Clearing Yaupon and making wood chips

We continued to clear underbrush.  We found a small pine stand as we worked in from the road.  It was satisfying to see the pines as we cleared out the sweetgum and yaupon holly.  This is a continuation of the area near our long suffering blackberry.

Here's a couple of pics of Brenda feeding the beast.  She's turning those pesky trees into wood chips.

 The wood chipper is great, but it is still a lot of work.  There is a hydraulic feed roller, but it sometimes has a hard time taking in crooked branches.  We have to help it along by pushing, rearranging and sometimes looping off branches.  It's a bit more work than burning, but we both feel much better with chipping the brush.

Here we've spread the wood chips over a bare section of one of our woods roads.  The bare dirt is not good for the environment and this  road was starting to show signs of erosion.  By covering it with wood chips it should help stop the erosion and hopefully start to build back the soil that has already been lost.

We cleared out a lot of brush and we've freed up the young pines.

Trying to save the blackberry

This little guy is a thornless blackberry.  I planted it several years ago.  It has struggled and I don't think it has ever produced a berry.  My wife and I were planning on clearing brush and thinning a small pine stand near where we worked a couple of weeks ago, but as I passed this miserable little guy, I thought, it's time to clear the brush around the blackberry and see if it will do better.  As you can see from this closeup, this is an after the brush has been cleared picture.

Thinning Pines

Well, this weekend, Brenda and I spent time cleaning up and thinning a small stand of pine trees that line one of our woods roads.

This stand was left by the forest mulcher.  The machine is just too big, so we thinned it by hand.  The thinning was with loopers and chain saw.  We then chipped the stems with our PTO driven wood chipper on the back of our Kubota.  Sorry no pictures of the wood chipper.  We also used the billy goat brush mower to help cleanup the underbrush.

I think the results look pretty nice!

Felled our first tall pine

We felled our first tall pine tree.  We chose a pretty bad tree.  As you can see this is one twisty tree.  It was over 90 feet.  We limed and bucked it into saw logs.  I'm not sure how the lumber will turn out, but it's a beginning.

My oldest son helped with the felling of this tree.  It was his first time taking down a big pine.  It's a little scary, but also a bit fun.

It was pretty amazing that the tree's curve just missed a small pine.

Here's the logs all ready for the sawmill.

Making LUMBER!

Here's our first attempt at making lumber.  It's from a cedar log that was given to us by my very good lifetime friend Tom.  It's not actually a tree from our property.  It was a really nice thing for Tom to do and we've loved learning about milling lumber on his logs.

So, how do you like my wife's pink filter mask?

Setting up The Martha Fay

We started trying to setup the sawmill.  Turns out I'm missing some of the connector parts, so I'm only able to connect two of the three beds.  I'm still not sure I've got it leveled correctly.  It's going to take a bit of effort to get this thing setup correctly.  But, it's very exciting!

Shower Facilities

Working in the forest is hot, sweaty, dirty work.  Chainsaws and wood chippers will do that to you.  After a hot day working in the forest a nice shower is greatly appreciated. So, the wife and I took some time away from working in the forest to build an outdoor show.  The shower is near the outhouse, so I guess you could say we now have a full bath!  Here's a few pics of us building the shower.  It's been greatly appreciated.

The shower is only screened on one side.  You get to enjoy nature while getting clean.

We don't have running water or septic.  All of our water is hauled in five gallon buckets.  We fill a 20 gallon trash can (look in the lower right of the photo) and then keep a couple of five gallon buckets for reserve.  If the trash can runs out of water mid shower, we use the reserve to finish up.  It's happened.

A sump pump moves the water from the trash can through a propane water heater which feeds the shower head.  There's a switch on the center log, next to the shower curtain that will turn the sump pump on and off.  So far, it's been really nice taking a nice cool shower after a hard day's work in this mid-summer Texas heat.