Hamilton, TX 2 Acre Cedar Removal and Selective Mulching Project

Two acres on a place outside Hamilton, cleared of cedar and nothing else. The owner had one instruction: take out every cedar, leave every other tree standing, mesquite included. One machine, one day, and the pasture came back out from under the juniper without losing a single hardwood.

The same Hamilton County tract after the cedars were mulched out with the other trees left standing

What the owner asked for

Most selective jobs reach us as a list of what to keep. This one came as a species. Every cedar on the two acres was to go, and everything else was to stay exactly where it stood, mesquite included.

That is a narrower instruction than it sounds. Mesquite gets cut on a lot of Central Texas properties, and an operator moving fast will take it out by habit. Here it was protected the same as the oaks, so we walked the block before the machine started and there was no question about what a keeper looked like.

Why the cedar had to come out

Ashe juniper does two things to a pasture in this part of Hamilton County. It closes the canopy over the native grass until the grass thins and quits, and it fills the space where young hardwoods would otherwise come up. Left alone for a decade, a thin scatter of cedar turns into a solid stand and the grazing underneath it is gone.

It is also the part of the work that pays back fastest. Once the juniper is off, the grass under it often comes back on its own the following spring with no seeding at all.

Working around every tree that stays

Selective work like this is slower per acre than open clearing, and the reason is the approach angle. The mulcher head has to come at each cedar from a side that does not put the machine into the canopy of a tree that stays. On a tract with mesquite scattered through it, that often means backing out and coming around rather than pushing straight ahead.

The Weiler M860A helps here because the head sits out front where the operator can see exactly what the drum is touching. Cedar goes down and gets processed in place, and the chips stay on the ground as mulch, holding soil on the slope and breaking down into the pasture over the next couple of seasons.

Two acres, one day, one machine

Two acres of scattered cedar with full tree protection ran one day with a single machine. That is the pace to expect on selective cedar work with a high horsepower mulcher. A dedicated open clearing job on the same ground would move faster, closer to two or three acres in a day, because nothing has to be worked around.

There is no burn pile and no haul off on a job built this way. The cedar is turned into mulch where it stood, and the tract was ready to walk the same afternoon the machine left.

Before and after

Land clearing around Hamilton

We work the country around Hamilton regularly, across Hamilton County and the counties next to it.