Buckthorn Removal in Northeast Wisconsin: How to Spot It and How to Get Your Woods Back

If you own woods anywhere in the lakeshore counties, you have probably walked into a spot that used to be open and found it packed so tight with brush that you could not get through it. Most of the time, that brush is buckthorn.

It is the single most common complaint we hear from landowners in Manitowoc and Kewaunee counties. The good news is that buckthorn is easy to identify once you know what to look for, and right now is the easiest time of year to see exactly how much of it you have.

Why late October is the best time to find buckthorn

Here is the trick that makes buckthorn obvious: it holds its green leaves weeks after everything else in your woods has dropped.

Walk your property in late October or November, after the maples and oaks and ash have gone bare. Anything still standing there bright green is almost certainly buckthorn or honeysuckle. From a distance it looks like somebody painted green stripes through gray woods. You can stand at the edge of a field and map the whole infestation without walking a step.

Take pictures while you are out there. Those photos are the best planning tool you can have, and they make it a lot easier for anyone quoting the work to tell you what you are actually dealing with.

How to know it is buckthorn

Common buckthorn has a few giveaways:

Leaves

Small, oval, finely toothed along the edge, and glossy dark green. They grow roughly opposite each other on the twig, but not perfectly. They stay green very late into fall.

Bark and wood

Gray-brown bark with small raised lines across it. If you cut a stem, the wood underneath is bright orange-yellow. That orange wood is the dead giveaway. Nothing else native in your woods looks like it.

Thorns

There is usually a short, sharp thorn at the tip of the twigs, which is where the name comes from. It is not thorny like a raspberry, but it will get you.

Berries

Clusters of small, dark purple-black berries in fall. Birds eat them, fly off, and plant the next patch for you. One mature female shrub can seed a wide area, which is why a small patch turns into a wall in a handful of years.

Why buckthorn is worth dealing with

It is not just ugly. Buckthorn changes how your land works.

• Nothing grows under it. It leafs out early and drops late, so it steals the whole growing season from oak seedlings, wildflowers and grasses. Under a heavy stand you will find bare dirt.
• Your young trees stop coming. If you have oak or maple woods and you have not seen a seedling in years, buckthorn is usually part of the reason. You end up with old trees and nothing behind them.
• Deer stop using it. A wall of buckthorn is not food and it is not good cover. Hunters notice this before anyone else does.
• You lose the use of your own land. Trails close in, fence lines disappear, and the back of the property becomes somewhere you do not go.

How forestry mulching handles a buckthorn stand

A forestry mulcher is a drum with carbide teeth mounted on the front of a compact track loader. It grinds standing brush down to chips right where it stands.

For buckthorn, that matters for a few reasons:

There is nothing to haul away and nothing to burn. The material becomes a layer of chips on the ground. No burn piles, no permits for burning, no bare dirt where a pile sat, no hauling bill.

The ground stays intact. A tracked machine spreads its weight out. Compared to pushing brush out with a dozer, there is much less rutting and much less soil disturbed, which also means far fewer buckthorn seeds dug up and given a fresh start.

You can see what you own again, in one pass. A fence line or a trail that has been gone for ten years comes back in an afternoon.

The chips help. That layer of mulch holds moisture, feeds the soil as it breaks down, and makes it harder for new seedlings to get going in the first year.

The honest part: one pass is not the whole job

Buckthorn resprouts from the stump. Any contractor who tells you one pass kills it for good is selling you something.

What mulching does is reset the problem completely. You go from an impassable stand to open ground you can actually manage. From there, keeping it down is the real work, and it is much smaller work:

• Resprouts are soft and short for the first couple of seasons, so a second mulching pass or a mowing pass knocks them back easily.
• Smaller, scattered stems can be pulled by hand or with a weed wrench while the ground is soft.
• Some landowners choose to have stumps treated chemically by a licensed applicator. We do mechanical work only and do not do herbicide or chemical treatment, so if that is the route you want, we will tell you straight and you can line that up separately.

Plan on a follow-up pass rather than being surprised by one. Landowners who expect it stay ahead of it.

Timing on your property

Right now through winter is a good window. The leaves make buckthorn easy to find in late fall, and once the ground freezes a machine can work wet or soft ground without rutting it, which is a real advantage in the lakeshore counties where a lot of this brush sits in low spots.

One timing rule to know: if there are oaks in the area being worked, oaks should not be cut or wounded between April 1 and July 15 around here, because that is when oak wilt spreads. We plan around it. If somebody wants to run a mulcher through your oak woods in May, that is a reason to ask more questions.

FAQ

Is forestry mulching better than cutting buckthorn by hand?
For a small patch, hand cutting works fine. For a stand you cannot walk through, mulching is not really comparable. A machine covers in a day what would take weeks by hand, and there are no piles left behind.

Will the chips hurt my soil or my trees?
No. Wood chips break down and feed the soil. A thick mat can slow down what sprouts through it the first year, which with buckthorn is usually what you want.

Can you work around the trees I want to keep?
Yes. That is the normal ask. You walk the property, mark or point out the keepers, and the machine works around them.

How long does a typical buckthorn job take?
It depends entirely on how thick it is, how big the stems are, how wet the ground is, and how much you want left standing. That is why we come look first instead of guessing over the phone.

What does it cost?
Not something we will quote off a webpage, because density and access change it a lot. A walkthrough and a quote cost nothing.

Get a look at your property

If you have a patch of buckthorn you have been putting off, this is the time of year to deal with it. It is easy to see, and winter ground works in your favor.

J. Schleis Services is owner-operated out of Manitowoc, insured, and working across Manitowoc, Brown, Kewaunee, Calumet, Sheboygan, Door and Outagamie counties. Most jobs start within one to two weeks, and all of our work carries a two-year workmanship warranty.

Call or text Justin at (920) 362-1569, or use the contact page, and we will come walk it with you.