Summer Fun: Yarding Timber and Rebuilding the Garden

Camp Long Shadows opened for its two very special guests June 26 and ended the session July 28.   As always, Kim requests that photos of the girls not be posted on the web, so with sad and heavy hearts, we will leave this section devoid of images.  It was a whirlwind summer.  A visit to historic Timberline Lodge outside Portland.  Exploring a lava tube tunnel.  Lots of badminton, ping-pong, washer-board, jigsaw puzzles, and cards.  Camping and swimming and roasting marshmallows.  Rubber stamping greeting cards for hours.  Art lessons from a professional artist.  Listening to music, reading, laughing, talking, and just having lots of fun. 

We did manage to sneak some heavy duty work in while the girls were here.  We removed 6 rows of dirt from the garden.  Why? It was time to prepare the ground for planting the fall-winter garden in this spot. By July, the clay dirt at this end of the garden literally has to be broken up with a pickaxe. Gardening with a pickaxe is NOT fun. We're not getting younger. Life is too short. We decided to get rid of the old dirt and get some new. So, we loosened and scraped up the rows with the tractor and grader box, then shoveled dirt into a trailer and relocated it to low places all over the property.  The girls thought it was great fun shoveling loose dirt.  They even enjoyed riding on top of the trailer load of dirt as it was hauled away.

 
The rowless garden.

But once the girls left, life here shifted gears.  This past winter was exceptionally long and chilly.   The firewood bays in the barn are empty and there is practically no wood bucked, much less split.  The last time Charlie was here to chop down trees was February of 2009, and we didn't deal with most of them.  He left trees lying all over the ground in a couple of places.  One is WAY down toward the bottom property line.  That means a LONG tractor haul back to the barn.  The other location is very close to the barn, maybe 200' away.  Only problem is that it is lying on a severely sloping hillside. 

We bucked and hauled the easy stuff, way down south, first.  Only problem: there wasn't much.  At best it might be 3/4 of a cord.  We burn at least 4 cords a winter.  As we looked over the logs lying on the steep hillside, it did not look like much wood and we started worrying about the approaching winter. 

To make the job of bucking, splitting, and stacking that firewood easier, we had to yard the logs up to a level area.  Years ago, we worked with Charlie when he yarded some trees up from a similar slope.  Last year we actually purchased yarding equipment: cable, pulley, tree strap. So we had experience and tools and felt ready to tackle the job by ourselves. 

To yard logs means you mount a pulley fairly high in a tree at the top of the hill and run a cable down the slope.  One end of the cable is attached to a log and the other a powerful pulling machine -- in our case, the tractor.  The tractor then proceeds to drag the log up the hill right to the base of the pulley tree.  Simple concept.  

                      
          Well, here's the pulley.                                                                  And here are a few of the trees that need to be pulled up the hill.

         
      Chain wrapped securely around the log and connected to the cable.                                   Logs piling up at the base of the pulley tree.

This doesn't look hard you say.  The tractor is doing all the work.  HA!  We have a 150 foot length of cable.  At times, we have to add a couple 20' lengths of chain to have it long enough to reach the logs.  That means someone has to carry the choker chain 150+ feet down the hill, dragging the cable, then walk 150+ feet back up the hill as the tree is dragged.  Since there is not a clear roadway up the hill, that means the person walking along beside the log has to push, shove, pull, and tug to get the log past stumps or around other trees.  If the log gets in a bind, then you have to stop the operation and readjust the log, reconnect the chain, or do whatever it takes to get that blasted log moving again.  The tractor is NOT doing all the work.

Of course, the tractor operator can't hear you -- over 150 feet away and engine revved way up. So you communicate with a whistle.  One blast means STOP.  Two means GO.  And three means backup, I need slack in the line.  You can get out of breath just blasting away on that darn whistle (not to mention splitting your eardrums)!

                                            
After just a few trips up the hill the stack gets to be a problem.               This is Dianne wearing a choker chain and carrying a peavey.

