Are you anywhere near Athens, GA? I'm in Zone 8b, a pocket of Athens that's rated as such, but most of Athens is 8a. We had to have a bunch of diseased pines felled on the cheap, and we basically left most of them where they fell to rot down. We've got about 3/4 acre. We are renting, but the landlord is a friend and is giving me carte blanche to do whatever I think is best to improve the land.
I am a short seventysomething woman working by myself to develop this land. I have no heavy equipment; all I have is Mother Nature, who is actually pretty awesome in what she can do if you are patient. I started seven years ago eradicating English ivy that had climbed up into all the pines and sweetgums and undermined them. I had poison ivy, too, with twisting trunks of vines as big as a weightlifter's arms. I'm not poisoning anything now, but the poison ivy I did take triclopyr to in the first year or two, because otherwise it would have been hopeless. Now I am extremely vigilant with the ivies and pull them up whenever they try to reassert themselves. I did eliminate some wild muscadines that were not producing and choking out other things, but for the most part I've let the other stuff grow.
Pine sawyers were killing all the pines. I could hear them chewing up the trees from the inside. Bone-chilling sound! Awful! The trees were dangerous. I got somebody not insured to fell many. (When he dropped one that almost took off my neighbor's roof, we quit.) We have termites, too, but I let them do their work because they are not near the house. I'm keeping any felled wood away from the house. Plus, fortunately, my landlord has a termite inspection done every year.
I have dumped tons of wood chips and leaves on the ground. Passiflora incarnata vines come up everywhere, almost like they are invasives, but I figure they are healing the land. I pull them up in the areas I'm working on turning into "edibles" areas. I've plugged in any number of fruit trees (figs do extremely well here; half my plums and pears have died but half are making it), and I'm essentially fighting to keep the deer off of them until they are more mature, and then the guilds will go in.
Those pines, believe it or not, actually do rot down eventually. Periodically I go out with an axe and chop at them for as long as I am able to do it, and that seems to help. I've got piles that I've put black tarps over to knock back the vines (Passiflora, greenbriar now mostly) and I know there are voles and possums and other critters who take advantage of those spaces. I cut up a lot of the pine logs and turned them on end to make deer obstacles inside of the old chainlink fence on the property (this is an almost rural suburb), and I've definitely got insects drilling into them and helping rot them down.
This is all I can manage to do, but the birds must really love it because they come in droves. I've got mountain mint growing in clumps here and there, and I have never seen so many different pollinators in one place in my life! I've been able to watch the waves of this and that and the other insect come in and then be brought into balance by predators. One year the Joro spiders were everywhere...this year, not so much! Somebody is eating them for dinner....
As things rot, the soil improves. You know we have red Georgia clay. This lot had been scraped of all its topsoil so it was hard concrete-like clay pretty much, but slowly the soil is improving. I'm still working on nurturing the ecosystem, trying to bring things in balance. But this year, for the first year, after I deer-fenced a 48'x52' vegetable garden area, I have gotten more food than we can process and eat. There's still a ways to go, but when I look back and see what's been accomplished, I am heartened. The thrips and Japanese beetles ate all my fruit this year, but the trees themselves are healthy and I know it's just a matter of time before the lacewings start decimating the thrips. I used to have aphids everywhere, and they aren't a problem here anymore. The ants have moved further away from the house. I told them I was fine with them as long as they went off into the power easement and left my stuff alone!
mosquitoscreen by vwfatmobile, on Flickr
