Day ten and eleven

typically, it had to happen. i managed to fell 60-70 trees in a confined space, minimizing collateral damage, almost to nil, using guy lines and a winch to keep trees i wanted to fell from falling in the wrong place. then came today, day 11, and all that hard work seemed to come undone, well for a moment anyway.,





i'd felled a couple of trees by the tarmaced roadside, being as careful as i could, to avoid the overhead phone line.

a friend showed up, who works for the town council. today he was on bin duty, and he stopped to tell me i was doing it all wrong. then proceeded to show me how it was supposed to be done. apparently he'd spent most of his life felling. i gave him the saw, and asked him to show me how he was going to remove the worst placed tree, without fouling it on the phone line. 2 minutes later he'd dropped the tree, ripped the phone line out, and bowled over the telegraph pole. later i laughed about this. however at the time i was incredulous.



i realised shortly there after i could turn around that situation, and get out the other trees that were also by the roadside, and at risk of fouling the line at some other time. so they came out aswell, including one dead pine the other side of the road, which was never going to be easy to get out without hitting the line.

it was funny, he was so insistent it would only go the way he wanted. he admitted after that you can't ever know which way they will ultimately go until they are going. you can't see what's going on inside the tree, how its internal structure can cause it to go sometimes in the opposite direction to the one you set up. if anyone tells you otherwise they're kidding themselves.



up high on the mountainside some of those trees were like long bows, their growth pattern having sometimes massive disparity.







where all the tension was stacked, as they had grown very tightly on the south face of the tree and much further apart where they faced north. so even when they leant considerably into the mountainside, the moment you cut them they began pulling away, and did everything they could to go down the mountain, opposite to how they were being cut. this made for some very entertaining moments, with one tree actually falling 180 degrees to where i was trying to place it. fortunately for me it didn't do any damage.

today was almost a replay of that, a couple of times. and then during the limbing of the standing deadwood, which i dropped, pivoted over the road, the moment i cut it in two it bounced back at me knocking me over, fortunately i managed to keep the saw, which was still running, out of my way.



that was the last tree to come out today, and maybe the last for the job. a day cutting in the rain, soaked but happy to be alive.

got yer taters in yet? peasenhall?

The title was insisted upon by Rick, it's a local Suffolk saying, one which is used rather frequently at this time of year, suffice to say that only people from that area will get it...sorry!!!
Anyway, we are using a quinta next door to ours (as if we didn't have enough work to do already), in exchange for us cleaning it, the owner has promised not to sell and will allow us to use it and harvest the fruit from the grapes and the olives. So here's a pic of where our potatoes have gone,



the rest of the meadow is being sown with soya beans and milho (corn) for animal feed. The meadow is closer to the natural water supply, so hopefully this year our big crops will do a bit better.

The peas are going around the outside of the bean plot on meadow two

Day nine

a thing i really like about cutting trees for the construction of the timber frame for our house is its link to the past. this is the same method used by our forefathers. going into the wood or forest and observing, looking closely at each tree and assessing it for use within the building. what part could it provide is the first question? measuring its girth, and estimating the height that that girth runs, and then any subsequent pieces you might be able to obtain from it, once felled.



having a detailed cutting list is essential.



you need to be able to go into the woods and know what you are looking for, and then what you need to cut, the lengths and widths. for instance, you need to know how wide a tree has to be to give up an 8x8" post, essentially 280mm, to get a pretty square post without excessive wane (a part where the tree naturally narrows inside of the square cut, with the cut generally running out into bark).

and you need to be a bit flexible with your list, knowing that timber is a natural product, and that it may not conform just so, to your wishes or needs, sometimes you may have to go with it. it may not run straight, it may run in and out, but provided it isn't twisted too much you will be alright. just go with it. its part of the character of the tree, which will become part of the character of the wood and in turn of your home.



i like the challenge of working this way, it has a lot to do with knowing your craft. you make it work even if others might give up on it? deciding if you have enough tolerance to play with.

