Forestry mulching in Moncton, NB

On most properties, yes — but not because the mulching itself is cheaper per hour. It's cheaper because of everything you don't have to pay for afterward.

Conventional clearing has four cost centres: the clearing, the piling, the hauling or burning, and the site repair once the dozer has finished churning the ground. Mulching has one. The material stays put, so there's no disposal line on the invoice and no restoration to do.

The exception is a job where the roots have to come out anyway — a building pad, for instance. There you're paying for excavation regardless, and the gap narrows.

Depends what you're standing on. A dozer is a blunt instrument: fast on big open ground, brutal on soil. It pushes trees over root and all, drags the topsoil into windrows with them, and leaves you with compacted subsoil and a pile to deal with.

Mulching cuts at grade and leaves the ground structure alone. On a five-acre field that's going into hay, that difference shows up for years. On a site that's about to be dug out for a basement anyway, it matters much less.

Short version: if the soil has a future, mulch it. If the soil is coming out anyway, either works.

They're ground flush with the ground or slightly below, and the root system stays. You can walk it, mow it, drive an ATV over it and put animals on it. You cannot pour a foundation on it.

To get the roots out you need grubbing — a second pass with a bucket and thumb that pulls the root balls and hauls them off or buries them where permitted.

Comfortably up to about 8 to 10 inches on the stump, taken in one bite. Larger stems can be walked down in sections, but efficiency drops off a cliff and the cost per tree climbs fast.

There's also a common-sense limit: a 20-inch hardwood is worth real money as a log. Grinding it into chip is burning cash. On mixed lots we'll usually recommend having the merchantable timber harvested first, then mulching the rest.

It's the lowest-impact mechanical clearing method available, which is a fair claim rather than a marketing one. Nothing is burned, so there's no smoke and no carbon dumped at once. Nothing is trucked, so there are no haul emissions. The organic material stays on site and returns to the soil.

The mulch layer also does real work: it holds soil through heavy rain, moderates ground temperature, and suppresses the first flush of regrowth. On sloped ground running toward a brook, that erosion control is the whole argument.

It is still land clearing. It removes habitat. If your property has wetland, a watercourse within 30 metres, or nesting season considerations, those need addressing regardless of method.

Suckering species will push new growth from the surviving roots — alder, poplar, willow and raspberry are the usual ones around here. The mulch mat suppresses most of it through the first season.

If the ground gets used afterward — mown, grazed, hayed, driven on — the regrowth never establishes and you're done. If it's left alone entirely, plan on a maintenance pass in roughly three to five years, which is far quicker and cheaper than the original clearing.

Typically two to four inches, depending on how much material there was to start with. Heavy softwood regrowth produces more chip than open hardwood.

If you need it thinner — say you're seeding a lawn right away — we can spread it out further or push some of it aside. Tell us at the quote stage and it gets built into the plan.

Winter is often the best time for it in New Brunswick. Frozen ground carries the machine with almost no rutting, the leaves are off so the operator can see what's actually there, and the schedule is usually more open than it is in June.

Deep snow is the limiting factor, not cold. If you're planning a spring or summer project, booking the mulching for winter frequently saves money and gets you a better result.