With not much to do over Christmas, Larry, Zach, Max and I went about to cut down a couple of dead red oak trees in my back yard. Rewind about 3 years ago. One of these trees had just died. My uncle Charlie wanted to ensure that it was cut down. He came up for a visit and while here, wanted to help cut it down. Turns out that the tree sat on a small incline, and if not cut properly, would fall onto my iron rod fence. Long story short, it would be more work than we were prepared to do at the time.
Since then, the red oak about 10 feet from this tree also died. So now I have 2 dead trees back there.
Over Thanksgiving, I was telling my brother in law Larry how I was low on firewood and that I have these 2 dead trees in the back yard. "Let's cut them down at Christmas," was Larry's thought, "because there's not much do to do over most of that time" (actually, we both surmised that).
Today, we cut down not one, but both those trees and split all the wood. We first cut down the tree that died last. Got that cut up and split and then we went after the tree that Uncle Charlie and I were going to tackle 3 years ago. Larry went about making the proper cuts, and then started putting the wedges on the back side of the tree. But a small miscalculation was made. Had this tree fell one way it would hit the fence; another way it will hit a really old and big white oak. However, it fell almost 180 degrees to where we wanted it to. While it did not hit the fence or any other tree, it did require us to haul the wood a little further to the log splitter. Oh well!
I think we got about a full chord of wood in all. Of course the wood will need to dry and age, but we'll be ready for the 2007-08 winter. I'm sure Uncle Charlie was looking after us and would be proud that we got this thing down, though a little bit unplanned.
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