A Lot of Work



People often ask us about having an additional property to the one we live on.  It sounds like a great idea- a way to get away from the concrete jungle, somewhere where the kids can play around.  Sometimes, however, it is just a lot of work. 

We recently got the house pretty much completely done- there are a few tiny projects that we can work on.  Now it seems like this would be the perfect time to go and just enjoy the land, spend the night in the house, and let the kids play all day.

 

Enter drought.  That was pretty bad on the trees, but we were able to cut down last year all of the trees that died.  We made a big fire and burned the logs.  This year, all of a sudden we started losing a lot of pine trees.  In all, we probably lost about 30.  We think it is due to the drought weakening the trees defenses, then the bugs came in and killed the trees off.  So, the part of our land that was pretty thickly forested, is no longer thickly forested.  First, we had to get someone to cut down the trees.  Joe could do a lot of them, but there were a couple that had broken off about 20 feet above ground and were leaning over.  Those were much to dangerous for Joe to cut down by himself. 

 

These first 3 pictures is the thickly forested area immediately after the men cut down the 25 trees.

Then Joe had to hire some young men in our ward to use his tractor and four-wheeler to haul logs away from the forest into a field to stack them up to burn.  That took the two boys 2 full 8 hour days.  Adam and Joe helped some too.

There were so many logs that they had to make two burn piles, both of which were quite massive.  This is pile one.

 

View farther back for reference.

This is pile two:

Pile 2 just starting to burn:

A couple of hours into burning pile one:

A little after the start of pile 2:

4-5 hours into burning pile 2.

The next day- what is left of pile 1.  It burned nicely. 

 

This is what is left of pile 2.  A week later, after two massive rain storms, there were still a couple of places where the ashes were still burning. 
 
 
 
 

Since we lost so many pines, we had to buy more to replace them. We mostly bought several types of oaks, but we also got some long leaf pines.  The plant sale we went to didn't have loplolly pines, which is what died, we will have to try to get some for next year.