A delightful morning of cutting

The other broken red maple was cut up today.  We had an excellent 90 minutes of work.  More fodder for the wood stove! Most likely, none of this will burn until early 2018.

Walking by baby birches

Relatively speaking, trees are still babies when they are already 12 feet tall.  Young paper birch groves are simply wonderful places to be.  The optimism of new life, the pleasant air rustling leaves, and the sheer awesome sight of transitioning bark.  These types of photos show why Hardwood Hermitage abounds with life that never takes a step.

Greatest solar month

With one day to go, July 2016 goes down as our best month of solar production.  We surpassed our spectacular April this year with a day of more than 36 kw/hrs today.  We're already planning our 20 megawatt/hour party (for 20,000 produced kilowatt/hours), which will take place by mid-September or so, depending on how much our favorite yellow orb shows itself in August.

Another red maple blown down

As expected, some new winds took down another red maple.  Instead of going down the north hill to tackle the broken tree from last week, we climbed the south hill by the house take care of the closer tree.  This series of pictures shows the action from today.  The big tree is all cut up and split.  We'll carry down the pieces to cut in the saw buck one more time, then it's to the 2017-2018 woodpile.

Past and future wood work

Does our life focus too much on firewood? We don't think so! We cut several pieces from an oak that toppled about three years ago.  Oaks don't normally blow down, so on further investigation, it was determined that much of the tree's base had been growing over a rock.  The poor tree simply couldn't get firmly rooted.  The first picture shows some of the pieces we created with the big saw.  The second pic shows those split pieces near the final cutting and stacking spot.

A big wind storm last week broke a red maple, which was certainly no surprise.  Our long time fans know how weak red maple can be against summer gales.  The area around this tree (which was about 70 feet tall and has two trunks) was brushcut and lopped to prepare the cutting area.  Both saws will see action, perhaps this weekend, to process this.  Then the regular splitting, carrying, further cutting, and stacking.  The whole tree will likely yield about half a cord of wood.

The same storm also broke a branch on a white ash.  This tree now has a big scar on the side.  The branch is a bit high, so cutting or pulling it off the tree will be difficult.  The branch might be that way for a while.  The broken limb rests above our loop trail.

Plenty of wood and sun

We've had our sixth straight day of at least 30 kw/hrs of solar production, the first time that's ever happened.  Sounds like tomorrow gives us a chance for adding one more day to that record.  The meter is 90+ kw/hrs less than a week ago at this time.  

We know our last fire of the season has occurred!  Fortunately, the rising heat has not introduced much humidity yet.

The nice weather for the last six days assisted with the effort to bring more firewood up.  Here's a big pile set for some additional cutting and splitting.

Fire in June

We've had a cold June.  The indoor temperature today at noon was only 59 degrees, so we started a fire, our first ever in this month where summer starts.