Timber

These last few weeks have been largely focused on wood. We have a lot of wood, mostly in the form of trees, which we need to convert to fuel for water, cooking and warmth. This has meant that I have had to learn a new set of skills.

So far I have avoided the purchase of a chainsaw and continue to try and manage the wood with hand tools only. So far I have managed to fell, limb, buck and log two trees in this manner. The logs are now seasoning for winter.

It is certainly a much more active life and I hope that over the years that I should become fitter.  Most days I work hard enough to break into a sweat and this is quite a difference from my previous life when  when any sweating at work was anxiety driven rather than physical effort.  During all of this the importance of proper tools has again, and again, become clear.

It is easily feasible to buck a tree with a diameter of 18 inches with a bow saw if it is sharp and big enough. I have now discovered that, with a proper splitting maul, splitting logs is relatively straight-forward. A 6 lb maul is fairly easy to handle and fairly gentle exercise.

Skidding Sulkie

The biggest outstanding problem is getting the felled trees from the wood down to the house. We need to design something like a "go-devil" sledge for use on rough terrain or perhaps a "skidding sulkie". There are a number of suggestions, such as the picture (left), in the excellent article on woodworking with handtools on autonopedia. This is a very useful article published by the International Labour Office in Geneva.

A further, surprising, resource has been the Boy Scouts' publications. The following list of the burning qualities of wood is taken from one of their publications.

Alder: Poor in heat and does not last,

Apple: Splendid/ It bums slowly and steadily when dry, with little flame, but good heat. The scent is pleasing.

Ash: Best burning wood; has both flame and heat, and will bum when green, though naturally not as well as when dry.

Beech: A rival to ash, though not a close one, and only fair when green. If it has a fault, it is apt to shoot embers a long way.

Birch: The heat is good but it burns quickly. The smell is pleasant.

Cedar: Good when dry. Full of crackle and snap. It gives little flame but much heat, and the scent is beautiful.

Cherry: Burns slowly, with good heat. Another wood with the advantage of scent

Chestnut. Mediocre. Apt to shoot embers. Small flame and heating power. 

Douglas Fir. Poor. Little flame and heat.

Chestnut: Mediocre. Apt to shoot embers. Small flame and heating power.

Douglas Fir: Poor. Little flame or heat.

Elder: Mediocre. Very smoky. Quick burner, with not much heat.

Elm: Commonly offered for sale. To bum well it needs to be kept for two years. Even then it will smoke. Vary variable fuel.

Hazel: Good.

Holly: Good, will burn when green, but best when kept a season.

Hornbeam: Almost as good as beech.

Laburnum: Totally poisonous tree, acrid smoke, taints food and best never used.

Larch: Crackly, scented, and fairly good for heat.

Laurel: Has brilliant flame.

Lime: Poor. Burns with dull flame.

Maple: Good.

Oak: The novelist's 'blazing fire of oaken logs' is fanciful, Oak is sparse in flame and the smoke is acrid, but dry old oak is excellent for heat, burning slowly and steadily until whole log collapses into cigar-like ash.

Pear: A good heat and a good scent.

Pine: Bums with a splendid flame, but apt to spit. The resinous Weymouth pine has a lovely scent and a cheerful blue flame.

Plane: Burns pleasantly, but is apt to throw sparks if very dry. Plum. Good heat and scent.

Plum: Good heat and aromatic.

Poplar: Truly awful.

Rhododendron: The thick old stems, being very tough, burn well. 

Robinia (Acacia): Burns slowly, with good heat, but with acrid smoke. 

Spruce: Burns too quickly and with too many sparks.

Sycamore: Burns with a good flame, with moderate heat. Useless green.

Thorn: Quite one of the best woods. Burns slowly, with great heat and little smoke. Walnut. Good, so is the scent.

Walnut: Good, and so is the scent. Aromatic wood.

Willow: Poor. It must be dry to use, and then it burns slowly, with little flame. Apt to spark.

Yew: Last but among the best. Burns slowly, with fierce heat, and the scent is pleasant. 

Yggdrasil
by Lorenz Froelich

Fortunately we have plenty of ash, beech and birch and a reasonable amount of oak,

Be Prepared.

As befits January the theme over the last few weeks has been "Be prepared!" We have started on the vegetable garden and have broken open 6 beds. Digging a clay soil in the rain never gets easy but we have the foundation for raised beds and, as I mentioned previously, we have found some mature (and large) compost heaps which will come in handy.

We have also started to get ourselves ready for next winter. To ensure we don't freeze to death the wood pile has been started in earnest. With my neighbour's help we have a respectable start. Our festive period visitors enjoyed helping in this task as it also allowed them to return to the city with their car boots filled with logs.

Further, I was able to get a one-to-one tutorial on chainsaw use which should allow me to keep the same number or digits and extremities with which I was born. On the theme of education and getting ready, today also saw my enrollment in the local college's Welsh Course. Unfortunately there are perhaps too few course members to make this viable and it may be cancelled. So,  no sooner than I have learnt to say "Dw i' newydd ddechrau dysgu Cymraeg" than I am not !

Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

Stuck in the service department today. Free coffee and WiFi does not mitigate against the mind-numbing boredom. Every 10 minutes are punctuated by reassurances that they are just about done and the car will be ready. Finally after 6 hours this became true.  Even the Daily Mail becomes readable in time.

