Woodpile in June

Not a lot of firewood has been added to the pile since Woodpile in May.  However, that doesn’t mean that no firewood was made.

I made a quick mention in a previous post that my in-laws had sustained some storm damage towards the end of May.  The Sunday of Memorial Day weekend we went up to help them reclaim their yard.

All in all, they had upwards of 50 trees that were damaged in the storm.  The weather service classified it as a microburst that was 100 yards wide by about 0.9 miles long.  Many of the damaged trees were in the woods and out of the way, so our focus was to tackle the trees that were strewn across the yard.  While my mother-in-law watched the kiddos, my husband ran his chainsaw, I moved brush and stacked chunks of firewood, and my father-in-law did some of both.  We made amazing progress.  By the end of the day all the yard needed was a good raking and the brush pile burned.  Their woods, however, was a different story.  A month later they are still working on cleaning up some of the downed and damaged trees.

This is an “after the brush pile was burned” photo my father-in-law sent.  You can see it  still smoldering a little on the right edge of the photo:

Back home, last week I noticed one of our ash trees had a big crack down the trunk.  Last Monday it was pretty windy and all afternoon I kept hearing a disconcerting cracking sound (like branches snapping).  Later that evening my dad and I noticed a big crack had formed down the trunk.  I hadn’t noticed it before that day, so when my husband got home later in the week I pointed it out to him.

The next evening he got out the chainsaw and the ash tree was no more.

I wasn’t able to get a good picture of it while it was still standing, but you can see the crack in the photo.  It didn’t look nearly this bad before the impact of the fall, but the tree definitely needed to be taken down before it had the chance to break on its own and potentially hit the house.

My husband had to cable the tree to the truck and winch it to ensure it didn’t hit the house.  It wanted to fall away from the house, but we needed that little extra insurance.  There was only one direction that ash tree could fall without the truck needing to park in the corn field.  Unfortunately, that one direction was between our two balsam firs.

The falling ash took the top of one of our balsams with it.  So, that had to go too.  The other balsam only had a couple branches broken off.  We may or may not take it down at some point too, we’re not sure yet.  We’re going to live with it like this for a bit before we decide.

I can see the garden and corn field from the kitchen window now.

Of course, around here tree tops don’t go to waste.  We put them in the pasture and the cows love eating the leaves off!

So, our firewood stash had grown by an ash and a balsam, it just hasn’t made it to the pile yet!

Now back to what you’re really here for… Here is our woodpile on June 27th, 2016:

Although we didn’t add much to the pile over the last month, it is also important to note we didn’t use any firewood from the pile either!  We did have some chilly nights and mornings at the end of May, but the days warmed up rather nicely so there was no need for a fire.  We did turn on the propane furnace just to make sure it didn’t get too cool in the house overnight, but that was on account of having an infant and is definitely not typical for us.