Tiffy: that's a big lasagna!

I would think that in yanking stuff out of the ground you probably unearthed a lot of seeds. Covering them and blocking light might keep those from coming up.

When I think "Canadian winter" my teeth start to chatter. Would a lasagna really keep the ground so warm in your winter weather?

Karen

Hi Tiffy, I like your way of thinking. My guess though is that the hardwoods will send up shoots anyway - the maples and alders for sure, the viburnums probably - nice browse for the moose - but not the evergreens. Cutting back the suckers every summer for a few years might do it. We're in a similar situation. Bringing in a machine to rip out the roots may be the only effective one-shot thing. Maybe somebody else here has a magic solution.

When I think "Canadian winter"

Actually you live in Nova Scotia's Banana Belt don't you Tiffy? Or closer to Halifax - I forget. Either way, milder than the northern States (and I'm not including Alaska).

Am I getting this right? Are you just cutting the trees/bushes down and leaving the stumps? If so, I learned the hard way that it is not a good idea with all species of trees. When you cut down trees like oaks and maples they put their energy into their tap roots then resprout with vigor. At this point they are even harder to get rid of. I think alders do this too. The same goes for some bushes. Trees like pine and spruce didn't do that. I had much better luck getting rid of it all by using a weedwrench.

IMO this is one of greatest tools to come down the pike and I wish I had one years ago! So far I have cleaned all the junk trees and bushes out of a half an acre at least. When I started the saplings/bushes were growing so close together that you couldn't walk through it. Now the trees/plants I wanted to keep have plenty of room to grow.
With a weedwrench you pull them root and all and you can do it with little or any disturbance to plants and trees around them. Or you can clear pretty much everything out if that is what you want. I have pulled out birch saplings over 10 feet tall! Pine is a piece of cake. Oaks are a different ball of wax.

If you don't know what a weedwrench is go to www.weedwrench.com.

If I am off track as to what you are trying to accomplish then hopefully it will help someone else.

Good luck with your project.

Mulch, mulch, mulch. Nature hates a vacuum, and bare earth is an invitation for something to move in. I cleared out a section of my yard last week, and I've got little green things popping up already because I didn't mulch immediately.

Since you left stumps and root systems, you're going to get a lot of sucker growth next year. Getting them out of the ground now is the best way to prevent it, or else you'll wind up spending the next few years cutting down suckers until the roots die of starvation. A weed wrench, as recommended above, is a very good way to get them out of the ground, whether you do it before the ground freezes this fall or as soon as things thaw in the spring.

Anything perennial is probably going to sprout again whether you cover it or not...

Mulch is going to inhibit new seedlings and annual weeds and is good for the soil biota.

I probably would mulch (or lasagna). Besides as fall approaches, you will need some place to stack those leaves, eh. Next spring when perennials start to sprout, you could hand pull them (or carefully spot treat them with glyphosphate, if you don't mind chems).

That looks like a dandy invention there, never-give-up. Whether it would work for alders...

Here is a link that might be useful: weedwrench

That weedwench looks mighty good, but not something I can get right now. Thanks for the info though.

Yep, our winters are a bit milder than most folks think Paul. The ground didn't freeze until mid-January last year and most times we have a lot more freeze/thaw action than I would like.

Not really concerned about seeds germinating - that I can deal with easily.

It would be a pretty big lasagna, but I do have access to free stuff in amounts some would drool over. I work at a Tim Horton's (Canada's busiest coffee shop chain) and in the last couple of days have been seeing how much UCGs I can get on my shift. I've managed to haul over 100 lbs in just four hours out of the restaurant. On the way home is a log home manufacturing place and in their yard is the biggest pile of kiln dried pine and cedar wood shavings. Just pull up and load. And, of course, I live one house away from the waters of the Atlantic which provide an abundance of seaweed. The neighbours really appreciate me cleaning it off their beaches. So piling stuff into this area is not an issue. Let's also not forget that leaf season is coming up and the shredder is ready to go.

DH is thinking of going after the stumps with an axe and just mutilating them... Waste of time? For the moment I think I will just pile my goodies on there. Maybe I'll do seaweed, then leaves, then UCGs, and finally wood shavings. Good order?

Thanks for all the input. Really appreciated!

Oh, Joe... A few years ago chems might have found their way into the equation here, but I raise Monarchs so can't use any on the property.

Just be aware that mulching and improving the soil will help the trees/shrubs that start sending up suckers. This may be a great way to have lots of organic material for the shredder/compost but it will take regular effort to keep those suckers cut down so that the roots will eventually die off.

Good luck

I just looked in on this thread.

Tiffy, last Autumn I cut back one of my older and largest beds clear to the ground and covered it with about a foot of grass clippings, chopped leaves and deciduous plant stems. I was hoping to smother the perennials. In spring about a third of them came back up but the most shallow rooted varieties did die.

When spring came around I had several cleared areas where I could stand and dig out or pry up the perens I didn't want, afterwards I had plenty of new planting areas with the remaining die-hard, deeply rooted plants.

Though I didn't get the entire bed smothered with 100% die-off as I had originally hoped, I was able to drastically change the flora there making it seem as if it were completely redone.

T--waving hi to JPW ;-)

I'd like to chime in. I don't have experience using this method over areas with previously growing trees but it sure worked for some things that were pretty tough (like giant wild blackberry bushes, vines with huge underground root systems and lots of tall woody-stemmed field weeds). In fact, this forum was the first place I learned of this method. Cardboard.

I now use it ANY TIME I am creating a new bed or I just want to get the weeds under control in certain areas without spending a fortune on brush killer. No longer do I try to dig up or spray weeds before planting. I just smother the entire area in a layer of overlapping cardboard so no sun gets through and then pile topsoil on top of that if I'm going to turn it into a flowerbed.

My current project is an 80-ft. x 6 ft. patch of land in between my daylily field and the gravel road. The weeds were so tough and tall here you couldn't see the daylilies in bloom beyond it. I'm not making this a flowerbed but I don't want it a weedy mess so this summer I covered the entire strip with heavy-duty cardboard and covered it with a shallow layer of mulch to keep the cardboard from blowing away and so it looks nice. EVERYTHING underneath has died and is staying dead. Every so often in the beginning a straggler will poke out around the edges trying to reach the sun and then I spray it a couple of times with some weed killer and it's a goner. I've told everyone I know how effective this is. This process may take a month or more to kill the weeds for good but I just do it a little at a time as I collect the cardboard (which is free from any Walmart, big box store, etc...). Now that it's dead I can take off the mulch and re-use it elsewhere or just let it continue to decompose there and improve the soil. After 3 months the cardboard is like paper and the remnants can simply be raked away or dug in when the area is planted. AWESOME TECHNIQUE and my thanks go out to whoever made the post where I first read about it.

Danielle

Soil should never be left bare and exposed to the ravages of the wind, rain, and sun. Soil should always be covered with something, mulch or something growing in that soil, a lesson that should have been learned during the 1930's but apparently was not. While there is a good chance you will have snow cover for a good part of this winter we have found, here, that because of changing climate this is not something we can count on, so some planting beds here are seeded with winter cover, often because it is readily available and inexpensive, of winter Rye.