Cedar Clearing in Manor, TX

Ashe juniper. On the blackland it starts on old fence lines and ungrazed corners and spreads from there into stands. It is not the wall to wall cedar of the Hill Country, which is limestone and thin soil forty miles west. On Manor clay you usually get mesquite with cedar mixed in, and the cedar gets thicker as you drive east.

By Elgin and Bastrop, and into the Lost Pines, cedar stands are the main job and the loblolly pines are the trees you keep. Bastrop, TX →

Live oaks and post oaks grow in and around cedar stands here, and they are the trees you keep. Removing the cedar around an oak is good for the oak; pruning the oak itself in the warm months is what spreads oak wilt. We flag oaks before the machine starts, avoid wounding them, and do not trim oak limbs between February and June unless there is a safety reason.

We are not certified arborists and do not claim to be. If an oak needs real tree work, we will say so and stay out of it.

You will read that one cedar drinks thirty gallons of water a day. We cannot verify that figure, so we will not repeat it. What we have seen is that grass comes back under a cleared cedar stand, and the mulch bed holds moisture where the bare cedar duff did not.