An oak kicks my butt, and a flowering tree attracts many wild pollinators.

In which Hal and MM get consecutive license plates and almost consecutive driver's licenses; the sun comes out,  and the rain; Hal gets his butt kicked by some huge oak rounds, and the last alder log is sectioned and made into half-rounds for splitting, and Hal relocates the fast come-along.

The butt-kicking:
The oak sections have been waiting by the side of the road ever since that day last week when we decided that the dump cart wasn't strong enough to carry them.  I had made some preparations- ordering some log tongs and bolting a 2x12 across the front of the truck bed to use an an anchor point for a come-along to winch them onboard, or a rope and pulley.  I backed the truck down the creekside road to avoid having to turn around, and put down the 10 foot 2x12 ramp, and connected up the slow (÷2) come along. I started with the largest- I figured once I had that down everything else would be easy.

Except that the round kept pushing the end of the ramp up instead of sliding up, and the come along was excruciatingly slow.  The rope pulley was easy to rig but I couldn't budge the log. Eventually I used the come along together with a 5/8 manila rope rigged into a taut-line hitch, which allowed me to take a bight out of the rope when the come along had drawn its full 4-foot range.  (I had looked and looked again to find the 1x come along, but with no success.) The 2x come along configuration was too slow and dead easy to pull; I have two come alongs, so as not to have to keep reconfiguring and possibly losing parts.  In the end I did get the round about 1/3 of the way up the ramp, but then it slid off to the side repeatedly.

In the end I gave it a rest.  Lessons learned: sloppy thinking did not pay off.  Need some way to keep the log on track while being pulled up the ramp.  The ramp needs a stop added to prevent sliding into the truck when an object is being pulled.  I'm considering an a-frame arrangement anchored and pivoting just behind the wheel wells to lift the round without a ramp.  I'm thinking that a piece of steel angle across the bottom side of the ramp where it passes over the tailgate would prevent sliding.  And I'm thinking that I'd be better off bringing chainsaw, sledge, maul and wedge to the road and cutting up the rounds into manageable pieces to load on the truck.

Getting some splitting done:
Fueled by frustration I sawed up the last remaining log at the woodshed- 14" diameter by six feet long, which I cut into 5 lengths and split in halves for the power splitter later on.  Then I loaded the chainsaw, oil, gas, wedge, maul, and sledge hammer into the garden cart for my next expedition to get the oak rounds at the creek overpass.

Consecutive license plates:
But before all this happened, we had our morning excursion.  In order to register our cars we had to have pink slips from California DMV, and that detail somehow slipped our notice when we made our final car payments; getting the paperwork straightened out was MM's doing and finally the day arrived last week when the titles arrived in the mail.  Today we made time in the morning t go down to the DMV and register our cars and get Oregon driver's licenses.  We got through the DMV with a minimum of fuss, taking written tests and presenting our ID, getting our VINs verified, etc.  When the smoke cleared we had driver's licenses one number apart and consecutive license plates.  Something not many couples can say.  So that was today's treat.

But wait! another treat:

There used to be a bee hive right in the driveway, in a hollow oak: the seller had it removed, presumably because it was dying. As it happened they were taking down the tree on the day we first came to view the property. That oak tree is the same whose wood was giving me fits where they dumped it by the bank of the creek. Some of the hollow pieces still had honeycomb inside. So the area lost the services of the bee hive that day. This afternoon, the decorative front yard apple tree, jammed with flowers and blazing in the sunlight, was loaded with all kinds of pollinators like hover flies, visiting the flowers, but not domestic bees.  Showing that there is resiliency in nature.  I was happy to be giving these unsung creatures a feast for once. And when the sun had been shining directly on the flowers  few minutes, the blooms began to give off their perfume, sweet and evocative.

Post Script: After I didn't need it, I found the 1x come along stashed behind the seat in Big Blue, in case of need. When this happens, I usually leave it there rather than move it, so that I don't have to find it again.

Wednesday Wood Day

Wednesday 3-25

Rain and wind early- our hopes of seeing it dry out enough to get the ruts under control must wait awhile.

The log tongs should have come yesterday, so I checked the tracking from Amazon. It said they were delivered to our mailbox yesterday late afternoon.  Logging tongs fit in our mailbox? It proved to be true: that was some big mailbox I installed.

MM with 1/3 cord.  You can see the tongs over her left shoulder.

Today was a woodshed day- sawing, splitting, and stacking firewood. MM and I split and stacked the rounds we had gathered in the last week and put the new log tongs to work. We have been pencilling out our usage so far (1 1/2 cords) and calculating how much we need by winter. Looks like we need 3-4 cords for the winter months.  And ideally we need to age the wood for two years before burning, so we need to have double that so that it will be aged properly.  Our woodshed may hold 4 cords, so we need to increase storage  too.  After today’s stacking, we have a half cord split. 

1/6 cord stack we're working on now

We learned to cross-stack the ends for better stability.

