Like Fighting Zombies?

These trees are a sample from Timber Stand Improvement (TSI) project that I inspected recently. Most trees aren't terribly hard to kill; you just have to interrupt the cambium layer and a good bit of the sapwood. A single girdle with a chainsaw, treated with a suitable herbicide will kill most trees easily. You can also use two parallel girdles, spaced at least two inches apart to kill trees that you do not want treated with herbicide. The double girdle method is usually used to prevent the movement of herbicide through root grafts to trees of the same species which are near the tree you are killing.

There isn't any real trick to doing this right, and I was rather taken aback by the poor job that the landowner did in his woods. He did about twenty acres of TSI, but he did not cut deeply enough, and his application of herbicide was insufficient or maybe totally lacking. Click the photos and take a good look. You can easily see that the trees have quickly bridged the single girdle, and the crowns are showing no distress. I fired off a very polite letter to the landowner explaining (again) how to kill trees so they don't come back. I hope he doesn't get discouraged.