I have crazy amounts of alder in my woods. They fall down ALL THE TIME. They break half way up the tree, they crack at the base, they fall over with their roots half out of the ground. You can probably just PUSH some of those alders right over--my husband has! For the soil, I'd probably do like Dale said and just chainsaw them at the base. Those trees rot quick, and those nutrients are good for the garden.
Another use for those logs is as base material for hugels or lazagna gardening beds. They stack well, and decompose quickly.
Red huckleberries are often TINY berries. like, eraser size up to pea size. The pea sized ones are usually the least seedy and most tasty. I wish I knew exactly why some bushes make bigger and juicier and sweeter berriers than others. Is it the soil, the lighting, the genetics? I've seriously been wondering that since I was a kid. ANYWAY, as for their stems, about 1/10 comes off the bush with it's stem. They're pretty easy to take off. But, picking red hucklberries takes a long time to get a good amount, since the berries are so small and are usually varying degrees of ripeness on each branch. I've never picked blue hucklberries, so I don't know if the red ones are more or less annoying to pick, but I do know I don't usually spend much time/effort picking them unless I've already picked all the black caps and trailing blackberries. As for flavor, like I said, some are big and sweet, all are a little tangy--none of them taste like blueberries (or, I would assume, blue huckleberries)
I don't know if alder wood is really the place to grow red huckleberries, though I'm sure they would grow there if you planted them. Most huckelberries I see are growing out of cedar stumps or soil that's full of cedar/hemlock. Under my maples, I see salmonberry, thimbleberries, black cap raspberries, nettles, blackberries and elderberries. I'm north and east of you, though.
Hmmm, reading your post, I also noticed that you said that you had both alders and OLD maples. Maybe the alders are where they are because nothing else can really grow there? My alders are primarily around my stream--where the ground is drier, there's a lot of hemlock and cedars, but very few in with the alders. The maples seem to be interspersed everywhere. I our climate, monocultures of trees are rarely seen unless somewhere was logged. You don't generally see a forest of just maples, for instance. But, there are areas where one gets almost a mono-culture of alders, with them being the climax species, simply because that's all that really can grow there (due to it being wet).
Here's some more info about red alder forests. I'll try to find more info (I really should bookmark pages like this, because I always forget where I find my info!)
https://www.fs.fed.us/database/feis/plants/tree/alnrub/all.html
https://www.fs.fed.us/database/feis/plants/tree/alnrub/all.html wrote: Generally, five types of red alder communities have been described:
(1) Upland, pure even aged stands of red alder, with a dense shrub
undergrowth dominated by salmonberry (Rubus spectabilis) or
elderberry (Sambucus melanocarpa), occurring within coniferous
forests.
(2) Upland mixed stands of red alder/other deciduous trees and
shrubs/conifers within coniferous forests less than 100 years
old, with red alder occurring as a dominant or codominant.
(3) Riparian red alder communities within coniferous forests.
(4) Mixed stands within deciduous riparian forests, red alder
occurring as codominant with black cottonwood (Populus trichocarpa)
and bigleaf maple (Acer macrophyllum).
(5) In swamps often occurring with, or codominant with, western
redcedar. In this type of community, red alder appears to be a
climax species.