This site is about my life as a farmgirl, wife, mother and grandmother. We have a beautiful granddaughter and the cutest grandson. We own two farms in Craig County Virginia, leasing one and raising beef cattle on the other.
Firewood For the Next Heating Season
Crazy isn’t it?? We’ve just about finished a heating season and now we start preparing for another one! It’s not a vicious circle, it’s life on the farm!
Last fall we had this huge pile of firewood stacked on the outside of the wood house.
We covered it up so it would continue to dry. The wood house was about half full and we didn’t want to add any to it because a lot of it had been seasoned for 2-3 years and needed to be used. So we emptied out the woodshed and didn’t have to cut any firewood all winter. We used about half of the stack in the photo above and I just recently stacked the remainder to start our fuel for next winter. We NEVER burn unseasoned firewood! Flue fires are not on our list of fun!
The woodshed is probably a 20 ft. x 24 ft. shed and we now have two full ranks front to back and about 7 ft. high.We still have room for four more ranks to fill it up. This is well seasoned and under a covered roof so it’ll be great for heating in 2018 thru 2019 winter.
Hubby has already cut down four huge dead oak and wild cherry trees to complete the harvest and we have two truck loads of already cut up but needs to be split. We use locust, ash,and maple for firewood, as well.We’ll try to get this done in the next month so it won’t interfere with hay season and it won’t be full of bees and snakes.
I am a wife, mother, and grandmother that lives on a farm in Craig County, Virginia and I am retired. I love to cook, read, quilt, craft, garden, hunt and take long walks in the woods. I have one gorgeous teen granddaughter, a wonderful little grandson and two beautiful and caring children, boy & girl.
I've been married to my farmer husband for 46 years and he's the "love of my life"!!
I love doing things the "old" way such as canning, making maple syrup & cider, handcrafts and baking. I've taught myself to crochet, embroider, and quilt with help from my paternal grandmother. I could read until the cows come home.
We live off the products we raise and hunt for the most part. We run 75 head of cattle on our farm, 30 chickens, three rabbits and one dog. I help my husband with the cattle, feeding the livestock, hauling in firewood, fence repair, and general maintenance on the farm.
I was a stay-at-home mom to my children and then went to work when they finished high school. I was a cook at a School for At-Risk Teens and part-time substitute teacher. Then I started work at our local Farm Bureau and stayed there for 17 years. I worked at Virginia Tech for almost five years and decided to take early retirement in July of 2015. NOW, I'm a full-time farmwife and loving every minute of it!
I love to read fiction and the Bible. I'm currently hooked on quilting novels and Annie's Attic mysteries.
I started this blog in 2011 and have met so many interesting bloggers and have kept up with my friends through my blog.
I love to hunt with my bow and rifle and with a camera. We hunt to fill the freezer and cellar but would never kill anything for the fun of it.
I have friends and family all over the United States. Some of my ancestry last names are Bradley, Dickson, Hylton, and Rose.
I've lost both of my parents to brain cancer and miss them very much. I have one sister and four living brothers. I was raised in Paint Bank VA and moved to New Castle VA when I married. I went to school in Waiteville, WV, Gap Mills, WV and New Castle Va with a short semester of college at Virginia Western Community College in Roanoke VA.
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6 thoughts on “Firewood For the Next Heating Season”
Ah that firewood looks wonderful .. nothing like good seasoned wood
You got a good selection. We get almost no maple. There are not many here. We get box elder, but it is not as good as the bigleaf maple. There are no ash. Although not native, there are locust here. No one believes they are good firewood. I think it works fine as long as it gets used within the year. We get plenty of oak, and some madrone, I always end up with the wood that no one else wants.
We have some large oaks that have died that we’re going to bring in for logs and saw some lumber from them. The ash are dying in Virginia and I think it’s because of some kind of beetle. There’s a pine beetle here that killed a lot of our huge pines. We don’t use pine for firewood because of the major risk of flue fires. Our daughter will use them in her outdoor woodstove.
The biggest oak in North America is the valley oak that lives here, but the trees are so gnarly, and are typically decayed inside, so are almost never used for lumber. Some old homes have floors made from them, but that is about it.
The emerald ash borer is famous for what it is doing there. So is the death of so many pines. Many pines are dying here as well, but is more of a normal part of our ecology. The pines do not get burned by forest fires like they used to. We have only a few ponderosa pines here, and by the time they die, there is not much left to burn. I really wish I could plant a Monterey pine like I grew up with, but I can not find a good excuse to do so, and it is an unpopular tree.
We brought in three tractor bucket loads yesterday and one today but it all has to be split and stacked in the wood house. We probably have about five more loads to bring in.
This is the blog for our little farm in Skagit county. Here we have Shetland sheep and Nigerian Dwarf goats. In addition we have donkeys, cattle, pigs, chickens, geese, and peafowl. The blog describes the weekly activities here.
countrygirl-lifeonthefarm 
Ah that firewood looks wonderful .. nothing like good seasoned wood
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You got a good selection. We get almost no maple. There are not many here. We get box elder, but it is not as good as the bigleaf maple. There are no ash. Although not native, there are locust here. No one believes they are good firewood. I think it works fine as long as it gets used within the year. We get plenty of oak, and some madrone, I always end up with the wood that no one else wants.
LikeLike
We have some large oaks that have died that we’re going to bring in for logs and saw some lumber from them. The ash are dying in Virginia and I think it’s because of some kind of beetle. There’s a pine beetle here that killed a lot of our huge pines. We don’t use pine for firewood because of the major risk of flue fires. Our daughter will use them in her outdoor woodstove.
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The biggest oak in North America is the valley oak that lives here, but the trees are so gnarly, and are typically decayed inside, so are almost never used for lumber. Some old homes have floors made from them, but that is about it.
The emerald ash borer is famous for what it is doing there. So is the death of so many pines. Many pines are dying here as well, but is more of a normal part of our ecology. The pines do not get burned by forest fires like they used to. We have only a few ponderosa pines here, and by the time they die, there is not much left to burn. I really wish I could plant a Monterey pine like I grew up with, but I can not find a good excuse to do so, and it is an unpopular tree.
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That’s on our list in May when we start. Ugh, never look forward to it, but there’s no better heat!!
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We brought in three tractor bucket loads yesterday and one today but it all has to be split and stacked in the wood house. We probably have about five more loads to bring in.
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