After a short walk about the property yesterday morning that consisted mainly of a sojourn back and forth along the road and a loop into the woods, it was time to get some work done.
I fired up the ATV and hauled some trash pine cuttings back into the hole at the end of the new short trail I cut the other day. These were pieces of scraggly Scotch pines that have taken over the area right behind the house. I'm sure some of these were planed but they rapidly produce abundant seed and infest any cut over area. Mark and I have declared war upon them where they shade the ancient apple trees. The smaller branches have been stacked into brush piles (some that are 8-10 feet high) that harbor small rodents and rabbits but the thicker logs needed to be removed to prevent their becoming home to insect pests. If they were fir or white pine, we would have left the main trunk as poles and striped the bark, but these Scotch pines have very, very soft wood and twists and turns in the trunk that make them next to worthless.
As I finished, Mark came over and we started work on installing a pair of beams to support the garage/workshop roof that had sagged badly under the weight of ice and snow this winter. I had some old 2 x 8s from the old deck in NJ (turns out it really is cedar!) and we used four of them to create two beams. Mark had two fir poles over seven feet long from last winter's storms. So, using adjustable support beams and a 2-ton hydraulic jack, we raised the roof of the workshop and installed our permanent cedar box header with two fir posts. That took much of the afternoon. The other header will be installed in the garage today. It's already built and we have two posts there that just have to be fitted with a tenon at the top to hold the header.
While Mark was cutting and building the two box headers, I pulled the chipper/shredder out and went to work on some small cherry branches left from last fall's wind storm. Mark's dad had spent some time last spring rebuilding the carburetor on this little 4-hp Craftsman and it worked pretty well during the summer. Yesterday it started on the second pull. The only problem was that it would only run with the choke on full. I got a good portion of the brush pile put through the machine between periods of helping to install the header in the workshop but that full-choke deal got me in the end. The machine died of its own accord and would not restart. When I pulled the spark plug it was coated in a layer of soft, black carbon. I wiped it clean and tried starting the machine again and it ran for about 30 seconds. Pulled the plug...carbon. So it looks like I will have to take the carburetor off and soak its parts in kerosene. Mark's dad did say we needed a kit to do a proper job of rebuilding the damn thing.
In about an hour or so, Mark's coming back over and we'll be dropping some of the taller pines in the apple works. These needed a rope attached to them to make sure they fall the right way. (That's another problem with these scraggy Scotch pines--it's difficult to get a read on which way they want to fall.) This will get done while the winds are still calm. With the warm sunshine the last two days, the winds have picked up after 10 AM and have been blowing around 20 mph.
Once the pines are on the ground, it will be time to go back and do the box header int he garage. Then we can come back to the chunking up of the trees and hauling the crap out of the yard. Getting these pines down will also mean I'll have a much larger view from the deck in back. (Second floor outside the bedroom.) I might even be able to take a deer next season without doing much more than getting out of bed.
Busy day planned but if we put it off, the blackflies will be making our schedule for us. So far, despite the warm weather, the Adirondack Air Force (blackflies, mosquitoes, deer flies and gnats) has not emerged.
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