Clearing Woods for Apple Orchard. Advice on brush removal, Anyone do this? Looking for Advice.

First post here, and its going to be long but i will try to keep it as short as possible while still providing enough info. As the title says im looking for advice with my current plan of converting forest to apple orchard. It doesnt need to be really high producing, as i am intending it for household consumption, but given how long new trees take to produce i would like to get them in the ground if possible in the next year or two. Located in Maine, USA, zone 5a if that helps.

To start the story, over the last two years i have been working at clearing a roughly 1/2 acre section on the southern portion of my property. ~120’ north-south, 180’ east-west, with the goal of planting a small orchard for personal use (fresh eating, baking, and cider). The northern boundary of the future orchard butts up against existing field and garden, the southern end against my property line with woods on the other side. The east goes up to a small windbreak about 15’ wide, pretty much one single line of mature trees that will seperate the orchard from the road, and the west end joins up to existing field and an old tractor path accessing my back 5 acres of pine.

The entire area that is going to be in the orchard used to be field until probally 80 years ago. When i started clearing the land, it was dominated by white spruce, aspen, paper birch, and some red maple and white pine (pretty common mix for overgrown fields here). Besides the aspen pretty much everything left stumps with less than 5” diameter. All trees except for 5 or 6 have been dropped, and i am currently working on gathering what useable material there is for fence rails (my posts are all cedar) and firewood there is, and am also working on gathering up the worst of the brush into piles to eventually burn.

My main question is, how good of a job do i need to do in clearing all the brush / unuseable tops prior to planting apples. My goal is to have most brush and woody debris less than 1’ off the ground, with all brush being less than 2’ off the ground. 8 also plan to have all stumps cut as flush to the ground as possible. I have done alot of tree planting for sustainable forestry purposes through college, and that is usually how well removed brush is for the purpose, but there is a difference between planting apples and spruce. I expect most of the brush left behind would decompose to lying flat against the ground within 5-10 years, especially with our 3’ annual snowpack, and i would plan to remove more brush after planting as time goes on. I also plan to use a brush saw (think weedwacker with a metal blade), to keep the grass and other weeds trimmed to the height of the woody brush left behind until it is eventually cleared enough to get my mower in there, but that will be a ways out.

Basically, if i can access the ground where i want to plant each tree, and can get the tree planted, and protect each individual one with a tube to protect from rabbits, voles, etc, and a 6’ high hardwire cloth “enclosure” about 2’ away from the tree to protect from deer pressure, how bad would leaving the bulk of the tops and brush be (again if cleared so nothing is higher than 1-2’ off the ground”.

If the snow melts in the next few days i can also put up some pictures of how bad the brush is now where i havent started clearing it, and where it has already had the majority dragged out.

Thank you all very much.

Renting a machine, or a machine with operator can often do in a day what would take a decade to do by hand or natural decay.

Agree with Joseph.  I did 0.6 acres.  I hired a Forestry Mulcher.  Actually it was his son who did this on the weekend.  
It is a large spinning cylinder on the front of a skid steer and can completely take out trees 9 inches and smaller.  
For larger trees ask around for any wildcat loggers and trade the larger trees for stump and limb removal.  

I’d also endorse a day or week with an excavator. I’d also try to keep native mosaic areas as much as possible for ecological services and fertility.

Hi Jake,
Have you ever heard of Ernst Götch and syntropic farming? I love the concept and his work is fantastic!
The concept is based on natural succession of plants. It seems to me that nature might have done a lot of good in a 80 years of human neglect.
Honestly I don't have much experience with this method, but I would certainly look into it before destoying in a day what nature has been building underground fo 80 years.
I think it depends on the size of the trees that you are going to plant, and how easy it is to dig a hole for them. I think it would be possible to clear only small spaces for your trees, and manage their sunlight by cutting surrounding growt all year. It is something different, but I would give it a try.

I go with getting a machine and operator to remove the brush.   On a different topic, my biggest regret in putting in an orchard on my property 25 years ago  is not going with full sized trees.