"Quiet desperation is the English Way"

Not as uneventful as we thought.

I thought that we had avoided any major damage from the winds. I was not right. Our neighbour lost four large trees (beech and birch) which fell crossing and blocking the road and taking our fence with it. He has cleared the road and at the weekend we will cut up the remaining.

Wind

The end of the festive season was marked by high winds. Gale and storm force winds raged though the night and unfortunately continued when folk were due to drive back home.

So far, every time we have travelled between Scotland and Wales the weather has done its best to make it difficult with either winds or snow and ice. Hopefully, as winter ends, we might start to have easier journeys both for ourselves and our visitors.

We seemed to be lucky and avoided any significant damage.The hen house did become al fresco accomodation for a period but it has been repaired in advance of our poultry coming home this week.

A few trees did come down in the woods and in the garden. However, this latter damage did help expand our growing wood store. The new saw is still working well and we will hopefully have a good supply of seasoned wood in a few years time. There seems to be quite a bit of arguament about covering wood to be seasoned I had decided that for the first cord I will try with stacking indoors and that following this we could try with an outdoor site. However, after reading this page I am going to have to move my nascent pile

The rain has largely precluded any further work in the vegetable garden but it is still early days. Fortuitously, in the delay I have uncovered two large compost heaps which are ready to be dug in

The first fortnight

We have survived our first fortnight. We have moved in, without furniture which remains in storage, and have started to find out how things work. The house is sited jnside its land and the fields are clearly going to require sheep, or some other ruminants, to help us keep them in control.


The views are better than I remembered them with good aspects over Cadair Idris.

There have been a number of urgent tasks. We have started to look at our land and size up sites for a vegetable garden. We have discovered that the soil is largely clay so it will require quite a bit of work. We will need to work in a lot of organic matter into raised beds.

The first steps in this reminded me how difficult clay is to dig and prompted the thought that we might consider pottery as an alternative.

Most of the manuals suggest that, with enough work, clay soils can be fertile but they generally do suggest it is a major undertaking. We will need to look at local sources of manure.

We have made the hen-house so that we can arrange the flittings of our hens.  This came as a flat pack system and was remarkably easy to put up and much cheaper than the ones in the stores.


The shock of the move for the hens might be lessened when they discover that we intend them to share their new home with a cockerel.

The next major task has been to secure fire and wood. It prove very easy to set up the stoves and these have been very effective at bumping out heat. However, the collecting of wood has been much harder. 

A new axe made the felling of some trees reasonably easy work but we spend two days cutting this into a third of a cord. This work was dreadfully strenuous and slow. We alternated between the bow saw and, in desparation, an axe. However, after a trip to the local store and the purchase of a new saw we discovered the importance of a sharped and clean blade. Now we were slicing through logs like butter. A bad workman may blame his tools but bad tools do make a crap workman.

Just weeding in the rain.

One of the jobs I least look forward to is weeding the drive; pulling out recalcitrant dandelions and other long-legged weeds is extremely irritating. You pull and pull but the roots stick in the ground and you are left with a handful of leaves for your effort. Usually I tried to make this less unpleasant by choosing a pleasant day and working while listening to the radio. However, the best day to tackle this is actually when it is raining or it has just rained. The weeds have less of a grip in the damp ground and give up the fight much more easily. Pulling is less effort and is rewarded by long trails of satisfying root after the tug. So waterproof headphones are the next investment.


Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I re-read this book on a whim and I am immensely glad that I did. I recall enjoying the book as a 15 year old boy but it is clear that most of it went over my head. I suppose expecting an adolescent male to see the horror in ready sex with pneumatic women was unlikely, and he was further not likely to recoil at the idea of easy access to mind altering drugs which gave free access to happiness. The true warnings, which have proven uncannily accurate, needed some tears and maturity to understand.


Nice Cup of Tea and a Sit Down by Nicey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Very enjoyable and surprisingly informative. However, it fails to answer the question as to whether the biscuit is simply NICE or whether it hails from the South of France.




The Waste Makers by Vance Packard
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It is surprising how little that this book has dated in the two generations since it was released. The dangers of planned obsolescence remain as important as when he coined the term. We are now all too painfully aware of the risks of our excessive consumption on the finite resources of our planet and the consequences of the increased waste.

Many of the trends he predicted have proven to be correct and unfortunately the depressing effects on personality and culture seem to be taking place.


Maigret and the Idle Burglar by Georges Simenon

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Maigret at his best. Humane and gentle and clearly on the side of the poor and suspicious of the intents of the rich. This is almost Maigret by Chandler, but still firmly set in a clearly recognizable Paris.





50 Big Ideas You Really Need to Know by Ben Dupre
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An ideal bathroom book. Short chapters just long enough for an average visit to the toilet. Basically superficial treatments of the major philosophical ideas but basically sound descriptions.

Tethered by Amy MacKinnon
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I do not understand the extremely high ratings for this book. It was not that I found it a bad book but rather a rather mediocre book, neither one thing nor another - not really crime, not really supernatural thriller.


The plot seemed very predictable and I found some of the literary devices annoying, the bracketed characteristics of flowers added very little to the story and became rather annoying after a while.


There were passages which showed that the author can really write very well, but these were rather few and I was glad when the whole thing was tied up at the end, though this wasn't soon enough.


View all my reviews