We won’t pretend it can be done in just one
Green-Gym sesh, converting a Christmas-celebrating bod into a lean, mean conservation-machine. But I think we would suggest that a morning’s
work-out with Green Gym is as effective and pleasant a way as any to get the transformation
underway.
The means by which this feat was to be achieved in our first full session of 2019? “Processing timber”. Which meant:
- unloading a trailer
- splitting and stacking logs
All by manual labour, in glorious sunshine (if
bone-splittingly cold in a keen nor’wester).
And to begin, a most pleasant short walk, down to the log store, past a horizon of sheep:
No matter how much experience some of our
members have, there is generally something new and interesting to be learned
from the introductory talk. Today: the
benefits of staying symmetrical when splitting wood with axe or splitting-wedge.
However interesting the lesson, though, volunteers’ ambient
air temperature meant that as soon as the site warden had finished his
delivery, Green-Gymmers swarmed round the glove-bucket and set to work right
away. Unloading the trailer was
something people could fling themselves into, without having to set up
work-station and equipment first.
As for the log-splitting, the suggestion was
that anyone who had not done much before might like to work in a pair with one
of the old & bold. Even the most
experienced, however, found from time to time that they had to team up. Some gnarly specimens [yes, I mean timber, not volunteers – Ed.] simply would not obediently
split in one strike:
The site-warden remained most usefully on hand
to give further instruction. To be sure,
strategy for turning lengths of branch into firewood is as simple as The Beautiful
Game, but there is such a thing as tactics:
“Football tactics are rapidly becoming as
complicated as the chemical [sic]
formula for splitting the atom.”
attr Jimmy Greaves
Refinements to log-splitting theory depend
on water content of timber (willow is soggier than oak, for instance) or on size and shape of branches.
Even with all that cumulative wisdom and
experience, the session still had to be extended a little, in order to retrieve
the situation where there had been “a pig of a log to split”. Somehow, all three splitting-wedges and two axes
got buried in it – and had to be extracted, before that team could leave:
Meantime, the log-stackers were discovering
that the technique they needed is similar to that used by dry-stone-wallers,
except for the slope at the end of a row:
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| Progress by half-time |
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| “Final
look-what-we-did picci” |
All this activity, of course, generated a
degree of noise:
This engendered lively curiosity among some
of the livestock quartered nearby:
It created not a ripple of interest, however,
among the nearest – in the mother & baby unit. We thought we had detected the odd
(contented) sound off. Sure enough, a
camera lens held at arm’s length by a
natural aperture in the wall revealed creatures entirely absorbed in the world encompassed
by the care between parent and offspring:
Below is the official portrait of ewes and lambs
which were born about three weeks before Christmas, at home in the barn. They look almost as contented as Green-Gymmers
and site-warden were by session end, “a very satisfied and happy crowd”:
