Controlling Volunteer Trees

Trees are beneficial but sometimes tree seeds will sprout in the wrong place. Walk around your land periodically to be on the lookout for any tree saplings that are growing where you don't want them, especially along a fence row. It's a lot easier to get rid of them when they're extremely small.

Kim Coder is a forestry professor at the University of Georgia. He says if there's a volunteer tree that's gotten too large to pull out by hand, grab the garden spade.

"Come really close to the base of the tree and slice down as deep as you can get that spade in the ground, just jump on it," says Coder. "Try to sever all the roots, and then yank it out."

Coder says for a lot of people that's too much effort, but there is another option if the tree is small enough.

"So the next best thing is to go out with the garden hoe on little small trees and just hoe them off, slice them off at the ground surface. Now, depending upon the species, probably 20% of them will come back and then you just hoe them off again after about three months," he says. "And that will give you about the best kill you're going to get."

Coder says you can also squirt them with a herbicide immediately after you chop them off. Be sure to follow the label instructions on the bottle.

Sometimes the wayward trees are a quality species such as oak or walnut that you'd like to keep and move to another location. In this case, dig the hole wide rather than deep when you're taking the tree out of the ground so you preserve as much of the root system as you can.