How to recover from a bad burn?

I say that in all honesty. I never thought there was such a thing but apparently a “good” burn can turn bad. I have about 17 acres of long leaf and at year 7 was finally able to send a fire through it. That was two years ago and my understory has yet to recover. You can see 60-80 yds wide open in most of it now which most know is not a good thing for holding deer. I need to thicken everything back up but don’t know what to do at this point. My deer usage has tremendously suffered because of it. I don’t know what I need to do now but something has to change this summer.

Wait on something to grow back is about only option. What did you have before and what do you have now?

Pretty good sage, briars, beauty berry and lots of other weeds. Now I have a little sage and briars. I’ll have to take pics but it’s way too open now and the deer don’t like it. I have sandy loam soil with pea gravel in it and the ridges have a very hard type sandstone underneath.

Get you a few privet sprigs and set them out. You'll be thick as all get out in no time

Sage should have bounced right back

You could buy a bunch of round rolls of hay and place them strategically throughout your pine stand. They would provide cover and plenty of seeds that could sprout and grow to some cover. I know a guy.

Gets Whild bills buddy to fly seed on with his crop duster

You would have to be insane to intentionally plant privet on your property.

Twas a joke Boudreaux

Might try scratching the dirt with a disc and expose some old seed bank

Is pretty good deer food though.

Fertilizer!!!

I hear ya Boudreaux. i have actually heard people suggest this before.

I sprayed a bunch of privet this summer. Not happening on that.

I second running a disk lightly and spreading fertilizer to feed what you got but running a disk would be better than nothing

If you could do this and run some cows on it for a few weeks with some temporary electric fencing it would probably help greatly.......

If you can fit a small disk in between rows with a small tractor just go scratch the surface between now and first of March. You may be amazed what will come back.

Although I’m quite perplexed as to why/how native forbs and grasses didn’t immediately come back. Are you positive there wasn’t a chemical treatment before or after the fire?

I think he likely got his fire too hot........If so it may have done a few things...... I'm guessing it toasted the microbial life in the top few inches of soil across a pretty large area......might not be a bad idea to try and apply an inoculant of some kind......(Cattle would do that).......Applying fertilizer would be good.....(Cattle again)

Unless someone sprayed my property without my permission. Friend helped burn so no one was paid. If I find out anyone Sprayed anything besides me I’m gonna put them in a hole after the assholes who did my site prep.

Is there any of it that looks good? If so, then you have to ask yourself what is different about that area......Was that area backburned and therefore burned cooler than the rest? Does it have better topsoil? Etc, etc,

Only better looking areas are the wetter spots where I have springs seeping.

Did you burn late spring two years ago? Have you been experiencing drought around this property? I bet a good, wet spring will help you out a lot.

Throw out a runner of kudzu and run like hell

It was right before the drought in February but we had plenty of rain this summer

I would love a 3-5 acre kudzu patch if I could keep it contained. Deer hammer it.

Does any sunlight hit the forest floor? If. It, that is your problem and you need to create some holes in the canopy.

I agree with the "run a disc over it" folks. That should guarantee results.

I can check and see if some of the Japanese tallow trees around here gave seeds on them and fill you a sack full. Them bastages will grow thru concrete and will be 5’ tall in 6 months and will sprout new trees every 2 weeks. Let me know buddy. I’ll fix you up.

I appreciate the offer but I’m good. Sunlight is definitely not an issue

Might try a couple of soil tests in pine stand to see what you are dealing with. Disking and maybe some fertilizer might work. I would not plant anything non-native.

Arsenal herbicide may have been used at original site prep which encouraged your briars and killed your grasses. Briars are now likely blocking sunlight. I think killing the briars and disturbing the soil will get your ground cover growing again. Longleaf Alliance is a good resource. They suggested a herbicide mix of Garlon and Escort under mature longleaf for me that encouraged a lot of native grasses and reduced my briars.

I wish I had a good briar stand but I have a thin stand of everything.

This is what the majority of the property in long leaf looks like now.
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Dang. Burn it again

I’ve never seen a burn or a spray where sage grass and briars wouldn’t come back.

