Forestry mulching in Old Fort, TN

Brush doesn’t stand still. A fescue field left alone for a few seasons fills in with briars, sweetgum, and cedar seedlings; a few years later the saplings are too thick to bush-hog. Every season you wait adds diameter to the trees and hours to the machine time.

• Your bush hog can’t get through anymore; the saplings are too thick or too tall.
• Eastern red cedar, sweetgum, or pine seedlings are spreading across pasture or hayfield.
• Privet, honeysuckle, or briars have closed off the woods so you can’t walk through them.
• You can’t see or reach your fence line to repair it.
• Pond banks or ditch lines have grown over and are hard to mow.
• You want a view, trail, food plot, or shooting lane opened without clear-cutting.
• You’re getting ready to survey, list, sell, or build and need to see what the land actually looks like.

Forestry mulching is single-pass clearing: one machine cuts, grinds, and spreads vegetation in place, so the ground underneath stays covered and intact.

Walk-through, with keeper trees flagged first

Before any equipment moves, Ronald walks the property with you. Shade trees, specimen oaks, and anything else you want to keep get flagged, along with property corners and fence lines, and you point out wells, septic fields, and private buried lines. Nothing gets mulched that you haven’t agreed to on the ground.

Brush and trees ground in place

The work is done with a forestry mulching head mounted on an excavator or skid steer. Its drum spins carbide teeth that chew through vines, briars, and saplings, which makes it just as useful for brush mulching and underbrush clearing under a stand of hardwoods as for opening a field. Trees up to roughly 6 to 8 inches in diameter are ground from the top down into chips. Stumps of mulched trees are ground off near ground level rather than pulled out, which is what keeps the soil and root mat in place.

Excavator reach for slopes, fence lines, and pond banks

Ronald’s Kubota excavator carries a cutting attachment on its arm. That reach lets him work down a ditch bank, along a pond edge, or tight to a fence line while the tracks stay on stable ground, which matters on the steep ground common through Polk and Bradley counties.

Mulch left as ground cover, property left finished

The ground material stays as a mulch layer that slows runoff and breaks down into the soil. There’s nothing to haul and nothing to burn. Before leaving, Ronald takes extra time to spread out heavy mulch piles and clean up the edges, so the property looks finished, not just cleared. You don’t need to be home while the machine runs once the flagged plan is set.

Cedar and sweetgum taking back pasture. Old hayfields and pasture in Polk and Bradley counties revert to eastern red cedar and sweetgum fast. Cedar is an ideal mulching target because it doesn’t resprout from a stump cut below its lowest green branches. Sweetgum and most hardwoods do resprout and need a follow-up mowing.

Privet and honeysuckle closing off the woods. Chinese privet and Amur honeysuckle are both on the Tennessee Division of Forestry’s list of invasive plants, and both form a wall under the canopy that you can’t walk through. Mulching opens the understory, but both resprout from the roots, so plan a follow-up pass or herbicide treatment next season.

Red clay that washes when it’s stripped bare. Clay ground here erodes quickly once the cover is gone. Bulldozing pushes topsoil into windrows and leaves the ground raw; mulching leaves the root mat in place and adds a protective layer on top. When you do need bare dirt for a house pad or driveway, that’s full land clearing.

Old structures hidden in the brush. Overgrown tracts often hide a collapsed shed, old trailer, or outbuilding. Once mulching opens the ground, R&G’s residential demolition service can tear it down and haul it off.