There are NO photographs of the really hard work.  Sometimes these long skinny bean poles still have limbs.  After being on the ground for a year and a half, there are briars and ferns growing up in the middle of the limbs.  These limbs have to be removed.  At times we were wading into bracken ferns that were taller than we are.  Dragging a chainsaw into a thicket like that is exhausting.  Of course, you have to get the limbs out of the way.  They will be hauled out of there later. 

Sometimes the trees are sooooooo long that they have to be cut so they will fit between the standing trees.  If the log is too long is will get in a bind being pulled between trees that are not in a straight path.  That means marking the log into firewood-length segments, so you know exactly where you need to cut the tree.  Slugging your way through the underbrush,  climbing over and through slash, and leaning over for 80+ feet of tree with a crayon in hand is not as easy as it sounds. 

When the pile of logs at the base of the pulley tree gets cumbersome, it's time to get them out of there.  That means setting aside the cable, chaining the logs directly to the tractor, and dragging them the next 50 or so feet to the big flat area where we can buck and split them.

Once the super long logs get there, they have to be cut to a length so they will actually fit.  Below Dianne is wielding the chainsaw while Thibodeaux watches from the shade.  Once the log is the right length, it has to be rolled out of the way, so the next log (or the next 60 logs) can take its place.  These trees are all under a foot in diameter, so rolling them is possible. Theoretically. Just roll it out of the way, you say.  None of these trees seem to be straight.  They all are curved and do you know how hard it is to roll a curved, 24' long log that weighs in the hundreds of pounds?  Hard, really hard.  Below Nancy is learning a new skill - manipulating a peavey.  It is a logger's tool designed to help a person move an uncooperative log.  Works better on bigger logs, we learned.  

See why you have to move them out of the way?  The pile keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

So yes, it turns out we do actually have the skills to yard logs.  We just had no idea what an undertaking it was going to be.  Worried about next winter? HA!  There were logs hidden under ferns, under shrubs, under other logs. There were lots and lots and lots of logs.  It took days and days and days to drag all those logs up the hill.

Somewhere in the middle of all that yarding, we did some real yard work.  Since the last 6 rows of the garden were gone, we could now get a tractor into the no-man's-land north of the garden -- between the veggies and the fruit trees.  Let's fix up that area!  First step: remove the crabapple tree from the garden.  It had been there for at least 10 years and had never borne a single crabapple.   The only way to really get rid of it would be to dig it up.  We got Cheryl to come up with their backhoe and do the murderous deed. 

 
Everything is easier with the right tool!

Nancy kept thinking and thinking about this new, but short-lived accessibility.  What about tilling that entire area between the fruit trees and the vegetable garden and planting the melons and strawberries there?  Oh my God, are you mad, woman?  Well, after a little discussion, everything she suggested made sense.  We have to put an electric fence around the fruit trees to keep the coons and possums out and do the same for the melons and berries.  If they were all located in the same place, then we could use only one fence.   Actually, this sounded like a brilliant idea. 

Here is what it looked like before the tilling.

                                     
Looking east from the top of the garden: This area is about 80' long.             Looking north from the bottom of the garden: This section is about 45' long.

The call went out to Jerry asking him to come up and till the area for us when he had a little time on his hands.  We are half owners of the tiller, so that was part of the original agreement.  They keep it at their place and when we need anything tilled, they will do it.  Our tractor isn't big enough to handle the job.  While we waited for Jerry to have time, we yarded logs!

                  No, that is not smoke!

                       
                          Jerry playing in the dirt.                                                                It's summer time and the earth is parched.

Half of this melon was under a leaf, half wasn't.  Can you guess which half is which?

     
          Needs some raking, but this looks pretty nice.

                                                                            
                                                                                         We may be picking strawberries here next summer.

Lest we get complacent, we ordered the new dirt for the garden about an hour after Jerry finished tilling.  It was delivered the very next day.  12 yards.  Are we nuts?  Looks like we have a little dirt to shovel.  That is, in between bucking and splitting firewood.  This stuff is definitely NOT clay -- it's very sandy. We had been warned by the county extension agent that we'd need to build up the fertility. So we'll order a truckload of compost when we've made this into rows. Question: Will there be a fall-winter garden this year?