Drop 6” to 8” live standing tree with a bow saw - PEP BB woodland.sand.livebow

Cutting down a poplar to use for a hugelkultur and to expand my food forest!

So I had a little fun yesterday cutting trees. Part of my day job is managing 5 public access properties--basically I'm a restoration manager, parks manager, and park ranger all folded into one position. Fun! Anyways, the recent snow storm caused a lot of problems on my preserves. In this particular case a lot of small hardwoods are leaning/bending over a trail making it potentially unsafe for public use. So I went out to cut them down. Most were too small to meet this BB requirement but one was at least 6 inches and potentially up to 8 inches across. So I thought I would document it for this BB

Here you can see how much this tree was bending--this made me nervous so I decided to do a test cut on a tree next to it that was also bending but was much smaller. Unfortunately, I forgot to get my bow saw so I had to use my small flip saw... that was a pain...


*Tree to remove--the very bendy one


*Testing this method out on the small tree

The test on the small tree went well so I moved on to the big tree. Here is a picture of the wedge being cut.



This next picture shows the completed wedge and the start of the back cut.



Lot of work cutting down the tree with just a small hand tool but it was successful! Next time I will bring a bow saw... that little flip saw works fine on the small stuff but it is slow going on the 6" or larger trees!



In addition to these trees I think I cut a good couple dozen down yesterday and I got more to go at that site. Though the rest were too small to count for this BB or were just branches/side trunks where I did not need to cut down the whole tree. Through this work I also collected a lot of live stakes of cottonwoods and willows that I'm going to be "planting" at my homestead. When I go back to the site to do more work I'm going to gather some more live stakes. I also think I will be able to get some wood to use to make a spoon or mallet for those BBs

Fun times!

Here is the tree I fell at the PEP 1 course.

Tree selected, wedge cut made plus started 3rd cut, then tree down without squashing Paul’s fence.

Live tree standing? No problem

Paul needed this tree cut down near the Fisher Price house.  It was on a steep hillside, had trees downhill from it, was leaning a bit left, all the branches were towards the hill and it needed to come down to the right.  Hmmm  should be fun.  Why not also do it with a bow saw?  Oh, and it was 14" at the cut.  Yay...

So I notched it and did the back cut until the cut closed due to the slight left lean.  Baylee brought up a big rock and I used that with the timber tool to crank on the tree and push it a bit to the right (to open the back cut back up).  Then I finished the back cut, leaving a slightly thicker hinge on the downhill side due to the branch weight on the uphill side.  Used the timber tool to push it over and it fell perfectly.  

For those who don't know, a timber tool is a long, beefy, heavy jack that you can use to push a tree over.  It's the orange thing in the last photo.