Cleaning up the yard

Helen has been working me hard to trim some trees and clean up a lot of the downed trees in the yard. In addition, we seem to be having a problem with our live oaks, the problem is that they have become dead oaks. We have no idea what is causing the problem, but it's killing ALL the live oaks on our property. The other oaks and pines are fine. I'm in charge of the chain saw and the larger pieces of tree and Helen is getting a lot of the smaller stuff and vines.

My secret tool, the leaf blower!

It gets hot enough to fuse the soil into stone!

Telephoto makes it look like it's close to the woods, not so.

We get rid of a lot of wood in a day. Using the leaf blower forces a lot of air through the fire and all the oxygen allows super combustion and there is very little smoke. Once the fire is cooking, everything burns quickly. Green wood seems to burn as fast as dry wood. AT the end of the day all that's left is a couple of gallons of fine white ash.

There is one thing that keeps going through my mind. All that heat is going to waste. I have a pool with cold water and it would be great if I could find a way to get that heat into the pool. There are wood burning stove to heat water, but they are way too small and would burn wood very slowly. I want to come up with a way that will capture a good part of the wasted heat while still burning at a fast pace.

I had an interesting day yesterday while taking down one of the live oaks. Apparently my boys built a tree house of sorts in the tree. The new chain on my saw was cutting the wood like a warm knife through butter. Then is would hardly cut at all. The consistency of the saw dust change from course chips to a fine dust. When I finally got through the limb, I found a nail embedded in the middle of the wood. Fortunately, I have a 5/32 grinder for my Dremel tool and brought the chain back to a high performance standard. I knew about the nails in another tree and was able to avoid them, but I got caught on the smaller tree.

Tonight I'm very tired and very sore, but I'm happy to be getting a lot of this taken care of. I've gotta get everything ship-shape so we can take off again.

Later.