Autumn Olive is the Devil!

Since we bought the Estate in 2020, we have been fighting with the very invasive Autumn Olive that is growing everywhere. It's fast growing, very thorny and proliferates easily. It can't be killed by merely cutting it down, that just makes it mad. The only way to really get rid of it is to pull the roots. Even then, it may have enough left to try to regrow. Luckily, when it is young, the deer to eat it and help keep it in check, a little. When it's mature and 12ft tall, nothing wants it. The birds do like the berries, which is how it has been spread so well. Each winter, I pick a spot and cut down as much as I can. I do leave the stumps about 2ft above ground so I can wrap and chain around them or bash into them with the back blade on the tractor to rip the rootball out. Winter is the best time I have found to go at cutting them down. With the leaves off, it's easier to see where I am cutting and not get stabbed as much by the thorns. I make brush piles that I always plan to burn in the spring, but never get to. I have at least 4-5 brush piles to deal with currently. I always think I am going to rent a big chipper and spend the day feeding the Autumn Olive in so it can go back to Hell where it belongs.

This last weekend, I finally remembered to bring up my small chipper so I could at least work at making my brush piles smaller. I picked up this small 5HP chipper off Marketplace a year or so ago to use at the Estate to chip up some of the smaller brush. Having wood chips available is helpful for things like trails and around the hammock area as well as to put in the dirt of the food plots to add organic material. I have been lazy and kept forgetting to bring it out. I was able to use it around the city house, however. Well, this time it came! I was going to finally make some progress on the brush piles! Even if it was only a little.

I know this chipper is underpowered for what I need to do. It's a homeowner grade chipper, meant for very small twigs and leaves. The chute has a limit of 3" for branches, but in my use, I found that 3" is really too much. The engine bogs and stalls if you try to feed a 3" branch in too fast. The engine is tired, and I knew that. It will eat the smaller stuff with no issue. Since Autumn Olive has a ton of branches, I figured it would do OK. The bigger stuff I would just cut into "logs" and burn that way.

As it turns out, the brush pile I had decided to get rid of had been there about 18 months. The wood was very dead and very dry. The chipper liked that and was able to get into some bigger stuff without it bogging as much. Feeding it by hand still took forever and having to cut the branches off so they could be fed in straight didn't help. For a brush pile that was around 12x15 feet and only a few feet tall, it took me about 90 minutes and a tank and a half of gas.

Was it worth it? Yep! Seeing that pile gone and looking at the pile of chips it became made all the scratches and puncture wounds worth it. Will I continue to use the small chipper for grinding up Autumn Olive? Yes. But, I will still like to rent a bigger chipper and have a party of cutting and grinding Autumn Olive at the Estate. It can't be gone fast enough!