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voids for squirrels
Tuesday, December 17 2024
I did a fair amount of work on both stone walls today, starting with the older one south of the Chamomile. Amusingly, after I'd written about how every stone wall collapse is an opportunity for the wall in that section to be built back "better," the fancy flying buttress I'd just made the other day collapsed. Evidently the problem was that there was no compressive force holding its fragile structure together and all it took was either frost heave (or the settlement of frozen ground as it thawed) for the buttress to collapse. But when it did so, only a few stones fell out of place, as most of the rock overhead was successfully cantilevered by an expansive flat rock I'd installed high up. When I built the buttress back, I concentrated less on trying to make it look like an independent limb and more on its ability to stand on its own so that it can receive some of the load above it should forces in the wall change.
After that, I worked on further building up the wall at the bottom of the Woodshed Path, mostly by stacking flat rocks on existing structure. In some places that existing structure was too narrow, so in places I stacked bulkier rocks so that there would be at least a point to catch the load some distance from the south edge of the wall, allowing to to lay wider flat rocks atop what amounts to a narrow ridge. (I love leaving voids in the wall for the chipmunks and squirrels to use, though this year the gypsy moths made the oaks produce zero acorns.)
Later this afternoon, I came back down the Stick Trail with the big 18 inch Kobalt battery-powered chainsaw and felled one of the few still-standing (if very dead) white ashes north of the Chamomile. It broke in a few places as it fell, which white ash almost always does. It was a moderately big tree, capable of supplying over a week of good dry firewood in peak burning season. I bucked up what I could of it before my battery went dead and managed to get a few pieces home and split up by the end of the day. Temperatures today were in the 50s, so the only problem working in the forest was the presence of puddles too deep to step in while wearing Crocs & socks (my normal winter footwear unless there is snow on the ground).
The white ash I cut down today, just north of the Chamomile, after my chainsaw ran out of power. We're looking north, away from the Chamomile and towards the Woodshed Path Stone Wall, which is somewhat visible in the distance.
Click to enlarge.
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