if you've slightly oversized on lengths it will give you a margin to work within to achieve the closest fit you can later. over cutting by much is as wasteful as undercutting. its a finely gauged thing. and that is it, its gauged, there are no fixed rules. even when you try and obey all the constraints of good building practice, and engineered design, sometimes you will have to use your common sense or experience and over-ride principals, because that's what they are, principals, guides for general construction. the closer you work all aspects of timber the more you understand about it and the greater your ability to use that judgement.

now, i only have to find timber for some of the attic floor joists. i have jigged the design slightly, so i don't need to span the entire depth of the house with the joists, as per the plan, which would've required joists at a depth of 270mm or a nominal 11", (the reasons for this in the design are to prevent overloading the girding beams). i am going to insert something known as a summer beam (one smaller than the usual dimensions), at the midway point, across the entire width of the building, spanning from bent to bent, housed in the girding beams, and additionally interlocking them. this will take any flex out of the floor joists and allow me to downsize them to 200mm, which will make finding them in the forest much easier, since i only need to find trees at 280mm diameter instead of 355+ in order to get any number out per length. as of today, theoretically i only need another five 6.6m lengths.

its been an exhausting couple of weeks, trying to find 134 pieces of timber in a stand of pine trees somewhat closely packed together. joyful, scary, constantly intense, and somewhat pressured. the last couple of days especially so, as its involved cutting down the biggest trees, the half meter+ wide trees that run the best part of 100 ft. some of them within striking distance of overhead power lines.



the reasons why i didn't clear cut are because i didn't want to take all the trees out, i don't need them all for construction. and i hope that at least some of them will survive the seco plague that's hitting the forests here, hopefully to grow and have productive lives, and maybe one day get used for some other construction project. i didn't plant the trees, and it doesn't seem right to take them all out. not yet anyway. i'm trying to manage part of the forest, and this is my way of managing it. there are other reasons, but this isn't he place to talk about them.

i've tried my hardest to accurately place the trees in slots between other trees to prevent damage. i can appreciate why some people would clear cut regardless, its easier, and a helluva lot safer. i've tried wherever possible to leave any tree standing that i hadn't earmarked for construction, unless its presence presented a real threat to my personal safety in my efforts to get another tree down. out of the 60 or 70 trees i've felled i think i only had to cut out about 5 additional trees.



i haven't removed more than a fraction of the total trees in the 2 stands in the top of the forest that we manage. if you look at it from a financial pov i was offered only €1800-2000 for all the trees in both stands, which would not have paid for more than 1/3 of the total pieces of timber on my cutting list. i still have to get everything hauled to the trackside, then mill everything/get some of it milled at the mill, but i am certain, for us, this was the right approach.

this was my original intention when we looked for a place to be self sufficient, that it would provide the materials to build a house. this is the message i want to send to anyone who reads this. there are other ways of building that aren't reliant upon huge loans from a bank (forest/woodland here runs at about E1000 per acre) and sometimes it isn't necessary to employ teams of people, you can learn to do it yourself.

Day eight

Coming to the end of our time on this bit of mountain, not much left to take out, lots of clearing up to do though and then the hauling out. We'll be moving down to directly above our farm next, which will present another set of problems,getting the trees to land exactly where we want them and not take down the telephone line.

I'll show you some pictures tomorrow of before cutting and after so you can see how well managed the whole thing has been, not one cork oak has even been damaged.....

Here's two pictures of the dreaded caterpillars (especially for Gary)

Day seven

6 trees, 14 pieces off the construction list. Need 14 big boys now, 10 of which we have, so we are adrift 4 big ones.......unless rick can do some jiggery pokery, which incidentally he's very good at!!!!
I managed to get to the farm, finally and picked some asparagus!!!! 8 pieces, one big one!
Sorry no pictures, the camera woman was a bit out to lunch

Day 6

We kind of lost count of how many trees Rick felled today, about 5 or 6. 10 constructable pieces, we've probably got another 5 days to go!! we need about 50 more pieces of varying lengths and diameters, so we're over half way.....yeah

Day five

4 trees, 2 blow downs, 13/14 pieces of constructable timber
No pictures, pouring with rain, finished early, dripping wet!!!!

