Tractoring!

Yesterday Mooshum and I pulled a few trees off the slopes and down to the bottom of the hill.  I'm so glad we bought the winch - although it was expensive, it will pay for itself in time.  There was a hemlock tree which had been standing there for over a hundred years - they cut it and for some reason chose not to take it.  It's been laying there for a couple of years now and yesterday we managed to pull a small portion of it off the hill.  The bottom thirty feet are still stuck in place on the hillside and I will definitely get it once the frost lets go.


I brought a few logs up to the house today, including another hemlock that is almost 60' long!  Again, why cut down something so beautiful, only to leave it there to rot in place? Disgusting. At least we can use it for firewood, but it should have never been cut down in the first place.

That said,  the winch is amazing!  I can pull four logs at once, using the three sliders and one on the main line.  They come down like butter.  There are four piles of logs waiting at the bottom of the hill to be brought up to the staging area.  From there I'll pull them to the top of the logging road, then move the tractor to the back yard and winch them down one final slope.  Once they are in the back yard, I'll cut, split and stack them in the new wood shed I'm building off of the side of the new shed.  This plan will have to be changed once the garden is in, but for the meantime it saves me a bit of work.

Bert, the winch and two logs on the skid plate.

Bertie and the longest one we've pulled yet.

I had to finagle this one a bit.  Because it's almost 60 feet long, it was rather tough getting it out and around the corner down by the creek.  But, it's out and waiting at the top of the logging road to be cut for firewood.  This log was almost too much for tractor and winch to handle - Bertie was sweatin'!