CHAPTER XVIII

CLEARING THE LAND

It is pretty good fun to hack at bushes and to chop trees down and then to chop them up.  If there is only a small part of the land to be cleared, a man can easily learn skill with the ax and do it at odd times, but he was a wise old man of whom his little girl said, “When grandpa wants anything, that moment he wants it.”  It is now that we need the land; but even if it is covered with trees, there is no cause for discouragement.  Lumber is so high that the local or portable sawmill men will buy the timber by the acre.  They will cut the trees and haul the logs.

If you decide to cut a tree yourself, a little inquiry will show for what purpose it will bring the highest price.  Locust sticks, for example, four to six inches thick, will bring in New York ten or fifteen cents a running foot for insulator pinions.  If a maple proves to be either “curly” or “bird’seye” (this depending not on the variety, but on the accidental undulations of the fiber), it will be in demand for the manufacture of furniture.

Sugar maples ten or fifteen feet high can be transplanted or sold.  Nut and fruit trees will nearly always be worth keeping.

Cedar sticks fourteen feet long will bring twenty cents in most places for hop and bean poles.  See what can be sold instead of burned, and don’t cut down recklessly; an unsalable tree may be valuable as a windbreak or as shade for your house.  The wrong tree for shade is the dense foliaged, low-branched tree which forms a solid dome from the ground up.  The right tree, in the opinion of Henry Hicks (in Country Life in America), is the American elm, which ought to be called the umbrella tree.  Pliny speaks of the plane tree, our sycamore or buttonwood, as excellent, because of the horizontal branches which, like window blinds, allow free passage of the breezes while intercepting the heat of the sun.

The ideal shade tree is a canopy like a parasol over the house, with high, leafy branches that do not shut off light and air from the windows.  This cools a house by keeping the sun off and cools the air by the rapid evaporation from its leaves, and will make it ten to fifteen degrees cooler in summer.  It will be cheaper and more effective than a combination of awnings, piazza, and eaves.  Woodman, spare that tree.

Stumps may be burned out To get a good draught, bore a hole in a slanting direction far down among the roots.  The smoke goes through the hole first and then the flame, boring the body to the roots deep enough to plow.  Land can also be cleared by dynamite.  We condense from Edith Loring Fullerton in Farming, on what has been done.

To go into the desolate, uncultivated, burned over “waste lands” near a great city and put ten acres under cultivation in the shortest possible space of time was our problem.  We undertook it at short notice in an uncertain season—­the autumn—­with the determination to get at least a portion of the land seeded down to winter rye before cold weather prohibited further work.