See's Pep Woodland Care Badge

Somebody who helped me clear the forest around my RV a few weeks ago did an absolute hack job when he "chopped" down some small trees that needed to go. We have big issues here with fire danger and a lot of inappropriate species were planted on these 80 acres, so there is a lot of forestry work to do, but not a lot of tools to do it with. Last week I asked our Site manager for a lesson on how to use the chainsaw because I wanted to turn some of the trees into firewood. He failed to show up and then broke the chainsaw on a different day, so I bought my own. I basically have no idea what I'm doing and have used a chainsaw once before on a different property. I got the blade stuck in the tree.


Here's me cleaning up the hack job someone else did today, using my own chainsaw for the very first time: https://photos.app.goo.gl/FSkkyPtC2JbXJ1FN6

Here's me taking down a tree with someone else's chainsaw a few weeks ago: https://photos.app.goo.gl/hra2wZD83gL2XBRz6
The blade got stuck and I needed help, but the tree did eventually come down.

Here's me managing a controlled burn of mostly dead Himalayan blackberries on the edge of our meadow: https://photos.app.goo.gl/hra2wZD83gL2XBRz6
I had some help with this as the burn was quite large.
We don't have a wood chipper to handle the amount of material we are taking out of the forest. I bought a small electric one and it can handle diameters of up to 1.75 inches. It would also be awesome to use this stuff in hugelkultures. We have a couple of those out in the forest along a major swale project that wasn't built on contour (workshop happened before my time). We don't currently have a working tractor, so digging trenches and burying biomass is not a thing that will be happening. Burning is, ironically, one of the best ways to reduce the fire danger.

See Ker wrote:Here's me taking down a tree with someone else's chainsaw a few weeks ago: https://photos.app.goo.gl/hra2wZD83gL2XBRz6
The blade got stuck and I needed help, but the tree did eventually come down.

I'm thinking it got stuck because you were just cutting through it in one go and you started from the side it was leaning towards?  A time tested approach is to cut a notch on the side it's leaning towards and then do a back cut from the other side.  There are lots of youtube videos of how to properly cut down a tree.  Many are only partially "proper" but they can give you some good guidance.  Your safety gear was much better on the second tree!

There are BBs for cutting down live and dead trees in the 6-8" range so if you cut another one, take the right pictures and you'll get those certified!