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| Snow machine with freight sled for logging |
On sunny, windless afternoons, even in the high 30s to 40s F, we enjoy a drink and sometimes a meal on the front porch, warmed by the sun (wearing jackets and hats). Intrepid little insects emerge from… wherever… to heat themselves and mate on the sun warmed log walls.
My favorite task this month is culling trees in the forest for firewood. My roles remind me of go karts and county fair competitions.
Each autumn, when the bugs are gone, the ground is firm, and the birch leaves have dropped so we have a clearer view of the woods, we bushwhack a trail along a concentric circle of standing dead spruce trees. In the winter, we snowshoe and then snowmachine a hard packed path there, so we can get close to the trees with a snowmachine and large freight sled, plus two little plastic sleds that carry the tools to the work site and cart away the log rounds from the tree to the large sled. On cool March mornings (and this year, even into mid-April), we head out with chainsaws, kevlar chaps, ear protection and snowshoes to fell some trees. Bryan assesses the direction that each target tree wants to fall, based on orientation and heavy/light limbs. After that, he limbs the tree and bucks the wood into rounds.
Then, the fun part starts for me. I play bocce ball with the logs by tossing them toward a target near the small sleds. I judge my prowess by how many subsequent logs hit the first one. Some of the really skinny trees with no lateral branches, I throw like a javelin. Then I lumber over to the pile in my snowshoes (if the snow is soft) or regular boots, if the snow is hard, load up the sled(s), unstrap my snowshoes to straddle the snow machine and deliver the logs to their destinations.
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| Spruce logs awaiting splitting |
I feel like a kid on the go kart tracks my boys loved as kids when I careen around the trails through the woods and around our hilly property. The thin top trunk logs of black spruce go next to the wood fired hot tub. Thick ones that will need to be split next summer with an electric log splitter I pile up under the larch trees near the wood corral. Rotted trunks with a neat central hole I ream out with a crowbar for future planters. Bryan usually quits after two tanks of chain saw gas, while I serve as log loader and delivery gal. It is great that this is so fun, because we are incentivized to gather 11 cords for winter. A friend with a 5 bedroom house needs 40 cords each year!
This year we are also harvesting 10 to 12 foot long trunks of the slimmer trees (or the tops of them) to use as posts and poles for construction projects. These I drag behind me towed by a looped ratchet strap. Some will support an electric fence encircling the bee yard. Others will support perennial climbing vines (clematis) that I plan to plant on either side of south facing doorways. So pretty!
This year, nights were still below freezing until mid-April, so we were able to gather firewood for a longer period. This is good for two reasons. One, standing dead spruce are highly combustible fire hazards. Two, they will rot upright over time and be less useful in the future for fuel or construction.
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| Wood corral as of March 29 |
In mid-April, we finally wrapped up this project by cleaning up some of the flammable debris on the ground. I towed many sled loads of the pine cone rich tops of the trees to the wood corral, where we chop them up as tinder. Dead branches fueled several days of bonfires in a snow filled meadow. (Don’t you love a bonfire in winter?) These locations serve as our version of terra preta, or maybe biochar. A few years hence, dozens of little birch seedlings with sprout in this year’s burn spot, just as they have in others.
