Hello World

For this first blog entry I guess I can tell you about clearing an area in our mostly treed 10 acre lot on which we'll be building a 2000 sq/ft straw-bale home. We need an area not only large enough to build the house on, but also with a clear (as possible) Southern exposure since we'll be using the Sun for passive solar heating as well as for generating electricity. I also have to clear any trees which could potentially fall on the house.

Unfortunately this means I've had to chop down a lot of trees. Last week I felled 61, a mixture of spruce and pine. To date I've probably brought down a total of about 80 or 90 trees. It is our intention to re-plant more trees than we fell on another part of our land, once the building work has been completed.

Here's a photo of the cleared area.

Something of interest... after felling the trees I walk along the trunk and cut off all the branches. While doing this to one tree I found a bone about 20 foot up the trunk. It looks to be a large thigh bone and I can only guess that a cougar took it up there! Here's a photo of it with my hand for scale.

We know there are cougar in the area, and nothing else would be strong enough to carry a bone that size up a tree. Well, I suppose a bear could, but I doubt it would bother. More info on cougar here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cougar