Phil's a Lumberjack, and He's Okay!

With colder weather, our humanure pile does not compost much. In fact, it’s mostly frozen solid. Shortly before Christmas, Phil came across a couple men chipping wood up the road, and asked them if they would bring their chips to our property. They brought a small mountain of pine wood chips: not much good for mulching fruit trees, since fruit trees need hardwood chips, but good for carbon for the compost pile.

Phil spent the morning refining our current compost pile. He added the humanure and the dead lambs, then shoveled cubic yards of wood chips on top and around. It makes me excited to think what great compost we’ll have! (And, for the horrified, no, we don’t plan to use humanure compost on products for sale. We’ll use it for our personal garden only.)

The sheep and goats are creating good compost, too. We put hay down, and they eat some of it and poop on some of it. The layers have built up until the ground is spongy to walk on. Phil thinks that little bugs are bedding down, since the chickens go and scratch around. Come spring, that will be another large lot of raw material for our composting pleasure. Yay!

Phil next went to chop down a large double tree up near the road. Based on the conformation, we figure it was a stump that sprouted two trees, each about the diameter of a dinner plate, and each about 50 feet tall. We wanted it down because it’s in the future cherry orchard, and the future cherry orchard needs more space.

Phil the Lumberjack got to work. First, he chopped a wedge in the side using an axe. Then he took his huge one-man crosscut saw and started to saw on the other side. (The saw was one purchase made back in Colorado, as we stocked up for our life in the wilderness. This was its inaugural cut.) He sawed for a long time. It looked like hard work. He had to take frequent breaks. The tree was a tough customer.

But, after about half an hour from the time he began, he pushed on the tree and we could both tell that it wasn’t ever going to return to its proud upright state. TIMBER!

The second trunk he wedged with his axe on one side and wedged with his axe on the other side. And that one was down in about 6 minutes.

What kind of an insane person in this day and age does not use a chainsaw and get the job done quickly? To be honest, I have wondered that myself. For Phil, who sawed through his jeans, his long johns, and a bit of skin in one stroke with the hacksaw yesterday, I think safety is an issue. I’ve read that chainsaws are the most dangerous tool on the market that one can operate without a license.

Phil has used a chainsaw once, and hated it: the noise, the smell, the jarring fatigue, the maintenance required. A handsaw is simpler, quieter, and not smelly.

But it could be that, in the balance, we get him a chainsaw and he uses it for parts of the job and not others. I don’t think he’s quite ready to take the plunge, though.

In the afternoon, we cleared a bit of land together. He sawed down trees and scythed down brush. He limbed the larger trees and carried them aside for future building purposes. I gathered the downed bits and created a brush pile. I would hope that we can chip it—fruit trees like hardwood chip mulch—but, perhaps, we just burn it all.

Butch came by near sunset and we talked to him for a time. We like him. Neighbor Brian had stopped by just before and talked to Phil for a time. He’s a good neighbor, too. He walked the quarter mile up the road to talk to us, which was very neighborly.