Cleaning Up Landing

Salvaged firewood from the log landings are what we use on the farm for our domestic heat source.

The landings always seem to collect those end pieces, tops that are too small for logs, large branches and other chunks that have no value to sell. We clean up the landings by making pieces small enough to fit into the outdoor wood-fired furnace. Some of them are already small enough to be hoisted into the furnace, others need to be split down several times. The clean up is a win-win situation, the log decks are cleared of debris and the wood pieces heat our home.

We have been in the process of cleaning up the back landing where there are very large pieces of logs strewn about. Many are the butt pieces and they are very hard to split manually with a sledge hammer and several wedges. It takes the large, hydraulic splitter attached to the back of the big tractor to split the chunks with some weighing several hundred pounds.

It takes a minimum of two people and works better with three working in tandem to get a single piece broken down small enough to lift into the waiting Gator. A single round needs to be rolled toward the splitter, positioned under the cutting wedge, the handle activated to draw the wedge through the wood, then moving the smaller pieces around to split them into manageable sizes.

Getting a Gator full of wood can take an hour or more and by then we are tuckered out. It is a slow process to get the landing cleaned up. Right now, we nearly have one of the three landing sites cleared of all refuse. Our salvage of all the debris may take well into the spring to get all the sites ready for the next year of logging. The heat derived from the clean up will keep us comfortable all winter long.

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