Chop Chop

The summer was winding down, and we knew that every weekend we were at the property we needed to spend one day chopping and stacking wood. A couple neighbors were a little less than encouraging with statements like, “Kind of late to get started.” Jer and I were not deterred. There were two and three year old downed trees waiting to be cut, split, and stacked.

Jer’s friends at Home Depot, literally friends because he’s spent so much time with them over years, gave him a great deal on a wood splitter. The deal surpassed what they were offering to others at Jer’s request, and they threw in a bunch of extra parts since they were not going to be using that brand in the future. It is one heavy duty splitting machine.

There were a couple downed trees that needed to be cut in rounds. Some were half Jer’s size standing on end. He would roll them into the tractor, and I would try to carefully pile them on each other near the splitter. I really enjoy using the tractor. As Jer sat for hours at the hydraulic splitter, I would go around and try to roll some of the still large but not as large, rounds into the tractor bucket.

There was a lot of wood. The wood split pile would get so big, we’d stop and stack, then repeat several times each weekend. There was also a lot of bark that we didn’t want in the house because of the bugs. Jer and I filled two full trailer loads of bark to dump at the community burn pile.

Sometime when Jer or I got frustrated with a project, we’d just stop and work splitting and stacking. There was no holding back. We were going to be spending our first winter in our home and wood being only source of heat.

By the time we finished, we had thirteen rows, four feet high and about sixteen feet long. We figured we have around six and a half cores of wood and prayed it would be enough. Quite an accomplishment for us.