Working in the wood in winter sunshine, what a great way to start the New Year . I restarted processing the fallen turkey oak in late November this year after a summer concentrating on learning how to successfully produce charcoal. I had worked through the branches and was left with about 30′ of the main trunk and the knuckle where the tree forked into its main branches. This week, a few days outside of my ambition to finish by the end of the year, I finished chainsawing up the main trunk. Here is a short video showing the last few stages.
Having cut the last remaining section of the main trunk into manageable lumps I will now complete splitting these lumps into logs and stack for seasoning. A lot of the later stages of the trunk were very heavily knotted and are almost impossible to split by hand. For these bits I have reverted to using the chains saw to cut through the gnarly, twisted grain sections. Whilst this is perhaps wasteful purely from a use of chainsaw fuel and production of sawdust perspective; on balance I think it is far better to go this extra step and produce some very useful firewood from the fallen tree.
Very satisfying to finish this part of the job but rather daunting to think that I have lifted each part of the tree so in effect I have lifted the entire tree. The worrying part is that I will continue to lift and carry the whole tree many times over as I split, stack, load in the van, transport, unload from the van and re-stack at the buyers home! They say that firewood warms you up twice; once when you cut it and again when you burn it – maybe in this case it is not twice but five or six times!
Storm Eleanor blew through the wood earlier in the week, from an initial inspection there was very little obvious damage thankfully. One exception was a pair of small ash trees that I noticed were at an odd angle.
I was confused what had caused the damage as there was nothing obvious at first, the ash trees were too young and therefore too supple to snap under the direct effect of the wind so there must be something else. It took me a while but some way from the trees was a dead branch from a nearby beech tree which must have snapped, fallen onto the trees snapping them before being catapulted off again to lie some distance from the snapped trees. Seems a shame that a dead part of a well established tree can take out a younger tree – net gain zero.
More next time……………………..
Tim Burr 