Good news is, there’s a lot of wood on our property waiting to be gathered.  That does not include living trees, but it does include trees that have fallen due to ice storms, overgrowing their habitat, or having been cut and left on the ground last year- we don't why they were cut and limbed but not harvested, but hey.  We need to stockpile these trees before they rot. And our neighbor Jon has given us a huge douglas fir tree that was felled last year and is lying in a ditch, already cut into rounds for splitting.  I came close to hurting myself trying to load the larger rounds, but now I have rigged up a ramp and attachment point to winch it into the truck, and I have new log tongs to make it easier.

Two rough cut oak slabs with matched faces. 

All this makes the buzz about rocket mass heaters seem pretty interesting.  Claims are these wood powered heaters can reduce fuel use to a fraction of what is needed for other devices.

While we were splitting some oak we salvaged we noticed some interesting grain.  I cut a couple of matched slabs and also some other pieces with the chain saw and I hope to make some one-of-a-kind end tables or something out of it. There is beauty everywhere, if we have eyes to see it.

We quit when we started to stumble around from exhaustion, just about 5; so it worked out well.  I made dinner then, and in its aftermath we are sitting around half-dazed, looking forward to bed time.

Monday and Tuesday Diaries

Monday, March 27, 2017

Loaded 2 cartloads of med bark and spread out in hoop house.

Pressure washed the truck

Rigged awning for work in the rain outside garage door.

Made attachment point for come-along at front of the truck bed. 

Rigged rope pulley and 10’ 2x12 ramp- ready to load large rounds when log tongs get here.

(2^nd 2x12 read to pair for tractor ramp.)

Installed heavy duty screweye off the eave in the center of the garage door,

for loading/ unloading heavy objects onto the truck bed.

Only this flower is open- one of thousands on the tree.

Made upside-down cake in the morning.

Took ¼ cake to Jon just to share.

Tuesday 3/28

Late start- breakfast casserole 10am

Made adaptor plate for guest bathroom light fixture

Split larger rounds by cutting cross in top and inserting wedge or maul, drive w sledge hammer

Trimmed low branches on fir near woodshed below 5 feet, leaving stubs for climbing.

 Trying to find an efficient way to bundle 1/2-2" branches.

Need a way to make and bind tighter bundle- maybe ¼” rope and Spanish windlass- finish with several wraps of twine?

First open flower on mystery fruit tree- bud break!

Working in the rain

Sunday AM

 It's been rainy lately, which will raise few eyebrows in Cottage Grove. I have decided denial is the best strategy, once I don a non-absorbent outer layer topped with a rain parka. Unless the rain is interfering with my vision, I treat it like some irrelevant weather phenomenon like stratus clouds and contrails.

I have been surprised lately when I get off the garden tractor to hitch up a log for towing or fill the dump cart and find that the seat has gotten wet in the 10 minute interval. What? How? I guess I must be adapting. This lasts until the rain penetrates to my skin, then I call it a day.

Our morning's work

We have been gathering some firewood, gradually, and yesterday was the day.  We were cutting and dragging out an alder, that had fallen near our lower road. We managed to drag two six-foot lengths to the road, that yielded eight rounds for splitting into firewood, with many branches left to gather up for smaller stove wood and for huge mounds.  

About halfway through our morning we got a call from Jon our neighbor offering us some precut rounds from a fir cut on his property last year; so I drove up there in the pickup truck.  Some of these rounds were so big in diameter that they could not be loaded by hand, so I will have to go back with a ramp and a come-along to get the things in.  

Wood from Jon's property

Wanting to get the truck unloaded right away, I drove down the internal road over the area I recently covered ruts with bark, only to make more ruts.  Until this rain lets up for a week, the ground will continue to be saturated and I will not be able to travel that intersection very much.

The ruts on top of more ruts covered with bark

Today, Sunday, projects are on hiatus.  MM and I will go to Eugene for a movie and dinner. 

The hoop house- with two dump carts of bark.

Monday is looking like a market day for groceries and hardware. Maybe I can rig up a ramp and a crossbar on the truck for winching on those big rounds and loading heavy wheeled equipment like the generator and the wood chipper, start on the gate for the stable/ tractor garage.

Tuesday the logging tongs I ordered should arrive, which they typically do around 10AM.  More log harvesting then, loading rounds and branches, and hauling the remaining chips to the hoop house.

Signs of spring

2 yards of medium bark for filling ruts, and as a first layer in blueberry
beds. The subsoil here is pure clay, and makes some epic ruts if you
spin your wheels at all on a rainy day.  Which is most of them.
Permaculture wisdom: add organic material.

Today I will just show some of the sights around Folly-up-the-Creek on this day, March 24, 2017, with captions

Bing Cherry buds

Purple Tartarian Cherry buds

The unknown fruit tree is still bashful.

But leaves are emerging, and flowers look ready to pop.

More buds on the mystery fruit tree.

The Fugi apple is managing a few buds.

The golden Delicious is alive!  (partly)

Mystery tree near gnome village

Whatever the mystery gnome tree is, these buds look like just leaves.

What are these 6" spikes in the blackberry patch? Maybe ferns?

