It’s been a minute since I felt like I’ve contributed to our cause on The Mountain. It’s also been a while since I last produced any firewood. This morning I put those two acknowledgments together and got busy.
I had a couple of targets in mind, an easy tree and a not-so-easy one. I flipped a coin — heads. I’d tackle the tougher tree first.
At the edge of the woods was a chinquapin (or chinkapin) oak (Quercus muehlenbergii) rising between two mature eastern red cedars. It stood maybe 35 feet tall, nine inches across at its base. And it was leaning disconcertingly toward the southeast corner of the cabin 30 feet away.
Y’know, it probably would’ve been okay to leave it be. The crown was healthy enough. The lower trunk looked suspect to me, however, and I decided that it needed to come down.
The trick, of course, would be to drop the thing without hitting the cabin. That’d mean going ever-so-slightly against what it wanted to do. I calculated where to place my cuts, then made a generous notch on the lee side, a foot from the ground.
The third, felling cut put the tree straight down, no “barber chair,” exactly where I wanted it. I walked around to see what my margin had been — a good eight feet from the cabin. Perfect.
I limbed the oak where it landed, tossing smallish branches (loaded with hundreds of now-displaced cicadas) onto the burn pit. The rest I bucked to stove-length and gathered into a pile near the stump.
Cuts I made near the base of the trunk, by the way, exposed signs that this tree was in the early stages of hollowing. That further validated my decision to bring it down.
With that out of the way, it was on to the easier tree.
A relatively small (less than 20 feet tall, seven inches at the base) black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) obscured a “Private Road” sign we’d planted a couple of months ago. I drove my truck down past the tree and felled it in the only direction it could go — across the road.
Since that then blocked anyone who might pass that way, I didn’t buck it in place — I limbed it there and stuffed the branches into the woods, then cut what was left into a half-dozen six- or eight-foot lengths, which I loaded into the bed of the truck.
In the time it took me to do that, not a soul drove by.
Back up at the wood yard, I bucked what I’d cut and stacked it temporarily on cedar runners. Once I’ve acquired a few more shipping pallets, this black locust, along with the chinquapin oak and other wood I’ve harvested recently, will be racked properly and left to season.
To wrap this up, a few words about how we think about taking firewood on The Mountain.
Ordinarily, and for a variety of reasons, I always prefer to harvest trees that are already dead (ideally standing dead) or casualties of wind and weather. The two I dropped today were very much alive, but neither species is rare or even unusual here.
As long as we’re taking them, we’ll put the wood to good use. It’s a stewardship thing.
Both oak and black locust are top-tier firewood. I went to the trouble of bucking some of the branches, even as small as an inch in diameter, for kindling and coaling. Waste not.
Because this is green wood, it’ll take a long while to season. I’ll split the larger pieces to hasten the process, but I don’t expect it to be ready for the stove ’til the winter of 2025-2026 — at the earliest.
Once again I did the entire job with our 12-inch DeWalt electric chainsaw. That’s all it required.
It felt great to be productive.
Deb bought these from one of her customers — a quart jar of herbed farmer’s cheese, and a quart of fresh yogurt. I think this’ll be the beginning of our making better use of the Country culture that surrounds us.
Take care of yourselves, Patriots. Stay calm. Stay sharp. Stay free.
#WiseUp #LibertyOrDeath #Ungovernable
#LetsGoBrandon #FJB