Gazebo Rails

Holes

New narrow leaf poplars on the North Side of the cabin

I started this morning by digging some holes for trees.  Holes are a challenge in the rocky landscape on Orcutt Hill.  I dug out several large rocks and moved my holes to accommodate others.

Tall skinny lodgepole panorama

After the holes were dug, my mother and I ran new drip irrigation off the main line to the holes.  We went in to town and purchased the trees, which look to be 10 footers or so.  Planting went smoothly, though I was a bit nervous as a badger has been digging very close and has accumulated a pile of bones of things it has eaten under the cabin porch.

I got a call about a local landscaping job I will be taking tomorrow.  The client has 8 yards or so of peat gravel and another large pile of top soil she wants moved and distributed.  I took a look after lunch and accepted the job on an hourly rate.



Putting together another log deck

There were still a few hours left in the day, so I headed back up to Kelly Park for another round of logging the versatile Pinus contorta or lodgepole pine.  Again, I was able to harvest almost everything from the leavings of unskilled and careless loggers.  The lodgepoles here can be 6 inches wide and 60 feet tall.  This makes them ideal for tipis and other log construction as they are thin, strong and have very little taper.  This stand was so dense that it was a challenge to walk through without brushing trunks or getting stuck.  The dense stands fully prohibiting the growth of any understory.  Given time they will choke out all other species of tree in ground favorable to their growth.   Lone lodgepoles can be huge trunked full canopied trees.  Lodgepoles are a testament to the environment shaping the development of an organism independent of its genetic potential.

In the stand I was cutting in Kelly Park, there was quite a bit of recent blow down (trees blown over in the wind).  This phenomena is often observed in forests that are recently depleted.  The forest itself has always acted as a windbreak in the past, so the individual trees have never experienced the wind stress necessary to promote stabilization root growth.  When some of the forest is removed (in this case by the pine beetle), the inner trees are newly exposed to wind and their weak roots can't keep them upright.  I am a bit sad to see this stand change as I recall it in its dense quiet glory vividly 20 years ago.  However, it is not necessarily bad for the environment.  Even the poor techniques of the previous loggers will provide a lot of habitat for local creatures.  In addition, the understory is starting to develop once again.

Partially constructed gazebo rails

After loading up the logs on my truck's ladder rack, I drove them back to the house and laboriously walked them out to the gazebo.  Then it was time to work on the gazebo rails.  I got done with most of them but wasn't quite able to finish them today.


Working on the gazebo rails