Conan enjoys this much more than I do.
I usually start in February, and it takes until summer starts to finish. Cut a fallen tree here and there, split it and stack it, a bit at a time as I have time to spend on it. Now it can season all the long summer and autumn, and be fully dry by the time the cold arrives.
9 comments:
There are about ten cords of logs dumped willy nilly in the back property.
i am going to take it nice and easy and cut them all up for cordwood. There is a certain pleasure to using a sharp skip tooth chipper chain and a well balanced splitting axe.
And the fact that even though I am old, I can still do this, although somewhat sparingly.
My guess is you get a satisfaction out of that work too.
My thoughts run to termites and rats in that pile.
And that it would have warmed our geodesic dome in Las Cruces' winters for decades.
Eric Hines
TERMINIX says we don’t have termites. The very many snakes say we probably do have rats, but also that God has the problem in hand and I shouldn’t worry about it. I haven’t seen one anyway. Occasionally Gandalf brings me a mouse, but not that often.
Chipmunks love those hotels up here.
Mice here- they make fluffy nasty nests in the pile, but they don't have hantavirus. At least that is my position. We had less mice before Rex the killer cat decided weasels were good sport.
I worked my little Stihl ms250 to the edge today- one maple log 30" or so had it gasping. Fortunately it ran out of gas before I did. (one tank of gas is a self imposed limit so I don't hurt myself.) Time to break out the old Husky.
I usually do not like German and Scandinavian machinery - machine tools, motorcycles, etc- too much "we know best, this is the only proper way to do this"- but for chain saws they rock!
Back in the day I was a shake rat, a derogatory term applied to those semi shiftless loggers who would scout for big downed cedars in the deep woods, cut them up into shake bolts , and fly them out with a chopper to the nearest roadhead. A Stihl saw was an object of lust for us, the normal tool was a big old Mac from a pawn shop. Those were fun times, walking through virgin stands of old growth Doug fir, hemlock and western cedar looking for the ancients laying there covered with a foot of moss, yet with heartwood intact as the day it fell a hundred years ago.
I returned to Forks Washington a few years back, to find a logging town that had nearly completely lost its history- taken over by a teenage vampire fantasy industry and for some reason an astounding number of Mexicans or Guatemalans or whoever. Cut off pants and cork (caulk)boots were nowhere to be seen. The only remnant was the Forks Timber Museum,which had a display, amazingly, of our old drinking spot "Art's Place Tavern." This was a good place to learn manners and discretion, where the proprietor one night, having ejected a particularly obnoxious patron, closed down the bar and was greeted with a hail of gunfire from a truck by the same ill mannered lout. In perfect keeping with the towns reputation, he drew his pistol and shot the man dead. Loggers, commercial fishermen, and Indians, too few women and too much alcohol.. What could possibly go wrong?
Heh-enough rambling from this old codger.
Yeah, I'm running a Jonsered. They don't make it anymore, but you can still fix it with Husky parts for the Rancher series. It's badder than anything Stihl makes, no offense to American industry.
We need so little heat that we hardly ever have to fool with wood. My never-ending battle is with digging up 5-foot tall grass and mulching it, then spreading the mulch so that our sandy soil has a little more organic material in it.
A childhood friend in NE chops her own wood through age 81, though the advent of breast cancer has put a stop to that, at least temporarily.
Gringo
I wish her good health a return to hard labor, then.
Post a Comment