Recent Reading: Solnit, Pogue Harrison, Adams

 Rebecca Solnit: Orwell's Roses

Not really a biography, but an exploration of certain aspects of Orwell's

Friday Links: Diet for a Small Planet at 50, Scythe Resource, Farm Tractors in Forestry

 Diet for a Small Planet is being issued in a new 50th-anniversary edition: 

https://www.dietforasmallplanet.org/

I have unexpectedly become interested in working with a scythe. I own two, a heavy one for brush and a very light and slim one for grass. Turns out you can still buy all the parts and maintenance tools, and there are modern-day experts ready to train you. This seems to be one of the good sites for both:

https://www.baryonyxknife.com/scac.html

And here's an English translation of a Swedish government publication about using a small farm tractor in the woods. There are still forestry winches being made for tractors, so this is all of interest to me:

https://www.maine.gov/dacf/mfs/publications/general_publications/farm_tractor_in_the_forest.pdf

Homemade Timber Inventory Tools

This is a good collection of simple, homemade tools for do-it-yourself timber inventory.

http://cru.cahe.wsu.edu/CEPublications/EM038E/EM038E.pdf

I found it in the process of seeking a way to estimate basal area at 10 selected points on my land, partly for my ongoing project of keeping specific data on what's going on in my woods, and partly for a before & after study of what happens when we log the land, hopefully this year.

REVISION (2019/01/08)
Here are stocking tables and some more timber inventory information from the Wisconsin DNR. Very good stuff. I'll be printing this out and incorporating it into my personal file of data I've collected on my land. 
http://learningstore.uwex.edu/assets/pdfs/G3362.PDF

REVISION (2019/01/09)
More on the theory behind the tools: 
https://dnr.wi.gov/files/PDF/pubs/ss/SS0023.pdf