My friend was building a pond for someone and he had to knock down some elm trees to make room for it. Not a lot of trees, but about 4 of them.
I was invited to cut them up for firewood, which we need pretty desperately for next winter. I want to lay in about 8 cords to make sure we can go the whole winter long.
I finished sawing up the first one and gave a quick glance at the rings. Looked like there were well over 100 there, possibly more than 150.
That tree has been growing alongside that creek since about the time of the Civil War. When this part of Texas was still in Comanche hands, that elm tree was growing there.
It took 2 minutes to knock it down with a bulldozer and push it over to the side for me, and I took about 20 minutes to saw it into logs. It will provide for us probably 2 weeks worth of fuel.
I just can't help feeling like there's something terribly wrong with that. My family needs to be warm in the winter, and we need wood to cook our food. Yet there ought to be some compromise with nature where I don't have to destroy some living thing that's over three times my age.
3 comments:
Hope you don't plan on splitting it by hand!
I know what you mean, sometimes it physically hurts me when I see trees being cut just to build yet another shopping center or apartment complex when we have plenty with empty spaces already. At least you will make good use of the trees and not just pile and burn them like they do around here. It's just wasteful when they do that even if most are pine. They could at least make it into mulch.
In Feng Shui, the ancient Chinese art of Geomancy, cutting down a tree is seen as a potentially disastrous deed. One cure for it is to immediately plant another tree to replace each one you cut down, as near to the original spot as possible.
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