A well-established sword fern in the shade of a tree.

Though this fork of the tree is covered with some kind of slick black
coating (some kind of mold?) it managed to send out this bud. 

A shelf fungus 

those little purple flowers in the lawn

Surprise! This apple-ish tree is blooming in the oak grove.

Oak grove- white flowering tree

And a pink-flowered tree in the oak grove

The pink flowers of the Oak Grove pink bloomer.

The tree that started it all, in front of the house, in full flower.

A Standing Rib Roast, and Topsoil For Blueberry Hill and Beyond

No, I'm not playing cribbage tonight. MM went alone, while I take some rest. I wasn't really planning to go this week anyway.

We had a full work day, MM and I, and my sore ribs got a workout shoveling those 5 yards of premium topsoil. Where to start? I slipped on a rain-sodden clay bank last week, and fell with a good smack on the ribcage even though I had my elbows tucked in; and in spite of some really classic ignoring for 5 days I finally admitted that I was in some serious discomfort and went in to the walkin clinic, where the doctor prescribed some antiinflamatories and a standing rib roast (x-ray). I didn't hear back from them about the x-ray but I did take the medicine and I resumed my previous program of hope and denial.

Today I received a load of 5 yards of amended topsoil previously purposed to be cannibis medium. Since the grower switched his grow medium he's selling off the old extra stock, and it should make a good addition to my plantings, when used as a top layer over a mixture of gypsum, wood chips, and manure for Blueberry Hill. 

He had lots to sell, and I elected to buy 5 yards, about 4 times my truck's payload, and he kindly delivered it from Springfield.

Only trouble is that he couldn't quite get his dump trailer where I wanted the pile so he dumped it on the road past the woodshed, where it would block all internal traffic, so we had to move it and tarp it until the beds were ready.

MM volunteered to help me move the pile, and we worked with shovels, hoes, rakes, and the dump cart to wheel over to the place it needed to be stored until my gardens are ready.

I'm working on Blueberry Hill just now, a bed just south of an overhanging fir tree. In its original condition, it's an eroding clay bank with exposed roots. At the bottom of the bank there is standing water after a heavy rain. I'm stacking a couple logs to make a retaining wall for a raised bed and filling the bottom foot with gypsum, dead leaves, wood chips and a bit of manure. The top four inches to be the cannabis soil and the blueberry bushes I have waiting. I may have to add an additional log midway up to hold more soil- We'll see how it goes. I calculate that a bed directly under the drip line of the fir tree to the North will get summer sun slanting under the branches, and I will prune the fir so its branches don't shade too much.

Blueberry Hill, with tarped pile of soil above. Some scrap wood debris is already
piled above the logs, which  will be stacked two high .

bottom of Blueberry Hill, with logs ready for
 stacking, and woody debris waiting to be cut
up and buried.. 

Blueberry hill from the Northwest

Log on transport dolly waiting for chainsaw trimming and stacking.

Along with blueberries, I will set out lots of onion sets to discourage gophers, and maybe some runner beans and greens.

Besides the soil, MM dug out a dead bush near the bottom of the bank, and I assisted. And I moved in another log to be ready for stacking.

We enjoyed the display of flowers from a young apple tree in the front yard, where we hadn't thought there was a fruit tree. Every day brings new delights.

Sunday Visit and the second contour

We went to church Sunday morning- arrived late because I couldn't find my black pants at the last minute.
We rushed back home because Angie and James were coming from Grant's Pass, and Q was coming from Portland, to meet each other and to see us.

James and I walked the property and we noticed that the water was coming out of the ground in places on the upper and lower meadows. He pointed out that a pond could be placed in an area like this.  I'll have to work this idea. We noticed fruit tree buds getting ready to break on the large legacy fruit tree.  Still not sure if the saplings left here will grow again- so we wait.  Also touring the gnome village we found the year's first trillium, which Angie got in a picture.  Some small purple flowers made their first appearance, and the lawn daisies were out by the dozens.  The oaks may be close to bud-break now.

They asked whether they could help me in any way, and I set them to flagging off another contour line 3 feet below the first.  We took an 8-foot piece of wood and marked it off at 60 inches- eye level- with a screw and had Q sight along a 4-foot level downhill.  Then we took another 8-foot stick and had Q sight the top of it and tell us when it was level with her 5 foot mark, while we moved up and down the hill.  When we had it right, the net drop in elevation was 3 feet, and we planted a marker there.  This was our reference point, and from there we used the beer-bottle level to plant flags on that contour every 8 feet across the meadow.  This is helping me visualize the contours and lanes I plan for the upper meadow, and where I might locate a few small retaining ponds on contour.

Maybe tomorrow I will start stacking logs for the blueberry hill retaining wall, and bring in some sawdust chips. I am thinking of stacking two logs in parallel about 12-16 inches high, and boring the right size hole vertically, then driving a 3 foot rebar through them and into the ground. 2-3 per 8 foot length. This will make a wall for a raised bed which tapers off uphill, which I can then fill with sawdust and manure, and some soil.