Weekend Workout

This weekend was gorgeous, simply beautiful! It was in the 20-30's all weekend and that meant most of the snow we have gotten was melting. It has been such a weird winter, tons of snow in November but then practically nothing all of December and now most of January. Yet this weekend of mild weather allowed all of us to get outside and....well....work! Our horses have been stripping the trees of bark non-stop and we needed to take a bunch of them down.

This is only one of the dozen or so that they have managed to eat everything they could reach off.

We live on 5 heavily forested acres of land, and every winter through fall we have trees coming down. It doesn't make it any better that now they are being helped down by our horses. We had three trees down in one section, looks like one of them came down and took the others with it.

Definitely a big job, not to mention that there was a tree over by the barn that needed to come down before it damaged anything by falling during a storm.  

We got started round noon, and I immediately started to light up our brush pile with my home made firestarters!! We don't use wood to heat our house so it gets cut up to be used while camping or during the summer for bonfires with friends. All the brush gets burned as we go to make it easier. (We already have three or four huge piles of brush from other tree cutting adventures)

They worked great to get the fire started! Especially since some of the center stuff was still frozen to the ground. We immediately started with the tree that was in danger of coming down on the barn, and it's that a scary thing to do! Even though my father has been doing this for years it's still a terrifying thing to see these huge trees just fall over on the ground. 

After 5 hours outside cutting and hauling wood we managed to slim down a lot of the stuff on the ground.

Remember that huge pile of like three trees? Well we didn't get all of it but we did get a good portion!

This section had a huge pile of brush and downed trees, now it's all nice and bare for the spring. We plan on seeding the pasture the spring hopefully as there is less shade and we have acreage down the hill in our backyard to keep them occupied. My aunt and uncle who live next door sometimes let us use their pasture as well since they no longer have horses. Which means we might actually have grass for the first time in a while!!!

Of course no outdoor project is complete without the two terrors watching our every move and getting underfoot with their playing. The one in the front is my girl Amaris, the one in the back is her sister from the same litter Tango. My aunt and uncle got her after I brought my girl home and they have been best friends ever since. Though next time I might put them to work, with harnesses and maybe have them drag some logs. You think that will work?