Firewood # 7 - Silver Birch

Last weekend I had logged up the main trunk of the Silver Birch (see Firewood # 6), leaving what I estimated at about 5m more stuck in the hedge (!).  Today I thought I'd pull the rest out - until the we can make the smallholding pay enough to buy me a tractor, the hardworking Polo will have to do (see Chickens # 8)!



Cut end of birch sticking out of hedge!

The first thing to do was to hitch up the end of the tree to the Polo.  I use some 'salvaged' webbing straps for pulling and lifting tasks around the farm - amazing what gets thrown away!

Polo hitched up to the tree ready to go!

Ben & Jo came to spectate (Kate was asleep after a hard day helping Daddy to buy barbed wire, smokey bacon, woodshavings, and doing a lot of swimming!).

On the move!

It took a while to start moving, but the trusty Polo didn't let us down - the wheels were spinning at times, but suddenly it freed and off we went!



Out of the hedge!

I'd previously guessed that this section was about 5 metres long.  Now we can see exactly what we've got it is actually 8 metres long!  That means the tree was actually 20 metres (65ft 7 and 13/32 inches!) tall.  A whopper!

Have to deal with this next weekend!

There is a lovely fork in the tree about 6 feet up from the bottom.  I'd love to use this in one of our woodland cabins or yurts in the future (see Vision # 4).

Firewood # 6 - The Wobble!

We have quite a few trees growing uncomfortably close to the house, and as we slowly tidy up we are trying to get rid of them, with the plan of replacing them hopefully with better trees planted in more appropriate locations.  Around the smallholding there are tons of Silver Birches, and one in particular is too close to the house.  I've been hesitating about cutting it down as it is very tall, and, in one direction it is about 6 metres from a telephone line serving our neighbours house and 4 metres from the lane, and in another direction it is about 8 metres from the house.  In other words if I got the felling wrong I would either be in trouble with our neighbours or Jo!

After many months of hesitation and procrastination, yesterday I thought I would sieze the day and sieze the chainsaw and go for it!  I've been eyeing it for several days, circling it to see which direction it naturally leans in the hope that it is away from the telephone line and away from the house!  Ideally I wanted it to fall directly away from the road, and luckily it does have a very slight lean that way.

There are plenty of step by step guides on the Internet and in books so I won't go into too much detail, the drawing below shows what I did to fell the tree:


How I Felled The Silver Birch

This is the biggest tree I have ever felled, and I must admit it was a massive relief when it all went according to plan and fell just where I wanted it to!  Jo had helpfully been telling me horror stories about someone who accidentally cut off his wife's head with a chainsaw which had increased the pressure to get it right and fell it safely quite a lot!   The first 2 cuts determine the direction of fall, and the 3rd cut creates a 'hinge', which allows the tree to fall in a controlled way.

The Hinge

Like everything, practice makes perfect - I'm sure the next one will be neater, but I'm still fairly happy with this.

The Result!

I measured the 'vital statistics' of the tree with results as follows:

	Circum.	Diameter	Area
Units	m	m	m^2
Top	0.4500	0.1432	0.0161
Bottom	1.1500	0.3661	0.1052
Length	12

'Bottom' means around 20cm above the ground, and 'Top' means the point where a single trunk stops and starts to become several smaller, but still vertical, branches.  It's a little bit difficult to see quite how much additional height above the 12m there is as most of it is stuck through a hedge at the moment(!) but from what I can see I would guess maybe 5m or more.

I wanted to calculate the volume, density and then derive the total weight of the firewood the tree yielded.  It would be really useful to have a rule of thumb by tree type to use in the future when, hopefully, we're using wood to cover all of our heating needs.  Anyway, the starting point for the calculation that I used was to assume that the main trunk of the tree is a truncated cone.  This would allow me to calculate the volume of the 'theoretical' cone (i.e. if the tree actually ended in a sharp point), and then subtract the volume of the part from diameter 0.1432m to the sharp point.  Cutting a simple cube, measuring it and weighing it gives the density and then we're in business!

