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.
Just a little more work on the farm!
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.
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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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