Wood and flowers

We had great weather this weekend.  Plenty of cutting and splitting done.  Our July 4 wood rack is now officially full, with some nice logs on both sides.  The logs will be for the 2014-15 winter.

Just over three cords are ready along our driveway.  This doesn't count the red maple west of the house, which will burn first -- or the shed full of wood pictured above.

We have plenty more to cut and split, so, with only about 2 or 3 cords needed each winter, we're in really good shape on our supply.

Here's a bonus photo of some wildflowers growing just north of our deck.  Lots of good color from them this summer.

Next weekend is the Lancaster Fair!

Various Ramblings

We've been spending weekends and a few mornings here and there, picking berries, getting the garages organized, working on firewood (a perpetual task!) and getting ready for our first winter in the house.  We are in really good shape wood-wise (will post some updated photos and measurements soon).  Berry season was decent (not as many as we had hoped), but we still managed to pick enough to give some to one of our neighbors on 2 occasions (they have brought us squash and cucumbers from their garden).

The driveway will soon have its final grading and layers of gravel applied.

The next big event will be delivery of our new tractor!!!  We ordered it last weekend and hope to have it by next week sometime!  Will definitely post photos and specs.

Our solar electricity generation has been fantastic this month and we have exceeded 2 MegaWattHours since going live in May.

CO2 Emission Saved:  3,242.02 lb

Equivalent Trees Planted: 83.25

Light Bulbs Powered: 6,468.24 For a day

Baby white oaks

We welcome another grand tree species to Hardwood Hermitage.  White oak (quercus alba) acorns were planted on our south hill last fall.  Several baby trees can be seen now, like the one pictured here.

Unquestionably one of the greatest trees, white oak has tremendous aesthetic virtues.  The burgundy fall color on those round lobes is fantastic.

A white oak weighs about 46 pounds per cubic foot.  They are very valuable as lumber and firewood.  The cells in the wood are totally closed, unlike red oak.  Thus, quercus alba has been used throughout history in places that you don't want liquid to permeate, such as ship building and wine barrels.

We'll never see the white oaks we plant get to enormous proportions, but the majesty of this highly desirable species can't be denied.  More will go in brush cut spots we're working on this summer.

Berries!

We picked some great berries yesterday afternoon.  They amounted to about 3 quarts.  Plenty more blackberries will be ready in the next week or two.  Here are some we washed yesterday.

On our way back up the hill, we saw a porcupine about 35 feet high in a big red maple.

We continue to work on wood cutting, splitting, and stacking.  Also, we've completed some tractor garage clean-up in preparation for the tractor.  We're close to ordering one after test drives yesterday.

Destruction and creation

Nature's two most powerful forces, destruction and creation, are constant companions when you live in a forest.  We lost a big paper birch in that wicked storm earlier this month.  Also, the power company's tree crews did some preventive cutting of a few trees leaning toward the lines.  We got a lot of wood out of both events.

This weekend we did cutting of paper birch logs and a red maple log.  Most are in 22" or 44" lengths.  We'll cut those into burnable lengths later.  Here are pictures of the work, followed by a baby red oak created recently.  During the storm, the blown down paper birch and a dead conifer both came really close to wiping the little oak out.  But the lovely tree survived.

A wicked Friday night

We had another summer storm.  This one lasted about 10 minutes, but it knocked out our power for 22 hours, and some trees were blown over.  We think this might have been a microburst -- intense wind for just a few minutes.  The storm's power was amazing!

Some double-trunked red maples fell in the storm.  This large tree was rather lovely.  The full crown would have been a bright red this fall.  This tree may be a whole winter's worth of firewood, looking on the bright side.

Here's the root ball of that tree, lifted out of the ground by the short, powerful wind.  This is about 12 feet in diameter.  Another red maple fell on the driveway.

Several white pines fell, too.  I think nature used the storm to mock us.  Several pines are now blocking cleared walking paths.  Lots of work to make the paths, just a second to block them again.  We'll get the saws out, though, to make short work of these weak softwoods.

Two maples broken on our south hill.

Oaks are prized for many reasons.  We like their very hard wood and deep taproot, which make them much more resistant to storm damage than most trees. You can see a tall and unfazed red oak on the left, with a wonderful rounded crown.  On the right, a broken red maple.

Negative 188

We wanted to provide a solar production update.  Our smart meter was installed on May 20.  In those two months, our meter reads negative 188 kilowatt hours.  We've produced that much more than we used in that time.

The last eight days have been very productive.  The sun has been out a lot, even though afternoon storms have occurred quite a bit.  We're paying for that with highs that have reached 90.  That's rare for way up here.

Overall, since our system went on line on May 15, our solar panels have produced 1,340 kilowatt hours of electricity.  Long live the sun!