Northland Alumni Site

We are preparing the farm for the cow’s arrival this summer. The biggest part of this project is building a fence, since most of the remaining fence from when John’s grandpa had cows is no longer usable. All of the posts for the fence will come from our land. So the first step in this process is to cut down the trees.

Locust is the best tree for this because it doesn’t rot, ever. (Well, it does, but it takes decades, and our farm has lots of locust trees, and the guys enjoy searching all over for them) The next step is to cut the tree into 6ft lengths for the posts. I can cut up the tops of the trees to use as firewood this winter.

Some lenghts are small enough that they can be used as posts on thier own. Others are thicker and need to be split, by hand, which is a job for John. I’ve tried to swing the maul and axe, but it’s pretty worthless. So the first step is to use the maul to start to split one end.

After the initial split in the log, wedges are used to continue to split the log. Each one is pounded into the log using a sledge hammer. And the wedges are “leap-frogged” to the end of the long or until it splits in half. In these pictures John was using two plastic wedges, they aren’t as good as metal ones, but tend to be safer.

These two halves can also be split, but don’t need the wedges. They split pretty easily with the maul, and some help with an axe. I didn’t get pictures of this step. Here’s Farmer John with a finished post.

Did I mention he was splitting these in the rain and mud? Which, in my opinion, makes him a bad-ass farmer.