Sunday, June 13, 2010

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck. . .

It has been raining both rain and firewood around here for the last month. About a month ago I wrote here about the huge limb that fell and knocked the top off another tree. Then a week or so ago I went out one morning to find another huge fallen limb blocking our driveway. It was pretty good sized and had to be sawn into smaller pieces just to get it out of the way. Ray has been chopping and splitting and sawing and making piles of firewood. Here's a pile next to the house.

Here's another pile out by the picnic table.


And another pile.

And there will be more coming.  Here is the brush pile—the branches and broken bits.


Today Ray went out and rented a chipper to dispatch the brush pile. You feed the sticks in one end and wood chips come out the other end. Ray has done this before and the resulting stuff is pretty good for spreading around on paths and between rows in the garden. It might help the muddy area that resulted where the creek overflowed last week.


Of course the images from that gruesome scene in Fargo  (click on that link only if you have strong stomach) always come to mind. Yech! Ray just finished up after a long and noisy day of wood chipping, but he has a nice pile of chips.

Some of the wood that fell just can't be dealt with. The big, rotting branch landed across the creek right next to the bridge. It can't be budged, so it has become what we are optimistically calling "a feature". Ray planted a couple pretty little ferns right in the rotted out portion and it looks pretty good, don't you think?

6 comments:

  1. Man - that is a whole lot of wood. Is this what Ray had in mind when he wanted property? LOL

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  2. You would think you lived in a veritable forest. That's a whole lot of work Ray has been doing there.

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  3. Ray is an artist in his own right. I LOVE the ferns in the immovable log....

    Hopefully you don't have any walnuts in there because you do NOT want to use wood chips from them in your planting beds unless you want to kill off a lot....

    At least you are ready for some good "camp" fires this summer and fall....

    teri

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  4. I love the way you recycle everything nature throws your way. And if you can't recycle it, you decorate it. No one would ever know those ferns haven't been growing there for years!

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  5. That scene in Fargo is the first thing that comes to my mind when I see, hear, or think about a wood chipper. Neighbors on our block made good use of one, though, to help "pave" our "unimproved" stretch of 37th Ave. after a couple of trees came down.

    Jerry and I have a ton of fortuitous firewood, too, thanks to our limb-dropping sweet gums out front. I wish we'd realized that would happen before we invested in the half cord of milled fir that I finally got rid of on Freecycle. Is the moral "You never have to buy firewood in Oregon"?

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