 Beautiful Section - Future Cheeseboard I hope!

I cut a block, measured and weighed it and found that the density is approximately 1000kg/m^3, so our firewood pile is approximately 0.65m^2 x 1000 = 650kg


Propping prior to first sectioning cut

It was a bit nerve wracking but overall really pleased with the result - had a momentary 'wobble' just before the tree fell when I thought for a second it might be going the wrong way, but it all worked according to plan with no roads blocked, telephones disconnected, buildings or vehicles crushed!  Result!  I will be more confident on the next one!

Finally - apologies for the awful formatting of this post - hope any mathematicians have their microscopes on standby!

Ben explaining about sawdust to Mummy & Kate

 

 

Daddy's Little Helper!



Firewood # 4 - Western Power!

There are several power lines crossing the fields of Tymawr Farm, for which we receive a handsome 'wayleave' payment of £83 per annum! A much more important benefit is that every few years Western Power Distribution (www.westernpower.co.uk/) (WPD), who manage the infrastructure, come and trim any trees which are close to their lines. They hadn't been for several years prior to last week. They check with you a few weeks in advance to run through what & where they need to trim, and also what you want done with the 'trimmings' e.g. do you want them to take them away, chip them into the hedge etc. As I am building a fuel store for the years to come, and am also trying to tidy up the path through the woodland I asked them to cut any branches big enough to burn into manageable pieces, and to chip the rest into neat piles. The chips will be wheelbarrowed up to the woodland and will become the surface of the path.

They turned up on Saturday morning 'en-masse' - there must have been four or five four wheel drives, one tracked chipper, one wheeled chipper and eight or ten tree surgeons. Ben and I watched, fascinated as they worked (incredibly fast - I think it must be piecework or maybe Wales was playing in the afternoon!?) - the chippers in particular are awesome - easily shredding two to three inch diameter branches. The air was briefly filled with the sound of two stroke engines, shouted commands and acknowledgments, and the thud of branches hitting the ground.

When they had left, we walked around and inspected our woody-goodies! The totals are:

1. Wood chips: Approximately 4 cubic metres (40 wheelbarrow loads). One barrow load is giving a decent covering for about 3 metres of path, so I've got 120 metres of path covered for nothing. I would estimate that this is about half of what I need to do, so it's a very welcome addition! Out of interest B&Q sells 100 litre bags of 'softwood chips' (

http://www.diy.com/nav/garden/garden-care-watering/mulches-sand-bark/bark/B-and-Q-Softwood-Chips-Natural-100L-10288047) for mulching / paths etc. for £7.98. If we assume that these bags are compressed, so maybe one B&Q bag is equal to two wheelbarrow loads, we got 20 x £7.98 =

£159.60 worth of chips free. Incidentally I can hire a heavy duty chipper for £60+VAT per day locally here and I think it would have probably taken me 2 days to do the work that WPD did in a morning.


My little helper Ben!

2. Wood for fuel: Approximately 2 cubic metres of very nice looking mixed hardwood logs including Hawthorn and Beech. Once I've finished the (seemingly endless!) task of cutting to length and splitting these logs I will have wood which would have cost us around £300 to buy (see Firewood #1).


The log pile - waiting to be split!

I'm really pleased with this - another wonderful illustration of the abundance of the land. Its important for us not to miss opportunities to SAVE money like this, instead of always focussing on how we can MAKE money, in fact when we're trying to achieve self-abundance the savings are more important because they are not taxed, so £1 saved is worth something like £1.50 earned, after tax, pension, national insurance and all the rest is taken into account (see Vision #1).

Three cheers for WPD! Look forward to your visit in 2015!

Firewood # 3 - Stream-bed Attrition

The very heavy rain we've been having over the last few weeks has brought with it some great opportunities for character building, including feeding pigs by torchlight in the pouring rain and trying to clean mud off my trousers in the loos at work after rushing in one day, but it has also had some positives too!

The brook is full of water, which looks great, and is sadly a fairly rare occurrence, although I have big plans for trying to clear it out, and one day creating a dam and a pond, filled with delicious crayfish!