Leaving brush to rot on the ground might help put nutrients back into the soil.

Leaving brush on the ground might also discourage some critters from damaging young trees.

When the trees are old enough to start to harvest might be a good time to remove any remaining brush to clear the way for harvesting equipment.

Site preparation for orchard is to some extent comparable to building foundation - it's difficult to change after the orchard is established.
I would recommend to dig all stumps and roots with a rented/hired excavator, use chipper for all wood material and mix it into the soil with deep plowing/ripping. This is how they prepare the ground for planting new orchards here. At that point I would also add some additional organic material - more if the soil has high clay contents. For the area of 2000 m2 it would be at least 200 m3 so rather impractical, so in case of poor soil it would be better to preserve the extra material for individual plants.
Most fruit trees prefer very well draining soil and it makes sense to ammend it just at the planting hole. If I hit a spot with high clay on my orchard when planting new trees I replace it with at least 50% compost and this year also started using coarse sand.
I would also second John on full size trees. Apples on Antonovka will be well anchored, will taste better, produce a lot, live long and look majestic after two decades - a heritage orchard. Fedco (in Maine!) has a good (maybe the best online) selection of apples on standard rootstock and I purchased from them in the past. Sone cultivars have died - being unfit for my climate, but the others are growing healthy.

Good luck with it, sounds like a brilliant project. One thing worth thinking about early is spacing and rootstock choice, because that's hard to change once they're in. Full size trees like John said are worth considering if you've got the room, especially for low maintenance.

Thanks for all the advice, as mentioned part of my thought is that the extra brush will eventually break down and provide nutrients and organic matter over the course of the coming decades, and i can always remove more of the brush over time as things get established.

In regards to tree selection i am considering semi dwarf or standard. I dont want to have to stake the trees, and want them well anchored on their own. Biggest thing with standard would be time to fruit, im fine with smallish harvests, but dont want to be waiting 10-15 years to get a single bag of apples, but i have read good things about the antonovka. To my knowledge though Fedco no longer offers trees using that as rootstock, and is instead using “malus domestica”, whatever that is.

For spacing if standard i am considering about a 30x30 (due to stumps and boulders might need to move off point abit here or there). Soil is a gravely loam, with some boulders, and is generally about 2’ to hardpan. Fedcos main semi-dwarf is a m111. My thought if i go semi dwarf would be 20x20 spacing or there abouts. Im not looking for overly high producing yeilds like stated, so if i need to lower the density over time i would be fine with that.

Another thing to get quicker to having producing trees i have considered, is to plant standards slightly further apart, with true dwarfs placed between them, and to thin out the dwarfs when they start to interfer with the standards, or when the standards start to produce meaningful amounts.

How much do you intend to interact with the orchard in the first 5-10 years? I’d make sure the brush is knocked down enough to walk EASILY if you want to do anything before it decays.  

I just checked the Fedco website an indeed they state that:
Standard trees are now grafted onto Malus domestica. (We can no longer get Antonovka because of the war in Ukraine)

It would be probably a seedling of some other apple that will produce a normal sized tree.
The trees I have ordered form them and planted in 2023 have already bloomed and hopefully they will produce some apples this year, so 3 years for the first crop, but in your climate they would probably grow much better.
I like the idea of standards interwoven with some dwarfs.

R Scott wrote:How much do you intend to interact with the orchard in the first 5-10 years? I’d make sure the brush is knocked down enough to walk EASILY if you want to do anything before it decays.  

It will be. I intend to be in it regularly to prune, weed, monitor, and remove any flowers the first few fruiting years and do whatever is needed. I intend to get it to the point where i can walk around easily for me.

Cristobal Cristo wrote:I just checked the Fedco website an indeed they state that:
Standard trees are now grafted onto Malus domestica. (We can no longer get Antonovka because of the war in Ukraine)

It would be probably a seedling of some other apple that will produce a normal sized tree.
The trees I have ordered form them and planted in 2023 have already bloomed and hopefully they will produce some apples this year, so 3 years for the first crop, but in your climate they would probably grow much better.
I like the idea of standards interwoven with some dwarfs.

