Supose they make good for wine, If you dont have too much indean in your blood line.
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Tree roots are no concern for lines of any kind, apart from the old caulked cast iron sewer lines.
But your shrub choices sound good, you want something in that certain height bracket that grows fairly fast and fills in. Will lilac do in your area? They fit the dense growth and height criteria.
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Purple lilacs would definitely be a good choice they would need a little fertilizer to get 12 feet in sand they simply will not grow thick in sand but with a little fertilizer they will grow in poor soil and they tend to be bushy even with the leaves off.
I am still thinking about what the fruit bushes might work in this case.
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Dan, and @kmrland,
Lillacs are quite common in Indiana and Ohio. Where Kevin R is at, in Michigan close to the lake, It should be good for them there as well. If I remember right, they can be propagated by putting cuttings in water, like Willows. At my Grandma’s old house in Northwest Ohio, She had huge bushes that my Dad would cut back for her each year.
I thought about liloc though i was thinking id rather get berrys VS Not. Do liloc bush have tap roots and are they drought tolerant. I was worried about the tap root veriety bushes, might damage my gas line between house and road, since i will be planting over top the gas line.The liloc wood work good but they are suposed too be slower growing then elderberry bush ?
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Lilacs grow faster in my yard and fuller then elderberries. Both are easy to start from just some roots and normally someone with a lilac bush will be more than happy to have you trim it back by digging up some of them.
One word of warning berries on the road edge here get picked by people who think they have the right to just stop and pick them in your front yard. I have had to ask people to please stop picking my elderberries which are literally on the edge of my field cross the road from my front door. Drives me nuts that people have so little respect.
As to drought tolerance the lilacs seemed to be tolerant at my old house but they didn’t grow much. I think grapes or hardy kiwi on an arbor would probably be more drought tolerant and still provide fruit for those random passing by people…
I have been wondering about Sea Buckthorn for your application. They grow 6 to 10 feet and have orange fruit and thorns I think most people would dismiss them as oriental. I was debating them for between my road and house.
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Lilacs are not overly fussy over soil conditions, but like any plant they do flourish best in good soil. They have been widely used for farm field shelterbelts. Dan’s suggestion of putting up a trellis and growing grape vines is good. Just make sure the trellis is heavy duty, painted steel posts and galvanized wire if you want it to last maintenance free. If the berries attracting trespassers is a concern, how about Virginia creeper?
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I guess I should do this I have huge Lilacs , I can make cuttings and grow them in bags of soil and sell them . I grew a hundred popular trees this way , they all died after I planted them .
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Lilacs can be easily propagated by digging up the plants that sucker from the roots around the bushes, but best done before bud break, and then good attention to watering following transplant.
Poplar of many varieties including cottonwood and balsam poplar will readily grow from branch cuttings. These have to be taken from the fall or early spring (dormant buds), and planted straight away with maybe an iinch above ground. No rooting hormone or other steps needed. Willows, currants, gooseberries all the same, very easy propagation.
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Willow is what they use for rooting compound. If you put a small bit of willow in water it will help other plants root.
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I tried this to make a row of trees along north boundary . The trees were alive when I planted them but then I never found them again . Have many silver maple . along west boundary , just all over silver maple is a weed that can become a huge tree . Have one red maple which is a very nice tree , if it was not split down middle .
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The seedlings must be protected from competition and shading by grass or weeds. I recommend black plastic mulch or cardboard at least 18" square. And be sure to provide water when needed in the first one or 2 years. A balanced granular fertilizer applied at time of planting won’t hurt either.
I agree about silver maple, makes a decent firewood tree, but a very poor structure tree, gets big with heavy trunks apt to split. Willow is a far better shelterbelt choice, gets light branched towards the top, not much to split or fall down. They tolerate herbicide drift (unlike lilac with certain newer herbicides), grow fast and live a long time.
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I am not sure but i think cuttings might work out best from 2 or 3 year old bush cuttings, could be grown and cuttings sold, check out cold stream farms, they have a large selection of bush the trees for sale, liloc is about 70 bucks a hundred cuttings. might be good income, there ran low on elderberry bare root cuttings, only the longer cuttings.
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I installed a Unistrut on the ceiling of my garage. It’s 14’ above ground. This will help me when building my gasifier for the truck.
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That is really nice Bill. Looking forward to your new gasifier build.
Bob
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Thanks Bob, I really don’t think I’ll get to it until the Winter
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I think there is a great deal of truth to this idea. The EU’s plastic “success” being dumped in the ocean via Asia is the biggest example. I love the idea of reusing stuff but i’m not sure the recycling efforts are making a big difference in resource consumption.
another example : as a regular dumpster diver, I am quite aware of what stores put in their dumpsters. SO many of them have their “green” marketing program ideas. Like Office Max…and others have their computer printer ink cartridge recycling programs. But if you look in a dumpster behind one of their stores, about every 2 weeks it will be half full of ink cartidges. Same thing for cordless tool batteries…and many other things.
It only happens when it is profitable to do so. And it has been very well proven that economies run much better on new production than recycled stuff. Whether or not unending growth is even possible is a whole other story…
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I looked up the energy savings of recycled vs using virgin feedstocks once, and it is not very encouraging.
As I recall, aluminum is the standout winner - it takes like 5% of the energy to recycle it as making fresh material out of ore. The other metals were better to recycle, but nowhere near aluminum - I want to say around 50%? Some things like glass, as basically a wash - so if you have to ship it any distance to recycle, it might honestly be better to throw it away. There is no shortage of sand.
Plastic is not recycled, it is downcycled. A used food container is not turned back into a food container; it is made into a lawn chair or trex decking. Once that wears out, it is garbage.
What really bothers me is how many people are lazy recyclers. The dump here has a “recycling” area where you can take stuff in for free and sort it into bins. They are generally so full of trash that I suspect the crew just dumps it into the pit with the rest of the garbage.
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Luke and Naomi have been collecting deer hides to sell to fur buyers to pay for college this winter. He sold them yesterday. Turned out real well.
They salted around 1500 hides. Most of them are on their way to China to be turned into gloves.
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