. . . . in that order, no doubt.

....eagerly waits footage of Philly Chainsaw Massacre....

I have enough dead wood here to burn AND mulch.

But I still don't get it - the pine mulch in those pictures doesn't look like shredded pine wood, even if you include the crappy bark that's still on these trees. How do they make it dark-colored?

They dye it. Don't ask me why.

The pine in the southeast must be different.....that sure doesn't look like white pine or yellow pine.....unless it's all bark.

You could build a split rail fence around your property, just like Abe Lincoln.

If you wait a couple weeks, until I get my old truck back on the road, I can take some that off you. IT's NOT going in my new truck. :D

Get your self one of these bad boys ,
http://www.slashbuster.com/brushcutters.htm

and then mix it all up with one of these Big ass eggbeaters !!
http://www.slashbuster.com/stirat.htm

If you can get it chipped up, it's great mulch. I doens't have any magical weed suppression properties any more than any other mulch - 3" thick of any wood mulch, and you are pretty much ok.
If you get much rain, pine mulch can increase the acidity in your soil (not bad for a bed of azaleas or rhododendrons). If you are worried, throw a couple handfulls of lime powder on top once you've spread it.

Doesn't pine mulch lock up certain minerals in soils therefore causing nutient deficiencies? I'm pretty sure I once saw/read/heard that somewhere.

ya got more energy than I do to grow through all the mulching and what have ya..... I'd just get somebody to hual the crap off. (If they were pecan trees, that'd be a different story.... Down here, pine trees are crap, unless the paper-mill farms them)

Whatever you do, do it reasonably soon. In a scene right out of a bad, made-for-TV, Michael-Crichton-wannabe novel, that black cloud in the distance is every termite north of Richmond and East of Detroit heading straight for your backyard. Apparently one of the little bastards figured out how to log onto the Cellar and *GASP* they're text-messaging each other!

Then again, maybe not.