mixed mesophytic.
the hickory that has been our heat, or incredibly bountiful and easily extracted resource of that one katrina-felled tree, is, at a guess 90% gone.
lets go into that math.
lets use as an assumption that at some point about midway up the main trunk is the center of gravity of the tree, with an equal mass granted for branches and roots, wioth the mass balance ending up heavily above ground, in the form of the trunk (and what a trunk it is (that's what she said)).
now discard the, at an informed guess, 35% of themass that makes up the roots. unburnable (as far as i know). discard also at least 15% of the small branches in wastage, twigs too small to be worth gathering, sawdust and branches of the tree that had rested in immediate contact with the ground for 2yrs and were too rotten. i would have to estimate furthermore that i have used easily 40% of the tree, from nearly every tig and branch from 2" diameter to 8" diameter, and trunk sections in excess of 24" in diameter.
what's left is the root ball and the trunk up to about four-5 feet (and three half-slices that have proved unsplittable).
only now, after slowly cutting, splitting, stacking and storing increasingly huge chunks of hickory, a single wedge weighing from 30 to 50 lbs. which is nice, if you can get them to burn. theyll burn all night, easy.
if you can get them through the stove door. more than half of the quarters i split now wont quite make it through the stove door. and goddamn. goddamn. this stuff wont split under a maul. i have a new pile outside the door of wood rejected from the stove for size reasons, and which wont succumb to 20+ blows from the maul.
the goddamn log splitter is basically on the fritz. i need to remember that warranties are usefull on farm equipment. never EVER had one pay off on electronics (except ipods, where theyve paid in spades), but farm equipment gets used in a whole other class of hard. meh on that. who knows, maybe it'll respond to a hydraulic fluid change, but not until i get a decent oil pan, after yesterday with the spillway oil change. until then, i guess i get to try out frickin splitting wedges. gah.
learning is annoying. it means being wrong and having trouble all the damn time. i want to go to hawaii.
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