Friday afternoon, Phil and Joe went down to the lower pasture to saw some more boards. I found them hours later, Joe not napping, though he often does, sitting on the tractor seat. Phil had a nice pile of freshly milled poplar, along with a few red cedar boards he had cut the day before.
For our Friday night date, Phil and I walked around the lower pasture for a few minutes, just the two of us, until Isaiah ran to join us after getting bored, hiding in the tractor bucket. We were pleased to see that, in the wooded bottom land, no trace of cow pies remain, and in the cleared area, only a bit of dried hay is still on the surface. The microorganisms in the soil are eating and thriving, and that is good for us all.
Phil has a couple other poplar sections to saw, but most of the rest of the downed trees are either too small and twisted to bother with sawing. He plans to cut up down some pines, and that will give us soft wood for interiors, but what to do with all the rest? Poplar, pine, and beech are not good for fires. Our chipper is really too small for the immense quantity at hand (though I wouldn't mind the mulch, if we had a way to chop it all up!). What I suspect we'll do is, once we have a section cleared for some time, Phil will make piles of brush in order to redirect runoff: making a little channel into Hog Creek. The bunch of branches will take a long time to break down, but that seems a fairly good option.
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