My youngest sister visited and stayed with us from October to Mid-January. She is now on a road trip through West America.

While Seb was preparing the cabin, my sister and I started clearing the forest directly south of the building. This way we would get some more light coming in. This was a lot of work. The first thing was to get rid of all the low brush and low branches so that we could even get to the trees. Then we started cutting the smaller trees down with the chainsaw. The very thin trees were stacked for the woodchipper, and the bigger ones were cut into small pieces for firewood. We used the remaining trees to stack the firewood up in between. We would also clear the forest floor of most of its branches. This way it looks a lot nicer. Before that it looked like a haunted forest and now it looks like a nice piece of cared-for forest.

We also cut down trees at different spots that were dead or tilting in a dangerous position.

Because cutting firewood for us (girls) was very heavy work (lots of back pain in the evening), I built a rig out of poplar trees we needed to get rid of. We can now stack the fallen trees on the rig and cut them at the right size without having to bend over. It’s way easier on the back, and because the right length is already given, it is way faster because you don’t have to measure every time where you need to cut.

In November and December, we prepared the trees in the southern part of our land, right next to the access road to the cabin. Then during the waning moon (1-2 days before the new moon), we would cut down the big trees with Seb such as to produce what is called “Moon wood”. This is an old way of preparing trees for building materials as the timber produced during this period tendentially shows increased mechanical properties as well as a better resistance to decay. After the trees were cut, they would let them lay on the ground for 56 days, preferably on a slope with the point pointing downwards. This way the sap would be forced towards the branches. Then after 8 weeks they would cut off all the branches and process the wood further. We have done the first steps up to removing the branches this winter. Unfortunately, we could not mill the trees for boards and lumber because we do not have a sawmill yet. We did however debark a couple of trees already (in March) and prepared them into posts for our vegetable garden. But more about that in a later post. In February Seb took all the branches from the two sets of moon wood and built a platform to keep the wood high from the ground to dry.

Now people have had different results, but a study done by a Swiss engineer from the ETH Zürich (University) shows that even though the results obtained during the study were not significant enough to state that this method will always get you better lumber, there is a notable tendency that suggests that it is worth it to cut down trees for building during waning moon, and trees for firewood during a full moon. We therefore just have to try.

The wood which was too small for firewood we processed it with the woodchipper and filled up a lot of the very big holes we had in our road. We will keep filling up those holes, because during winter the chips have settled. But it makes a huge difference! Even when there is water on top, the car does not lose grip, because the chips work as a sort of carpet.

The wood which is even too small for the chipper, was simply burned. We got a nice old tractor wheel rim from Bert which gives us the possibility to make a large fire pit where it is safe to burn outdoors. And in the evening, it is very nice to sit around the fire eating marshmallows and roast bread on a stick!