How Much Wood...? (you know the rest)

The never-ending job of firewood acquisition continues...

Last month Troy and Isaac cut down some trees that were blocking the sun from Troy's west garden. You may be able to see the stumps on the far right:

The west garden just seems to get bigger and bigger...

The walnut tree also gives off something that stunts anything growing around it. Obviously that's not good for the garden either. So out it came. They cut it all up and Isaac got just about all of it split and stacked with Peggy and Warren's help.

They filled up the second rack and got a good start on the third (the untarped sections):

As usual at the end of the winter, we have two full from last season (at the far end), and we've gone through almost three racks though the winter.

Since then, Troy cut down a few more trees that he thought were crowding out the garden. (On the left in the first picture.) I've been working on getting that wood either on the racks to dry or stacked to split. Just a little more to move:

I also cleaned up the area at the end of the driveway where a lot of the cutting and all of the splitting happens. The wood was starting to spread all over that part of the lawn. (I assume every time they got a chainsaw out, they moved the wood further out to have a safe "clean" area to work in.) So I sorted out the crap and cleaned up with a rake and made it so I could run a mower over what grass is still growing.

I then stacked all the wood there that needed yet to be split. I like to keep a work area relatively organized and I like it better when I'm splitting if I can pull from a stack rather than from a "dumping ground." It also helps me feel like I'm making progress.

Today we went and collected even more wood from a friend's neighbour who had a tree taken down. All the branches and "little stuff" was cleaned up and we just had to pick up the trunk pieces. Can't get any easier than that! We had a full load in the pickup.

I stacked up this new wood with the old and this is what the area looks like now:

Yes, yours truly stacked all those big hunks. Yee haw!

But it's a little deceptive from that view. Let me show you another:

There are two rows of wood stacked in the back and five and half more in the front. That's a lot of wood to split!

In other news, my crab apple tree is blooming for the first time:

Very exciting!