One good opportunity it has provided is a great addition to the Tymawr log pile in the form of this Hawthorn tree.  There are lots and lots of trees right on the edge of the brook, each year having more of the soil around their roots washed away.  The recent heavy rain finally did for the last particle of Monmouthshire clay anchoring the roots of this particular tree, and it fell yesterday.  It has made me wonder how long the rest of the trees are likely to remain upright - a little Hawthorn is one thing, but a hundred year old Welsh Oak might cause some more serious problems!  I'll have to warn the sheep and alpacas to be on their guard, to keep their wits about them and to practice sprinting!

Incidentally, I haven't come across many Hawthorns which could be classed as 'Trees' and had thought of them really as a bush used for hedging.  It may be that at some point in history this tree was part of a hedge, but today it is easily twenty five feet tall (actually more correctly 'long' now!), with the largest trunk being about four inches in diameter!  Tymawr farm is certainly a great place for tree growing!  It gives me confidence that the Cider Orchard will be a success!

Firewood # 2

I didn't notice it being an excessively windy night last night (perhaps because I drank 3 small glasses of the homemade wine - probably equivalent to a bottle of 'normal' wine!)  However, when I went out this morning quite a big branch had blown down off the big oak tree - I guess a 100kgs or more in weight so it must have been pretty blowy!

So, hopefully tomorrow morning I'll be able to get the chainsaw out and add to the log store.  What it has made me think though is that perhaps we didn't go high enough with our pruning the other day - could've been nasty if it had gone the other way onto the house!

The great oak

Slightly changing the subject, a project for tomorrow will be estimating the oak's age - I found what looks like some good information from the Woodland Trust http://wbrc.org.uk/atp/Estimating%20Age%20of%20Oaks%20-%20Woodland%20Trust.pdf which should help.

Firewood #1

One thing we're not short of here is trees!  The great oak tree, which must predate the house by a century or more has been worrying us for a while - a lot of dead branches were hanging dangerously, and the area underneath it was really dark, cold and damp.  I'm pretty confident (I almost wrote 'competent' then and had to correct myself!) with a chainsaw, but not great with heights, so I generally confine my efforts to cutting down small trees or logging up bigger ones.  So, we decided to get a tree surgeon to tidy up the oak for us, nothing too drastic to start with, just to make it safe and open it up a bit to let some more light through.  We noticed that our neighbours were having some work done by Tof Horticultural Services from Cwmbran, and they gave them a positive report, so we asked them to do a day's work for us including tidying up the oak, cutting down a birch which had grown very close to the base of the oak, and some other smaller bits and pieces.

Mike Whittington of Tof was really good, he and his assistant worked really hard all day, did everything we had on our list and more, and also created about a 1.5 sq.m of firewood!  They logged it up into roughly 6 - 9" lengths depending on diameter, and piled it up ready for me to split later.  Not bad really when you think that seasoned firewood seems to cost about £150 per sq.m - hows that for 'cashback'?!

The pile, after 2 hours of splitting!

Log splitting and stacking is a really satisfying job - it speaks to something very primitive in me I think - makes me feel like I'm being a good father and keeping my family warm & safe for the winter!

The logpile - my pride & joy!

In a year or so these will be keeping Tymawr cosy!

I use a splitting maul and a sledgehammer (sometimes needed on bigger logs to hit the maul all the way through).  I'm a bit of a sucker for 'hardware' and have been looking at a 'wood grenade' (!) in the Screwfix catalogue (http://www.screwfix.com/p/roughneck-wood-grenade-log-splitter/51334) but not yet succumbed!

The maul is fairly new, fibreglass shaft, does the job fine.  The sledgehammer was my Dad's, I have a few of his tools and I always enjoy using them.  He was a great 'doer', very self reliant and, although I haven't really analysed it too much, I guess probably a major inspiration to be more self-suffient.  Would be wonderful to pass on the sledgehammer and also the 'doing' spirit to my kids too!