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Hiking trail project revived

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I started playing with the idea of cutting some walking path through our woods back in May of this year. The project stalled out when I realized how much brush and how many cedar trees would have to be hauled off, one pickup load at a time. The alternative was a whole bunch of brush piles somewhere on our property. Either option was proving exhausting.

The recent addition of a wood chipper has breathed new life into the project. I quickly had enough chips to cover the first path and today I started a second leg, mainly to have some place to put the chips. Now I can cut and chip with abandon.

UPDATE: The photo below was taken a day later, from the other end of the path-in-progress. Difficult to see here but making progress. It’s not unrealistic that I might be able to create a mile of paths, given enough time.

Perfect October Day

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Surounded by trees, we don’t get spectacular sunrises and sunsets. We just don’t get much of a horizon. But we do have a tiny vista, looking down our road to the hills just on the other side of the Missouri River. It’s so quiet we can hear approaching vehicles — few and far between if you don’t count neighbors — from far down the hill.

When the sun does shine through the trees in the late afternoon, we get some flattering light. My friend John says this was taken using the Old Man filter. I am much happier than I look. Ditto for Riley.

Chipper goes to the woods

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Having determined how big a branch the new chipper can (and cannot) chew up, we’re ready to roll the chipper down the hill to start chipping. It took about 45 minutes to cut and stack these cedar trees but it would have taken much longer to drag them up or down the hill. This will be the first real-world test for the chipper.

I purchased a chipper shredder

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My first brush with brush dates back to 2015 and I’ve cut and hauled (or had hauled) a lot of it since then. I’m constantly asked, “Why don’t you burn it?” Can you say forest fire? No thanks. There’s lots of video here of crews from Korte Tree Service chipping up my brush piles and while I knew they made small chippers for home use, I just never made the leap.

According to a whole bunch of YouTube videos, this one can chip branches up to 3 inches in diameter. That would take care of about 80% of my scrub cedar trees. The manual said run the engine for 3 hours to “break it in” and following that we shredded some hydrangea clippings.

The chipper is damned heavy but it rolls pretty easily so my plan is to take it down into the woods a way, closer to where I’ll be cutting, and chip those rascals up on-site. No more dragging up the hill, stacking, loading into the pickup and hauling off to a friends property who burns them for me.

Before taking the chipper into the woods, I ran a couple of scrub cedar trees through to see if it could eat a 3 inch tree. I’d say 2.5 inches is a big as it can handle. I also learned I need to trim the trunk of limbs.

The most surprising thing I’ve discovered is just how small the pile of chips is. Photo below is from two small trees.

This afternoon I’m heading into the woods to drop and stack a bunch of small cedar trees. Tomorrow I’ll roll the chipper as close to the pile as I can get it and start chipping.

New well: Cleaning up

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The new well is in and today was devoted to decommissioning the old well. The Missouri Department of Natural Resources has guidelines on this but the goal seems to be preventing contamination.

This involved pouring twenty bags of something called Envrioplug down the well. Moisture (and a little time) turns this into a hard clay-like substance that plugs the well until the end of time. After that it was Bobcat work, filling in the trench that held the pipes feeding water from the new well to a pressure tank in our basement…

…and tidying up the surrounding area.

New well operational

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I don’t recall being around when our old well was dug, almost 30 years ago. So I had no idea what the pump looked like until this morning. This is called a “submersible pump” and it seems pretty amazing something could work under wafter that long with very few problems. Lots of videos on this topic.

In the images below Joe Greene, one of our well guys, is wiring the pump to our electric. The red faucet is what Barb uses to water her flower beds in that part of the property.


The PVC pipe on the ground in the image below is what brings the water up and into the pressure tank in our basement. I counted 19 twenty-one foot sections which gets our pump down 400 feet.

New well – Day 3

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We’re in the home stretch. The trench from the old well-head to the new one will hold the plumbing and electric. A Bobcat will be here next week to fill in the trench and tidy up.

The old well will be cut off below ground and filled with some kind of cement mixture as required by the Missouri Department of Natural Resources.

Day 1 – Day 2