The weekend after we cut down the trees in the forest, my brother-in-law went over to help stack them in a neat pile and sent me this photo. They’ll be left to dry there for the next 3 years.
Several cubic metres of chopped wood stacked to dry out over the next few years
This week we went wood chopping in the forest not far from the village. My family in-law use a boiler powered by a wood furnace to heat their house. That’s why it’s important to collect enough wood in advance, so that it can dry out enough to be used for firewood in years to come. They own part of some land covered in trees and with the foresters permission they collect some every year.
A small group of us drove out in the morning and cut down trees in teams of two: One person saws down the tree and cuts it up into metre-long logs, while the other person carries the logs out to the road and collects them into piles. The others have experience using chainsaws, so I’m on collecting duty.
It took us until about lunch time to collect as much as we planned. Lunch in the woods means ham and sausage. After that it was time to stack the logs on the tractor trailer. It’s pretty clever how some tall, thin trees were selected as supports to extend the sides of the trailer and stop the huge pile of wood from toppling. The amount you can see on the trailer in the photo is probably almost half of what we collected that day.
Back at home the wood gets split and then stacked for drying and, in fact, a few years ago I wrote about the wood splitting part. The next day I had quite a muscle ache from stacking all that wood.
Today I met Doge, somebody’s Shiba Inu on the street outside my home, no idea what its name really is but the friendly dog came and gave me a handshake!
Last month we went to see the recently renovated Várkert Bazár –literally “Castle Gardens Bazaar”— in Budapest’s castle district, here are some photos.
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Monday was a public holiday, so we went hiking following this route through the Buda hills from Hármashatár Hegy to Solymár. Here are some photos of the scenery:
Visiting the Buffalo reserve in Kapolnapuszta
Székely kapu in Tapolca main square
Berni and I atop the Hármashatár mountain, seconds after she agreed to marry me!
Last weekend we went to visit Berni’s family in Vaszar and we chopped wood for the winter. The logs were really big, so we used a hydraulic wood splitter like this one. It was still a lot of work moving the heavy logs onto the splitter and carrying and stacking the split wood into piles, and I’m told that the next step will be to axe those into smaller pieces that can be used to heat the house in winter.
Unfortunately nobody thought to take any pictures of us in action, but these two large piles were the result of our day’s work:
A large pile of wood we chopped
Another pile of wood behind the first one
I think I might write more often about the fun stuff that happens when we go to visit in Vaszar.