Alone in the wood

Tracy has a few days of supply teaching this week, starting Monday, so she was busy preparing lessons this afternoon, and I headed up the to the wood on my own.

As a safety precaution, we arranged that I would text or call once an hour. Ideally you don't work alone with a chainsaw, but when you do, this kind of arrangement is recommended.

There was quite a bit to finish off from yesterday, with trees that had been felled and snedded (that is, had their branches removed), but not logged up and stacked. so that kept me busy for a while. I also striped some birch with the chainsaw:
The reason for doing this is that the bark of birch is very resinous (it makes an excellent natural fire lighter) and keeps the water inside the wood, so if it is just left as it is it tends to rot rather than dry out. By cutting a couple of stripes along each log you provide a route for the moisture to escape. We may sell some of the birch as firewood if we end up with much of it, but as it burns so easily we're likely to keep a pile back for our own use on camp fires over the summer...

Here's couple of pictures of the area we've worked on over the weekend:
They don't look that big for a day and a bit of work, but the thing to remember is that most stools had 3-6 stems on them, some of them large. It takes much longer to sned, log up and stack than it does to fell...

We've both got a full week of work ahead now, including a forestry first aid course for Tracy (I'm not doing the course, as I'll be the one stuck under a tree waiting for the first aid... ;-) ), and the weather looks poor, so it'll probably be the weekend before we're up there again...

Mike