The weather in June is at its absolute best here this time of year. Everything is still very green. Temperatures are in the 60s when we get up in the morning, and reach the high 70s by mid afternoon. It's light by 5:00 AM and stays light until 9:30 PM. Blue skies and cool mountain breezes leave us nothing to complain about.
I felled 13 trees on Friday afternoon and another 30 on Saturday morning before our guests arrived. They're mostly 7-12" dbh pine, with a tendency to hang up in other trees as they fall. I had a 3-tree domino, a fun thing to watch from a safe distance.
Our good friends John and Mara came up this weekend to visit and work. They brought their tricked-out VW camper bus, the same one they use every year for the Burning Man festival.
We cleaned up about 1/2 acre where we've finished thinning and pruning. Now, that area is ready to recover. We gathered slash into burn piles, moved other piles into better locations for winter burning, dragged longer logs out of the area, and left 3 ground logs behind. The pine grass and brush will take over and it will be all green by this time next year. Other than having about 2/3 fewer trees, it will look as natural as before.
The work goes pretty fast with a 4-person crew. Nonetheless, it's easy to see how slash control alone could take 20 to 30 man-hours per acre.
We had a great dinner outside by the summer evening light -- we kept talking and drinking quite late. Suffice it to say, we had less appetite for hard work the next morning. We all had a leisurely breakfast and went for a walk around the property before our friends headed back to Seattle.
No comments:
Post a Comment
All comments are moderated, which means the blog owner must approve them before they appear here.