Where abouts are you located if you dont mind me asking. Up here in central maine being zone 5 we only have about 150 growing days, but generally lots of rain, and cold.

And i got the idea based on the standard MO for alot of the timber companies and larger small landowners around here. Plant spruce or other shorter rotation species intersperced with pine or longer rotation species. Basically start denser with the larger species at their final spacing, and until they start getting big you can grow more things between them (but know you will need to remove them sooner than you may otherwise because it will eventually interfere with the intended crop.

Cristobal Cristo wrote:Site preparation for orchard is to some extent comparable to building foundation - it's difficult to change after the orchard is established.
I would recommend to dig all stumps and roots with a rented/hired excavator, use chipper for all wood material and mix it into the soil with deep plowing/ripping. This is how they prepare the ground for planting new orchards here. At that point I would also add some additional organic material - more if the soil has high clay contents.

I am not an expert on orchards in your area. Still, the comments above make sense to me. Half measures rarely lead to stellar results.

I am particularly concerned about the aspen. I'm not sure of your variety, but generally the rootstocks of both poplar and aspen do not die when the standing trees are cut down. Instead, they pop up 100 new trees from the roots. I think this would be a highly competitive species and a maintenance nightmare in an orchard.

Jake Schroth wrote:[Where abouts are you located if you dont mind me asking. Up here in central maine being zone 5 we only have about 150 growing days, but generally lots of rain, and cold.

The best apples were developed in countries with cold/temperate climates and these are the apples  I'm trying to grow in my hot, too intensely sunny California location. Some survived and some not.

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:

Cristobal Cristo wrote:Site preparation for orchard is to some extent comparable to building foundation - it's difficult to change after the orchard is established.
I would recommend to dig all stumps and roots with a rented/hired excavator, use chipper for all wood material and mix it into the soil with deep plowing/ripping. This is how they prepare the ground for planting new orchards here. At that point I would also add some additional organic material - more if the soil has high clay contents.

I am not an expert on orchards in your area. Still, the comments above make sense to me. Half measures rarely lead to stellar results.

I am particularly concerned about the aspen. I'm not sure of your variety, but generally the rootstocks of both poplar and aspen do not die when the standing trees are cut down. Instead, they pop up 100 new trees from the roots. I think this would be a highly competitive species and a maintenance nightmare in an orchard.

With my day job being a forester i am well aware of their tendency to sprout, and with regular cutting (ie monthly), they die off after a year or two from depleting their root reserves. Thats how i dealt with it when removing the random scattered aspens in what is now my garden.

If one wanted to speed it up they could use triclopyr in spring after leaf out, or glyphosate in the fall before dormancy, but i tend to avoid herbicides with the exception of invasive species management.

Cristobal Cristo wrote:

Jake Schroth wrote:[Where abouts are you located if you dont mind me asking. Up here in central maine being zone 5 we only have about 150 growing days, but generally lots of rain, and cold.

The best apples were developed in countries with cold/temperate climates and these are the apples  I'm trying to grow in my hot, too intensely sunny California location. Some survived and some not.

Yeah, id say its a much better climate here. To my knowledge most apples cant quite handle the cold of zone 4 (currently where i am is zone 5, but until 2010 was zone 4, and i plan to pick species as if im in zone 4, because we still do get a zone 4 level winter from time to time). There are plenty of varieties that can handle it. Personally i hope to find something similar to granny smith that can survive, as those are by far my favorite of the grocery store apples, but i have yet to find any that can survive at local orchards. Where im from in MA, they are all over, but alas its just too cold here.

Jake Schroth wrote:With my day job being a forester i am well aware of their tendency to sprout, and with regular cutting (ie monthly), they die off after a year or two from depleting their root reserves. Thats how i dealt with it when removing the random scattered aspens in what is now my garden.

I can see you're on top of it. Good stuff.