Invasive Trees to Mushrooms and Hugelkulture - an Experiment with Photos

Hi Friends,
We're trying an experiment, and thought I'd share photos and updates along the way here in case it's useful to anyone else - or anyone else has genius insights for us.
THE PROBLEM:
When we bought our property (suburban, 4a, .3 acre) there were a lot of young trees along the fence line and in old ornamental garden areas. Mostly Siberian Elm, but also a few Ash and Mulberry. These trees are causing several problems:
-Seeding more weed trees around the property
-Damaging the fence
-Shading out the best potentially sunny area of the yard (which is otherwise shaded by giant silver maples)
We want these trees gone... but we don't want to use poison or the traumatize either the soil or our bodies. We can't get a truck or tractor into the yard to pull them out.
THE DREAM:
What if we could remove them in a way that actually benefitted the ecosystem by keeping their biomass in the soil, breaking it down into useful organic matter, and jumpstarting the soil biology? And what if we could also get a good crop from the process? We want to try to take these suckers out with MUSHROOMS.
THE EXPERIMENT:
After researching our brains out, we realized that we weren't going to find step by step instructions for this, so we combined the best of what we found and thought we'd keep the community up to date in case it's useful to anyone else. Here is our plan:
-Cut the trees (except the fruiting mulberries!) at about chest height
-Girdle them near the ground (removing a couple inches of bark and the 'juicy' layers with a sharp knife) in hopes of limiting resprouting
-Wait a while for them to dry out before using plug spawn to inoculate with mushrooms.
-Meanwhile, use the cut branches to form our first ever hugelkultur beds in the newly sunny area. Plant these with a cover crop mix and hopefully with annual veg next spring.
And here are some pictures from step 1 (we spent the 4th of July weekend declaring our independence from Siberian Elm )

Right, here are those photos then:

Updates!
We cut and girdled the trees over the July 4 weekend. This week (about 2 weeks later) I went out there and saw that just about every cut tree was sprouting, both above and below the girdle. I'm disapointed - I had hoped that girdling would keep that to a minimum, or keep it below the girdle. I could also see on the cut end that they are starting to dry out though-- a lot less liquid coming up that way then there was a few weeks ago.
I took a sharp knife and basically gave every stump a shave. Cut off any piece of green that I could see. My idea at this point is to keep the tree from getting anymore resources through photosynthesis, and to force it to try to use up its remaining stored energy trying to send out shoots.
An accidental experiment: a few trees never got girdled, and now I'm going to leave them that way to see if the girdling is actually helpful. In my pretty unscientific observations so far, there wasn't much difference in sprouting between girdled and non-girdled trees. The biggest difference seemed to be how much sun they were getting.
We also left a few trees standing that weren't such a shade problem, and I'm going to experiment with girdling standing trees vs. cut ones as well.

Next steps:
1) Keep an eye on those shoots. Hopefully they will decrease and eventually stop if I keep cutting them
2) Prepare to inoculate!
To that end, I need a little mushroom advice. This is a pretty sunny spot... anyone have a good idea of a good sun tolerant mushroom for stump culture? Candidates I've thought about:
-Hypsizigus Ulmarius, because they seem well-suited to elm (but I'm having a hard time finding spawn)
-Turkey Tail, because they're apparently more sun tolerant and a fast decomposer (but not a great edible, so boo)
-Oysters, mostly because they are readily available
I could try messing around with shade cloth, but I don't have much time and bandwidth for this project and would rather keep it simple.

Bethany,

Interesting project.  I have a parallel situation.  I have a fence row inhabited by invasive autumn Olive.  I don’t try to eradicate, but I do trim back and chip the (substantial) trimmings.  Last time I probably got 8-10 cubic yards of chips.  These chips then get used for making 1’ high raised bed gardens.  Finally I inoculate these chips with Wine Caps to break down.

In your case you are trying to decompose in place.  If you were still at the beginning of this project I might have recommended keeping a couple of trees for shade just for the sake of growing some mushrooms.  I guess the challenge now is finding a sun tolerant shroom.  Turkey tail might work.  Wine Caps like some light (they prefer dappled light).  I will have to check on oyster mushrooms.

At any rate, I would suggest getting song plug spawn that you could hammer into little holes you drill in the the trunks.  I think the top sprouting will end soon so that wood should be dead and susceptible to fungi.

I guess at this point, maybe try to get some simple shade on the trunks and they should rot quickly.

Please keep us updated!

Eric

It would have been a good idea to leave a few for shade - I was focused on getting sun for my veggie gardens, but I could have achieved most of that goal and still had a bit of shade for my mushrooms. If this project works there's a whole different area of the yard I want to tackle, and I'll try it there.
I like your thinking--instead of destroying the unwanted plant, make it crank out a resource you can use! Maybe someday it will be worth it for me to get a chipper... in the meantime, I have to get my woodchips off site and find other purposes for my brushy stuff.

Bethany,

I don’t actually own a chipper.  For my purposes they are far too expensive.  Also I only trim my hedgerow every 2-5 years.  I cut up all my brush in advance then rent a chipper.  I find renting this way is much cheaper than buying and requires one last piece of equipment to own.

But that’s me and some like to do a little bit of chipping all the time.

Eric