The past month

A month ago, we had our last big snow of winter. The boys walked back and forth across all the pastures spreading clover seed.

As soon as the snow melted, we were back to clearing brush along the stream bank, creating more grazing areas for cattle, and removing the nasty stuff that is favored as shelter by ticks and poisonous snakes. This tree fell into it's neighbor, so K6 had to pull it down with a rope and muscle.

All the brown area was totally covered by thorny brambles, thick brush and poison ivy vines from the tree line almost to my pasture fence - I could barely drive my truck past it.

After many hours of labor and many fires, we have now cleaned this strip. We spread grass seed across it last week, and have gained a few more acres of grazing land.

This giant red oak tree fell across the stream last year in a severe storm. It is over 80 feet long.  Before we removed all the under brush and top branches, you could not see it very clearly. It took us a few days of cutting to expose it. Now we need to get a tractor with forks to hold it up while we cut it into firewood. I'm leaving the long straight trunk across the stream for my neighbor, who will run it through his saw mill and get quite a bit of lumber out of it.

This entire tree line was thick with brush and vines which hid a couple hundred feet of old rusted barbed wire fencing. K8 is in the center distance of photo cutting out more wire and rolling it up.

After he got the wire removed, I was able to drag this and other big pieces off the bank, so we cut it into firewood.

This particular oak tree was leaning dangerously toward our gate. Just behind K8 you can see where the trunk was once wrapped with barbed wire fencing which gouged deeply into the wood, so it had to come down now rather than later. K8 is making a loop in the rope. We attached the other end of rope to the tractor and I pulled him quickly up to a large branch so he could cut the top off of the tree.

He is our "go to" guy when we need an agile man for a dangerous job. He is using a small, one-handed chainsaw to cut off branches that would break our fence if we were to just drop the tree. 

Glad his Mom doesn't know what he's doing.

While K7 and Jack dropped and cut up the oak into firewood, K8 helped me drag a couple of logs out of the stream. He wraps the chain around top of log and I have the easy job of driving the tractor. We already have enough firewood for next winter, so we are now cutting and drying wood for 2015.