Clearing out and Firewood

Everything was blocked into 16-18" firewood blocks for later splitting.  The brush was all left behind to be burned.  The first thing I needed was a way to haul the wood out.  The plan was to stage it to my friend Brook's house where he had room to deal with it, and get it split.  I had the truck already, but to maximize hauling ability, I added some sides to it.

You could haul an awful lot of wood this way.  ...More than the truck was rated for, if you went too far.  Here is about 4100 lbs of oak ready for unloading at Brook's.  That was quite a heavy load.

After hauling for months and splitting it all up, we were into the next year.  This next pic is the entire oak firewood pile generated and split/stacked ready to sell.  17 face cords worth of 100% oak.

During the time I was hauling all of the wood out, I ran across a turkey nest in the weeds, while doing some brush cutting.  I left it alone and later on the eggs mostly hatched.

We had a number of very large brush piles that we needed to burn.  Most of these were the size of a school bus or bigger.  I'd guess we've burned 6 or 7 large piles to date.  Here is one of the early one in the early stages of going up.

Of course, the big question is how do you make such a large brush pile.  That first spring (2010) I realized I needed equipment to make this happen, so I ended up buying a used tractor.  That will be in the next post...