Woods

This spring was a lot calmer than last year’s. We still had some winter and spring storms, but nothing like the one that hit on April 2, 2024. Work changes during the spring. In March and April, cutting, splitting, and stacking firewood for the season after next takes a great deal of my time and effort. By early May, that work ends and mowing grass begins. Warmer temperatures at night with spring begin the end of our mud season when our dirt roads are a mess.

This photo was taken by Molly the previous firewood cutting season. The large red oak had been severely damaged in a windstorm in early 2023 and I felled it. I’m standing behind the trunk of the tree, which makes it seem much larger than the 24 inches diameter at chest height. I didn’t fell any trees in the 2024-2025 firewood cutting season. The April 2nd windstorm had already done that.

I took this photograph after a winter storm, which left a layer of ice on all the trees. I’m not sure it is possible to catch the way light glimmers on the ice-covered branches.

A close-up of the same photograph.

This photograph was taken from our yard looking west on April 18th. Some trees are starting to show a little green

Redbud trees blooming behind a solar panel array.

A close-up of the flowers of the redbud tree. Spring has really started to arrive.

The same view looking west as the previous photograph, this was taken May 5. The transition from brown to green woods is almost complete. I’m done cutting firewood.

I haven’t been posting since the April windstorm for a variety of reasons. I hope this collection of photos and text makes up for that. We’ll begin a few days before the storm at Sock’s frog pond, a favorite location to take photos in the spring.

When I took this photograph it was raining lightly. I love the nearly abstract blends of color and shape.

Amongst the chores are periodic maintenance and repair of our ATV and the MSU, a 4×4 side-by-side UTV. The MSU has two seats (thus side-by-side), cabin roof and windshield, and a bed great for hauling groceries and firewood. This is a shot of the passenger side of the engine that I took before I replaced the fan gears, part of the linkage between the gear shift and the transmission. The cover for the gears is just to the right of the black oil filter. At a certain point, the gears wear out making it impossible to shift. This was the third time I’ve done this so that’s about once every three years. Earlier this year I had to replace the one-way bearing in the drive clutch for the transmission, an all-day job. The one-way bearing provides engine braking when going down hills.

Mid-summer foliage provides full shade for our home and the forest floor. We are perhaps 10 degrees cooler in our woods than the ambient temperature ten miles away towards Charleston where there are few trees and much pavement.

Once leaves appeared on trees the impacts of the April storm became less prominent. Here a pine was twisted by the storm until it fell across the road following the county line between Putnam and Kanawha.

This summer beginning in June until the beginning of autumn we were in an area suffering from severe drought. In September some trees had their leaves turn color and immediately go to brown and fall. We expected the worst, though normal fall colors with leaves lasting longer on trees occurred in October. In September we feared our blaze of fall gold wasn’t going to occur. It was nice that our fears proved wrong, though we’ll see next spring how extensive tree mortality from the drought will be.

This photo shows the canopy over our buildings. The house is to the left, the shack is to the right and the shop roof extends to the left of the shack.

More pretty colors.

I love finding that single red leaf on the ground surrounded by leaves of differing shapes and colors.

Taken in the garden with a tall white oak in the foreground and the moon a tiny dot overhead.

Taken in the garden but I can’t remember where I shot this photo. I think this is a felled beech tree now a bush to the west of the garden fence.

We’re in winter now. Several snows have fallen and melted away leaving leaves on the ground matted down and less a fire hazard until spring. There’s a light snow on the ground with a clear blue sky as I write this. It’s cold so we have both wood stoves burning with cats in front of each.