A Country Man is I
The Aspen Tree Service came by a week ago or so and cut down twleve trees on my property. Excellent job in case you're looking for an estimate...Anyway, I asked them to leave the trunks in cut up into 16 inch logs (rounds, I think). In any case, the idea is that I would split the logs into fireplace worthy chunks...me and my trusty eight pound maul.
But a 16 inch length that's tirty inches across is a big ass log. And twleve tree trunks is a hell of a lot of wood. A hell of a lot. Anyway, even worse, the biggest trees were elms.
Two things I've learned which I didn't want to know really -
1 - Elm is a horrible, horrible type of wood to split. It's stringy, holds together really well...in fact, if you want a type of wood that WON'T split, choose elm.
2 - An overstrike is a bone rattling thing, and not just bone rattling for a moment - your bones will rattle for hours after you've put down your maul and gone inside. And damn me for being, as they say, big boned.
Of course, I could rent one of those log splitting machines, but that would go against my grain (pun). It's like I've started a fight and of course, you can't just walk away from a fight.
But a 16 inch length that's tirty inches across is a big ass log. And twleve tree trunks is a hell of a lot of wood. A hell of a lot. Anyway, even worse, the biggest trees were elms.
Two things I've learned which I didn't want to know really -
1 - Elm is a horrible, horrible type of wood to split. It's stringy, holds together really well...in fact, if you want a type of wood that WON'T split, choose elm.
2 - An overstrike is a bone rattling thing, and not just bone rattling for a moment - your bones will rattle for hours after you've put down your maul and gone inside. And damn me for being, as they say, big boned.
Of course, I could rent one of those log splitting machines, but that would go against my grain (pun). It's like I've started a fight and of course, you can't just walk away from a fight.
posted by Steven at
6:30 PM
1 Comments:
When we had one (small) tree and the branches of many other trees cut, the tree guys offered to take everything away or mulch it for us. We opted for mulching.
We had grand plan for our pile of mulch. We would fill in various depressions and ruts on our property. We would scatter the mulch around the bushes that count as landscaping, and try to kill (or at least make less visible) the weeds growing up, around, and over them. We would mulch some of the favored dog paths, where grass isn't going to grow again, ever.
We learned that mulch steams. We learned that if you leave it alone for a little while, pretty much all the mulch will decompose. We suspect that, if we had the vegetable garden we occasionally talk about, this would be a good thing.
We did mulch over one of the dog paths. And no bones were rattled, so I guess we're still ahead of the game.
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