It’s winter! The temperature at 6AM was 10F. It wiggled its way up to the mid-teens by mid-day, but then headed back down again. It was also breezy. The snow is gone, and the ground is now free to freeze. Today I cut cedar logs in a friend’s massive cedar bog. We have no cedar here so every few months I head up to Albion and cut cedar for our various outdoor building projects, fence posts, apple ladders, railings and anything else that requires light-weight, rot-resistant wood. The cedars love to twist and turn and curve and grow in all sorts of whimsical and curious shapes. They are so cool. I love cedar bogs! Mostly I cut the blow-downs. They might have tipped over or broken off years ago, but they’re still in perfectly usable shape.
My goal today was to find a post for a new gate in the BRC orchard. A fourth gate will give us access to a large stand of maple and other potential firewood to the south of the orchard. Thinning back the hardwoods will also increase sunlight to the apple trees. When I got home, I was able to dig a hole and install the post. The snow had protected the ground for the past few weeks so it has not yet frozen. That’ll change in the next week or so. I can build the gate itself in the coming weeks and install it on one of those crisp January afternoons.