This Week in the Woods
The reason Mom is so tired but still making time to visit Dad in the woods
Good afternoon and happy Sunday. It was a late night watching the Patriots lose last night. Well, the boys and I fell asleep on the couch while Chrissy screamed at the TV. I woke up with 5 minutes left. I saw all I needed to see. This morning Trafton, my oldest son, and I were up before the rest of the house and he wanted to make Mom breakfast in bed because she was up all night with the baby. He is such a good kid. After breakfast I went out to clean the wood boiler. That is such a nasty job, but there is nothing like the feeling of self sufficiency of heating our home with the products we produce. We bought our wood boiler used off my old man and it has served us very well for the past 4 years.
Let’s see what’s been happening in the woods since the last time we met…. mud. A lot of mud. Winter, so far, has been a bit too warm for my good. Fall was cold for fall but this winter weather has not been in our favor yet. We left the subdivision job in Raymond just after Christmas and moved back over to Jackson Rd in Poland to do another section for our clients up there. We really wanted this spot to be frozen, but Mother Nature doesn’t care what we want. As you may remember, our big truck has been at the garage waiting for repairs. Finally, the garage and insurance came to an agreement and we can move on from that. Good thing, because we had to park the old white Pete which leaves us with no trucking for chips and half capacity for pulp. These are the situations when you realize how great our industry is. After a couple days of piling wood and receiving unanswered prayers to get our own trucks back to work, I made a couple phone calls and the wood was trucking again. We can cut all the wood in the world, but it’s useless until it gets to a mill. These are also the times you realize just how hard it is to maintain being a “small” business. When you’re small, back up plans are very limited and sometimes you feel like you’re living on a wing and a prayer.
Down in the woods , Brandon, Dad, and I have been slow moving. We’ve gotten stuck in the mud a time or two. We’ve spent a lot of time dragging brush back into the woods to fill up mud holes. The Joe Cupo (a local weather man legend) in me has been checking the weather 100 times a day, praying for some arctic blast to help us speed up a bit. The plan for this lot is to remove the old growth pine which has started to rot, so we are getting it out before it becomes worthless. It’s hard to tell when your timber stand has rot in it until we start cutting but some signs to look out for are a lot of woodpecker activity and thinning tops with grayish needles. We are also taking out all of the ash due to the threat of the emerald ash borer which has made its way into Maine. Ash makes a great firewood product because the moisture content is lower than other hardwood species.
We are working on a double bridge crossing over a stream on the property this coming week. It is the only way to get wood from part of the lot and I’ll share some pictures on Facebook when we get it completed. We will need the weather to cooperate to make it happen.
We were able to rent out our excavator for a few weeks to a friend of mine which was great because we don’t have use for it all of the time. This is a great opportunity to offset some of the cost of owning it. It’s back to the shop now and we look forward to putting it to work this spring with the mulching head. With the current weather patterns, it seems like Spring will be here February 1st….. probably accompanied by orange posted signs.
Pray for cold. Have a good week.