I've spent about 4 hours cutting and hauling wood today. I dropped and bucked 2 of the dead box elders my buddy wanted taken out. I keep the wood, he gets his field back, and he'll use his boss' skid steer to haul and then burn the branches. The first elder was about 20" dbh and pretty straight for a box elder. The tree was solid. After I bucked that up, I got some of the brush moved to clear my ATV lane. Then I dropped a smaller box elder and bucked that up too. I didn't get pictures of the trees, but my ATV with the tow behind sled was working well for me with the 4" of fresh snow. That snow won't last as it will get up to the mid 40's by Friday and Saturday. I can probably get back on there with the 4x8 trailer behind the quad if the snow goes away. I'll take pictures of the trees I dropped next time I'm out there. There's at least 2/3 of a cord bucked up, maybe more. There's at least three other big dead box elders in there with a couple other smaller ones. This should be a good amount of shoulder season wood, with the basswood I have down and needing bucking at my wood lot just up the road from my buddy's place where I was today. I helped my buddy load up a couple of loads of red oak into his truck, and he says I could have the rest of that red oak. It's been seasoning for 3 or 4 years. There's probably a half cord if not more that I can take. I brought the ATV to leave by my buddy's, and I took the splitter to my house to split up the ash we took down in October. I also moved the burn barrel over to where I'll be splitting to burn up the ash branches. Here's the load of wood I brought over along with the splitter hiding in the back. There's a bunch of sugar maple splits, as well as the "sticks" of ironwood and a couple sticks of shagbark too. Those sticks are all burnable once I cut them in half. There's a few short chunky monkey red oak pieces in here from that pile as well. I'll get moisture meter readings on a round of the dead standing barkless box elder when I split it this week. I've also wore my wife's fitbit to see how many calories I burnt. 1913 calories in about 4 hours.
Here's the stack of ash that I will be splitting. On the left and right of the pile of silver maple that's been split are all the ash rounds. There's crabapple on the left as well that will get split. I'll split and burn branches at the same time over the next couple of weeks.
Aaaah firewooooood! I reckon after all this backbreaking work it was time for some gemütlichkeit eh?! Love the downhill yard of yours, good view there i bet. Frohes neues!
I did more work today on my ash pile and the other will I brought home last week. I used all of the saw gas I had as I didn't have any straight gas left. The saw gas was getting a but long in the tooth though, so it was fine . I split a good amount of the rounds though. The stuff I split was all from the burn barrel to the ram of the splitter. I have probably what I did today, or a little more left to do, which I'll work on after work this week. I found another ash borer in a split. Little bastages. We're to get rain tomorrow, so I loaded all the wood I brought over last week into my stack on the patio, and also put some inside. I secured the tarp on the patio stack to keep the wood dry.
Not yet, well except 1 piece that I took home to check the moisture on it with the mm. It passed, and it's already been incinerated.. It did have a slight red stripe to it, but it was about a 7" diameter round. The elder is at my buddy's dad's land, but I'll probably get out there next Saturday. When I split it, I'll take pictures. I'm usually good for that. ( Minus this box elder lol)