Day four

It was good today, we started felling on the next bit of mountain down from the track, it's so stupidly steep you can barely stand-up. What with all the pine duff, heather, blow downs and rain it was quite slippy, however, I only fell down twice.

Throwing the firewood up is entertaining, I'm running out of strength and most of the logs I threw came back down again, one or two nearly landed on my head!!

One tree had a great deal of internal tension (rick's words), it was leaning one way, he made the mouth cut, and was making the back cut when it did that awful spiny thing, and lent back into the back cut trapping rick's big saw. Stupidly, (his words) he hadn't wedged the cut with poundable hardwood wedges, and the small saw (which is on it's last legs) had to come out and play (because he hasn't fixed his other big saw yet). This would all have been avoidable (rick said) had he been paying more attention to what was happening up top, instead of focusing only on the cut. He said, before he started, he didn't imagine it was going to be a problem, it looked set to go only one way. Just goes to show. He said, it's quite stressful when they sit back trapping your saw, they could go any which way, and you rarely have much idea how much meat's left, and how stable the thing is.

A few of the trees on the mountainside have seco, a deadly (for the pines) and very virulent disease that's plagueing this region, any tree affected needs to come out as a matter of priority. So far, all the seco hit trees he's taken out are all usable. Now is a good time to remove lumber, before the whole forest dies from this disease. There are a lot of standing-deadwoods around, rotting where they sit, after a while they're not even fit for firewood.

Here's a picture of rick's cutting list.



After 5 or 6 trees we called it a day, as we'd been in and out of the truck hiding from the rain



He has also asked me to post a different picture of clear cut as the last one was not a good example

Day three

4 trees for construction and 2 out to ease the way.
We need 134 pieces, so far we have 33....woohoooo

I got new gloves, old ones had given up!!!!



In competition with loggers all over the place, you'd think it would be nice and peaceful up there - NO
This is what it looks like when they clear cut

Day two

Today we felled 7 trees, 5 for construction, the other two were in the way, they'll get used for something like 4x2 material.

I will not be able to put photos up every day or even feel inclined to take any, but 'll do my best, It is exhausting and sweaty and there's lots of biting insects and of course the proccessionary caterpillars are starting to fall from their nests at the top of the pines, not all our trees have a nest, but the ones that do get dealt with by me immediately!!!! read, stamped the hell to death!

Day one

Now that we are out of the ground, we need to move on to phase two of the build, the timber frame, Rick has ummdd and ahhd about the best and most efficient and least expensive way to do this and we have decided to fell our own timber, from our forest, we'll make less mess than a local logger, they won't be selective or understand.

Selectively felling makes life a lot more complicated, every tree has to measured and estimated, carefully chosen for it's straightness etc. etc. we don't want to take everything out (which is generally what people do here), so we'll call it forest management, along with creating two resources, one is firewood for us to use or to sell and the other is the frame for the house.

In total Rick reckons we need to fell at least 70 of our pines. Today we felled, cleaned and processed for lumbar and firewood 3!!!!! (and I collected a lot of pine cones!!)

RIP Betty

I arrived at the farm this afternoon to discover that Betty had broken her own neck!!! she'd got her head stuck in the feeder. It was very upsetting, losing livestock in this way seems so unnecessary, foxes,yes I get that (sort of), disease, I get that too, but this, not fair, not fair at all. I've changed the feeder (again) and made some modifications to it so they can't tip it over, which was why I'd changed it in the first place. Ho hum, she was a good bird, has laid all winter, sat on some fertilised eggs when broody, mothered the chicks and continued to lay. God bless you Betty and thank you.