Ending and Beginning

I cut down several small- to medium-sized elm trees today. I don’t know what kind they are, but they’re not American elms and they are weeds in our yard. I cut them down because they were getting big enough to shade the garden, especially the new parts I dug up last summer. So the garden gets more sun and we get some low-quality firewood.

We also got a bunch more brush to add to our ever-increasing brush pile. It amazes me how much unwanted woody growth that’s too small to bother cutting up for the woodstove appears in our yard and has to be removed every year.

I’ve read about terra preta lately and have been thinking about turning that brush pile into charcoal for the garden. I don’t know exactly how to go about that yet — get my hands on a steel barrel, make a masonry oven, or just burn it in a covered ditch in the ground. Seems like all those things ought to work, it’s really just a matter of finding the time and energy and doing it.

Every time I do tree work I think of what it must have been like to heat with wood that you had to cut yourself, and especially without a chainsaw. That’s an almost unimaginable amount of year-round, never-ending work. Whoever heated their house with wood in the old days must have been in incredible shape.