Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Firewood!



Alas, this is not my stack of firewood! (The photo comes to us thanks to our friends at Wikipedia)

In my dreams, I have such a stack. But first, wood must be split. Ever tried to split un-splittable wood? As in, the kind of wood so hard that a big, sharp axe bounces off and leaves nary a dent? After one of our neighbour's trees crashed into our yard during a wind storm two years ago, we had it cut into rounds with a big chainsaw (bigger than ours, wielded by someone bigger than I am). I'm not kidding when I say this stuff is un-splittable (the chainsaw wielder speculated the tree was something called ironwood, but that doesn't seem to match up with my best efforts at online identification). For nearly two years the rounds sat there getting nice and dry while we waited for more a more powerful tool than our axe.

Christmas elves last year delivered a lovely log-splitter, but then we got busy and realized we first needed to build a woodshed to keep the split wood dry, and then it was summer and we weren't really thinking about wood fires and the next thing we knew - November! Finally, yesterday we hauled all the rounds up to the new woodshed and started splitting. Whatever kind of wood it is - wow. Even the powerful splitter had trouble dealing with some of it. The innards of each log are stringy and tough and we had to put most of the logs through the torture treatment several times before we could pull or chop them apart! The bark runs horizontally in tough bands, so each log literally screamed when we put it in the splitter and the bark stretched until it snapped.
 
The logs aren't screaming now. They're burning slowly and evenly and throwing off a great deal of heat in the fireplace. Of course, the big logs (even split, they are hefty things) need some smaller stuff to keep them going, so we've been making our way through various brush piles that we've been accumulating since starting to prune the orchard way back in the spring. Slowly but surely, all those sticks and twigs and smaller branches we've been collecting all summer are disappearing into the fire and the brush piles are shrinking. My back is killing me, but my feet are warm!

Looking for motivation? Here are a link:
How to Stack Firewood (what, not everyone has random piles of sticks all over the place?)

1 comment:

  1. What a neat idea (the beehive wood stack)! I will certainly show this to my hubby - he spends a large portion of his life sawing, splitting and piling wood.....or, maybe I shouldn't show him this picture - too much like work!! Thanks for sharing. Michelle

    ReplyDelete