My neighbor let me know that he had another four trees for me (already dropped) so I made a few trips today. He had already cut one into sections in order to clear the trail but the others needed to be cut into sections/bucked. Two red maple, one beech, and what I thought was a silver maple (but not sure now...not used to silver maple having such a dark center).
When I was leaving after cleaning up the four trees earlier, I pointed out a birch that was on its last legs. Well, when he cut that birch down, one tree turned into six. He wanted to keep the others and that was fine by me as the birch was in excellent health and turned out to be a lot of wood (four trips). Used the new 500i on the lower part and it is definitely a time saver. Bucked the lower part of the tree in under five minutes (approximately 18" in diameter).
Pleasant surprise from my local arborist today...a decent dump trailer load of hardwood right in my processing area. Everything is fresh cut from this year except for maybe one or two logs. Mostly red oak and red maple with a few pieces of white birch. Probably about a cord (give or take). Definitely making my life easier this year!
And to make it even better, a friend dropped off a bunch of hemlock. Gotta love a day when you get over a cord of free wood delivered! Time to get some splitting done.
Went out scrounging this morning and ended up with three beech blow downs and one small ash. Used the 290 for everything except the large beech (didn't really need the 500i for that however I wanted to use the 500i). Dropped off the first load when I went to pick up the 500i. The round pile continues to grow so I may hold off on scrounging until I get everything split.
Absolutely! Beech is definitely my firewood of choice. I was getting jealous of all the pictures you've been posting lately of your beech scores so had to go get some more of my own.
The last two years I've been felling more Beech because of damage or disease, I hate doing it but new ones will grow. When I found the wind damaged Beech down, I stayed on that ridge and took some of the worst ones. We had our first warm day (66) and the bugs started to come out.
I agree. The leaves are just starting to really come out here so it is getting more difficult to see the blow downs. Plus it's getting into that time of the year when the dreaded four show up (black flies, mosquitos, ticks, and tourists) so that cuts down on my motivation to scrounge. I have enough in the lot to keep me busy for a while and I have access to probably at least a couple cords worth of blow downs on private property. Unfortunately those are all in some gnarly terrain that is only accessible by ATV.
We have a lot of the beech blight up here as well however thankfully there are still huge tracts of healthy trees. I try to keep an eye on a few areas where there is a heavy concentration of beech in order to get any blowdowns before they go punky. The black flies showed up here last week along with warmer temps (about the same as what you're seeing). I was cutting at a higher elevation yesterday and there was a good breeze so it stayed in the 50's and the wind kept the bugs away. No buZZsaw up this way however I did have some competition out there (which is somewhat unusual). It was about 60 feet downhill to the road but that caused two problems. I had to be careful before rolling/sliding the logs/rounds down due to intermittent traffic (tourists tend to get scared when they're driving up a back dirt road and suddenly see logs rolling down the hill). Plus if the rounds rolled across the road, they would have continued rolling about another 300 feet into the river.
With the warmer weather today (73) the bugs are out looking for a meal, it's time we purchase more Off.
Same here. It's not too bad in the wood lot where it's open and there is a slight breeze however I took the ATV back in the boonies to check out a couple blow downs and the bugs were intense once I got under the tree canopy. I'm ready for autumn.
Did some bucking today to add to the round stacks. Dang, that round pile looks a lot smaller in the picture (considering some areas are about 7' high). I need to get the rest of the logs bucked that are in the yard and then decide if I want to go into full-blown splitter-mode or go after 7 trees that need to be dropped.
EODMSgt You can always finish cutting and splitting and stacking what you have down. The vertical wood piles you want to take down will wait on you for a bit.
I did some stuff for the wife in the backyard today (perfect day for splitting and stacking) and the bugs were out but we had 20 mph winds that kept them off us so that was nice.
There you go putting logic into my chaos. But you're right, five of the trees I need to take down are on my own property so I can wait on those. The other two are on a neighbor's property and need to come down but they're easy to get to and won't take too much effort. After that it's splitting time. Never heard that phrase before (vertical wood pile)...gotta remember that.
Nice! It was sunny and warm (by my standards) and not much of a breeze so the bugs were out in full force. Figure it's only going to get hotter so work while it's only in the 70's and take a break during mid-summer.