Turkey neck do you remember the spacing those LL were planted on? Look awful tight and thick to me. The canopy cover is beginning to shade it out underneath. Usually LL are planted on a wider spacing, or less TPA, but those look pretty thick to me.

Matt those are on 8x10’ there’s plenty of light getting to the ground but if that is the consensus I’ll limb them up before spring. I just want growth.

Longleafs planted on the WMA are planted at about half that density, maybe even less, you definitely have sunlight issues due to how thick it is. I'd run some fire through it again this spring

8x10 is 545 TPA so shouldn’t be to thick unless there’s lots of seed in. IMO 545 is not near enough

What was the problem with your site prep?

As for the lack of regrowth that's very odd. I've burned longleaf on some really poor soils and we still have plenty of growth in the understory after fire. Is the longleaf planted at a really high density where the canopy is already starting to close up some? Even at 622 trees/acre you shouldn't get canopy closure in longleaf at age 7.

Just for the heck of it......take a small test area and apply some kind of microbial inoculant this spring........There's recipes online for making your own or you can order it online......Blahblahblah used one that he said made a big difference on his food plots called "Root Ruckus".....I'm sure there are several on the market....


Is it possible to sterilize the soil....basically kill the microbial life over a large area with a fire that's too hot??.....What about toasting the annual seed and perennial plant roots with a hot fire??


Turkeyneck.......When you burned, did you completely wrap the stand in fire.....in a complete ring?

Yes lit down wind and wrapped it.

Somebody post up Turkey_neck's video......I'm not sure how to......I think his issues are stemming from a pretty intense fire

Site prep fires don’t care about how hot they get, hotter the better. Every area I’ve seen burned came back with briars and sage grass at the least.
I have seen pine straw suppress an area, I’d burn it again, remove the pine straw which is a natural weed suppressor.

It may be too hot a fire and soil subsoil makeup. There is a very hard sub soil on that ridge. In the summer it’s like rock but sandy.

You need a skid steer and brush cutter to allow more sunlight to the ground

There’s plenty of sunlight. The two small areas of the property are way thicker and have way more growth then the barren area. Those two areas also had the worst site prep. They weren’t burned due to how hot the big area was and how many jumps we had on it.

The only thing I can add is that those pictures remind me of pine stands they used to have on the old Coosa WMA. Some of it was longleaf, but most was loblolly and it had never been burned. It just looked that way because of very poor soil fertility. And the deer didn't get very big, but turkeys did well and would start using the pines again long before they would in areas with better soil fertility.

I'm sure it looks a lot better in the summer. I would run a cool fire through that place soon, and then disc the flat places, and be real happy with it. Why would you want deer on your place anyway?

Aloe

I couldn’t believe it took that long for that reply

Aloe viro

I'm not sure what you think it's supposed to look like after a burn, but every site will respond differently. Going by the last 3 pictures showing the burn it definitely didn't get too hot and could have been burned a lot hotter. Why did you have to wait 7 years before you could burn it? Lack of fuel?

Couldn’t get lines pushed out weather a combination of things.

From what little I know and I’m no expert, there are really two main types of prescribed burn processes.actually a few more but this is what most novices stick with. A backing fire, a fire into the wind, does a slow methodical burn, and burns up all of your litter layer, and a heading fire, one that burns WITH the wind and is faster, but may not burn your litter completely to the ground. It spreads so quick and much quicker with any kind of wind. If you dig into the ash of a heading fire, sometimes you will find the litter layer underneath that wasn’t burnt very well. It will slow the regrowth sometimes and basically act as a mulch in your flowerbed kind of effect. A backing fire is what we try to do most of the time as it burns slower and complete and our seed bank seems to spout and come to life. Maybe you could have done a heading fire, with some ground moisture on top of that and could have caused more litter right at the ground not to burn off. You wouldn’t hardly notice unless you dig down. It’ll all look good. That’s just my personal observations and my two cents. To really answer your question, you may need to go back in and do a backing fire through it if this wasn’t done the first go around. It could be other things that have been mentioned like poor soil or too much canopy and the seed didn’t receive enough sunlight. Good luck and let us know how things progress.

Here’s kind of an example I found. Fast forward to 2:00 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WVygOrWCoMI

Unless its CRP ground.