I'm playing on less than 20 acres here so a rather disparate economy of scale I think. I probably burn a higher percentage of my "problems". LOL
The overhead is high, for sure! There will be close to $1,000 in trucking simply to get the excavator, harvester, and forwarder here. Building the roads I consider as an investment in the property rather than a cost to the job, but money out of pocket, regardless.
One day of site work done. Topsoil peeled off the lawn and pasture. A little drainage ditch to divert surface water away from a haul road. One of my tractor roads widened, and some openings through stonewalls widened.
Roadwork. Still pretty rough, but the forwarder traffic will help pack it a bit, and then I will come back through after they finish and dress it up for easy driving. I had an old beater tractor out this far, just once - pretty excited to have this sort of access now.
Gravel pit has been opened up. Does anyone have a crusher I can borrow for a week? I will be picking stone out of this roadway for sure.
The harvester arrived as I was about to leave for work. They couldn’t make the turn into the driveway so unloaded on the road. In the small world department, our daughter used to date the harvester operator, I used to work with the truck driver’s mother, and the owner of the trucking company lived in our house as a boy.
Some cutting, and a bit more roadwork was done. Mostly firewood in this area. The Sugar Maple is really slipping its bark - normally I cut in the winter, so I don’t see it this loose. He’s done an excellent job of not damaging the trees that stay.
The guys here now are the ones we’ve been working with all along (the company my wife works for). They were going to bring in a chipping company as a sub contractor for the junk pine, but that is not going to happen due to the low value for everyone involved.
This is their first job after mud season and Spring maintenance to the machines. The forwarder will get its bed stakes and tracks delivered here.
Yes, in respect to the white pine, but the opposite in respect to the hardwood, which makes up at least 80% of the area. We will remove a lot of the Ash and some Red Oak as saw logs, but much of the hardwood will be firewood, with the goal to leave high-value trees.
Working in an area that is a young sugarbush. Not much for sawlogs yet, but there were two big Red Oaks that came out, a few Red Maple, and a few White Ash. He said the Ash looks like very good quality, which is good news because there are quite a few to come out.
They took both Saturday and Sunday off, but showed me the quirks of the excavator, so I tracked it out of the woods to a small gravel pit and made a few piles, sorting out the bigger stone. Then I brought it up to the house to level some of the road fill. They say it takes repetition on the order of 10,000 times to reach full proficiency at tasks in general, and I’ve only got about 50hrs experience on backhoes and mini-excavators. Needless to say, a Sunday when no one can see me hit the right track pedal instead of the thumb, multiple times, is the right time to practice.
Back at it today. A little more roadwork, and finally some logs on the landing. The mailbox is for the truckers to leave trip tickets in.
I took down quite a bit of fencing and removed some waterlines that we use for the cattle and the raspberries. The waterline is on the surface most places, but I had buried it 6” at this gateway. I used a spading fork to help get it out of the ground here, and, of course, speared it in the process. On the upside, it made a good place to install a quick-connect so we can water the raspberries in the evening and then pull it out of the way during the logging traffic times.
