...or might be more specific to say "Out here in the woods..." because we are now spending some days clearing some few kilometers of service road leading deep into a piece of land I own out on the island of Björkö. My life isn't always about designing transformers for a living or building amps, HAM-radio gear, furniture for my wife and PC:s in my spare time.
If you own a piece of forest and you sell wood to the papermills or to a sawmill or you chop trees and use the logs to build a house, it is mandatory to get plants of spruce or pine and get the piece of land re-forested and that also involves the procedure of screening out excessive trees and trees toppled by storms on a regular schedule or at least once in a 10 to 15-year period.
A little piece of my forest is now ripe for harvesting and a lot of it has to be screened. The major part of the screening we are going to carry out ourselves and the trees are going to be logs for the fireplace but before we can go ahead with the project we have to re-open the service-road to be able to get there using a tractor.
It has not been used much since 1994 and there are now growing birches close to 10 cm. in diameter preventing us from getting into the woods.
The schools are out for winter holidays now in ww. 9 here in this region and the whole family is taking part in this effort. I am the one in the middle operating the brush-saw. Closest to the camera is my son Ian, behind him Lukas' girlfriend Jenna and far ahead of me you can see a glimpse of Lukas operating the chainsaw.
Ingela shot the picture and it is nicked from her blog :)
16 comments:
I love the photo Hans. What is your e mail, and I would like for you to be invited to my blog. ? I am bloggrace@hotmail.com
there are so many (sore) muscles in my body i didn't even know i had before this week...
and now i have a cold, thank you very much.
Glühwein is the medicine!
....we fight for our meals.....
..yes indeed... :)
grace > or rather "we fight for our heat" as we will be burning the wood in our fireplace ;)
have a good weekend Hans!
xox
....oh yes, have the wood stove going right now :)
Yup, we have a big stove with heat-storing capability going nearly every day throughout the winter season. It saves us $$$
We keep the fire burning for 1 1/2 hour and it is still warm the next day.
The spring backfired on us the last few days and it is colder than in january right now :(
Hej Hans!
Your photo looks wonderful. Though there is a lot of hard work going on, I am in awe of your "woods". It's a place I yearn to be only a little further southwest of your location:).
Stay warm!
Zoe
....its only teenage wasteland....
anyway, how are you, ?? If I get the stove going about 4 or 5 pm, it is "ok" til morning, still too chilly for me, I like it toasty, but who wants to get it going at 2 am!!! Makes the dogs snuggle with their heat. Do you only rely on wood heat? I do. I often wish for the switch of the central heat.
Zoe: Ingela is the photographer and she is a great one! Take a look into her blog and you will also get some well needed practice in the swedish language :)
A little to the southwest from here would place me somewhere around Sundsvall, Sweden or....?
Grace: The major heating is done by electricity. In my garage is installed a large insulated water-tank where the heat is stored between 10 pm and 7 am the next day. The water is then circulated in the floor at low temperature throughout the day. This system of loading the heat-accumulator during the night is levelling out the need for peak load during daytime and the price/kWh is thus lower during the night.
On top of this I have a heat-recovering ventilation system that is alsoenergy saving. The stove allows me to cut a big chunk out of my electricity bill.
If I would rely on the stove only I would have to heat it for three or four times or 5 to 7 hours each day and then my woods would be consumed in a few years :)
Hi Hans, I'm late here again and sometimes feel guilty that my dropping by usually coincides with more in the life of Arie. That's not how it should be and I mean to change it, but time is very short these days, so blogging has taken a back seat. Still, I dooo mean to change for the better!
As for this post, how wonderful to have your own forest! But, yes, I can imagine that it's a lot of work to keep it clear. Still, you must enjoy having the wood for the stove. Do you have one of those amazing soap stone stoves?
Hi Val, unlike my very active wife Ingela, I am the real occasional (or maybe accidental...) blogger who is blogging and visiting my friends blogs on a very irregular schedule.
Yes, I enjoy having wood "for free" (that is not really true ) for my fireplace to be able to cut my electricity bill. The stove is not a soapstone-one. The core of this one is built up of elements (thick slabs) of sintered slag from the production of steel and the whole thing is covered with glazed white tiles. I will make a designed blog-entry with pictures one day.
Now a will go and see what Arie is up to nowadays ;)
yes, I guess, it is far more cold where you live. Are you off the grid? Your system sounds very efficient.
be well, have a good weekend.
Hi Grace,
Yes, I like our heating system, or electricity bill is lower than many of our neighbours.
We are not off grid and even if the power grid went down we could keep the house warm with the stove.
The weekend came and went and we spent the whole Sunday in the woods.
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