Interesting thread. I can be no help with the ticks but like the sound of guinea hens roosting in your trees at night, cooing away and eating ticks and fertilizing the land during the day. I have one question: A little over an acre with 300+ trees? Isn’t that an awful lot of trees for one acre? How do that many trees fit on one acre? Are they all saplings? — City girl here but I’ve got a friend who lives on a house on an exact one acre lot and it’s big but not 300 trees big.
We have white oaks and a few pecans. The oaks in Texas tend to grow in very thick clusters. So the trunks are small and the branches don’t spread out as they normally would. The branches tend to grow upward vying for sunlight. About 150 trees are 1.5 feet wide and 25 - 35 ft tall. The rest are just as tall but only 10 inches wide or so.
I’ll post a pic if you’d like to see them.