Three years ago, I engaged JoJac's to come do cleanup and tree work in our woods, following big-time flooding of the woods. I thought it would be a one-time thing. Actually, because it was too wet to let the crew work in the woods, I re-scheduled the work and then cancelled it when Elder Brother had his first cardiac arrest and I spent a month with him. The following year (2016), the crew did come out to work and then, in 2017, they came out twice. Each time, the crew of three put in a full day's work. Final chapter - back woods shows some photos from the December 2017 work. The photo, below, shows the view of the woods (from our back porch) after the crew went home.
Yesterday, JoJac's crew (Benny is the crew boss) came out to take out four dead trees, cart off my accumulated brush pile (trees and limbs that I'd downed and/or picked up since last December), and transplant two black walnut saplings.
This photo (below) shows the edge of our woods as it appears, today.
One of our neighbors had expressed an interest in having some of the wood (actually, he thought he wanted it all); so, I showed Benny where to put the firewood-appropriate limbs and trunks. Our neighbor had said that he will buy a chainsaw, come over to cut the branches/trunks into firewood-length pieces, and carry them over to his own property. There is a gully between his land and ours which I did not want the crew to have to deal with or the wood could have been left on the neighbors land to start with.
When I explained the situation to Benny, he said that it would be easier for his crew to go ahead and cut the wood to fireplace length before stacking it within our woods. This (below photo) is the first stack they made, of the large branches that had, a few weeks ago, fallen from the dead tree closest to the house. (Photos at What's happening in my world?)
The photo, below, shows the second stack of wood that the crew made. I'm not sure from which tree(s) this wood came.
Extrapolating from those two stacks of wood, I could see that our whole woods would be stacked with fireplace wood. I asked Benny to go ahead and cart away the largest pieces of wood.
This (photo, below) is what JoJac's trailer looked like after they loaded the first three chunks of tree trunk (diameters are a bit over two feet). They over-filled the trailer before they left. It took two men to load each of those chunks onto a hand truck and pull it up the hill. Unfortunately, with the rain we've been getting and the new sodding along the edge of the woods, they could not take motorized vehicles back to the woods, this time. The fluorescent green on the bark is paint (originally, in the form of a large "X") that I sprayed on the trunks of the trees to be downed.
Most of the trees taken out were fairly regularly shaped, with a more-or-less circular trunk cross-section. One, however, was quite irregular. The measuring stick that I placed across the base is NOT a yard stick; it is a 4-foot stick that Hunky Husband's late father gave us.
For the first time, I had more work planned for Benny's crew than they could accomplish in one day. We will arrange for them to finish when they can work it into their schedule. In the meantime, I'll speak with our neighbor to see how much of the large tree trunks he thinks he can handle! He would need to rent a wood splitter (or become very conversant with an axe and/or wedge and maul.) Somehow, I can't picture our neighbor, the dentist, doing that. He's good at aerobic stuff (bicycling, for instance); but, he is accustomed to working with tiny tools.
Addition of 11/10/2018 - Update
Our neighbor, The Dentist (TD) came over, late this afternoon, to walk through the woods with me to see what wood we were willing for him to take (all of it!) He said that, if we could give him a little time ("Can you get it done in my lifetime?"), he would take it all - that there was no reason to have JoJac's crew come back - he would cope with the large pieces. O...K....
Here are photos of the rest of the wood we were talking about, below.
The longer wood in the stack, below, is logs from ash trees cut down last year. I told TD that he could take 'em if he wanted 'em.
The trunk, below, is from the tree that had the beautiful cross-section at the ground. Still, nice wood, but not as interesting.
"That's a lot of wood!", said TD. "Are you sure you won't use it?" Really? We've nothing in which to burn wood!
An hour later, he had thrown each of the pieces of wood shown in the first stack (BTW: I replaced the old photo with a better one of that first stack) over his fence into his yard, brought a steel-pipe wood rack out of his garage, and stacked the wood in it. He may be sore, tomorrow. Or not. He is young - not more than 1/2 our age. Obviously, I wouldn't be able to move.
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